You never get a second chance at first impressions. Not only does this truth apply when developing personal relationships it also applies in the world of website design. As I have traversed the World Wide Web I have found sites that have been thoroughly impressive and others not so much. You would be surprised at the lack of understanding of the first impression principle.
In the age of information it is important to make your information as accessible as possible. If a customer cannot find what they are looking for on your site they are likely to leave and find it on your competitor’s.
People go to the internet for two things:
1. Find information on a product or service they intend to purchase
2. Make a purchase
There is no doubt the importance of website design as a tool for marketing goods and services. Upon visiting a website the mind of the customer is made whether they will stay or go as soon as your site downloads. Your ability to keep them perusing your page is in based on a design that creates compelling exchange.
Regardless of what anyone says all humans look on the outside rather than the inside. It is our human nature to make judgments based on looks rather than substance on first encounters. If the cover of your book(your website) is not appealing than you will find that you have been judged only by your appearance and not the quality of the character of your site.
If the design of your website placed emphasis on deep and rich content yet losses a customer because of first impressions then you have wasted your time. When your website is perceived as confusing and uninteresting then your product or service will be perceived in the same manner.
A great example of this comes from Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence - Science and Practice, a woman owned an Indian Jewelry store in Arizona who recently purchased an allotment of turquoise jewelry.
The store owner had a hard time selling any pieces of this particular jewelry. She tried many sales tricks such as shifty their location to a central spot in the store, no luck. She had her sales clerks push the jewelry hard upon customers –with no success. One day the owner went on a buying trip but prior to leaving she left a note for her head saleswoman stating, “Everything in this display case, price x 1/2,” in hopes of getting rid of the offensive jewelry, even at a loss. The store owners handwriting must have been horrific because the saleswoman mistook “1/2″ to be “2″, and the entire allotment was sold for twice the original price!
The jewelry only sold because a higher price led to a perceived higher value. You see, “Perception is the key to the mind”.
If you place your website in a side-by-side comparison to your competitor, both offering the same product, the same price and the same value, the one who wins is the one with the best design hands down. Take time to think of what you are communicating to your customer and how it is best communicated. Through the creation of your compelling exchange your customer will find greater value in your website by “Design”.
Copyright ? Ron Seawood
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August 23, 2008
Avoid the mistakes of other website designers who make bad website design choices
Websites and blogs are easier than ever to setup. Gone are the days when setting-up sites can only be done by IT guys or web geeks. Using free Content Management Systems or blog platforms, everyone has an even chance to have their own online presence. However, the easy road to setting up sites does not always translate to websites with good website designs. At some point or another, you must have seen websites with bad designs. A bad website design is very easy to identify. Unconsciously, we determine a site to be ugly based on some common characteristics. This article discusses the common traits of bad website design. With this knowledge, you, as a website designer, will be fully armed to avoid these bad website design mistakes. Here are a few pointers to help you get started. Background And Text Dark background, incompatible color combination of background and text, or very small font size makes for very hard reading. Stay away from stylish fonts but instead use sans-serif fonts for your contents. Having the proper color mix and good font size will increase usability of your site and make a big impact on the visitors’ experience. Communication Style It is nice to appear smart and intelligent but geek speak or highly intellectual postings will not be perceived well by your visitors. Each of your webpage should not be used for showing off your linguistic prowess or technically-laden lingo. The usual rule here is to clearly communicate with your visitors in an easy to understand, grammatically-sound, direct to the point format. Technical details should be presented in the language level of your visitors. Graphics Having nice large graphics is only appropriate for printed advertisement. On the Net, it is better to utilize easy-to-load graphics so webpages are loaded quickly. If your website can’t serve up information swiftly and the longer your visitors become idle, the faster your visitors will leave your site never to go back. Templates and Navigation As much as possible, have a consistent look and feel in your website thru the use of templates. If your visitors have to re-familiarize and re-learn the headers, navigation and footers for every webpage, your visitors will eventually get tired and leave. Pop-ups Unless you can justify it, never use pop-ups. It is by far the single most frustrating thing your visitor encounters while surfing. When visitors close the pop-ups, they will also close your site, never to be irritated again. As regularly creating websites for my clients, I see a lot of web designers both good and bad. More often , the bad web designers have mastered the science and art of bad and ugly website design. I’m pretty sure this article uncovers your eyes and will help you spot the difference between the two.
Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William D. Jimenez runs a website that uncovers the complexities of website design that can rank high in the Search Engines. There are 33 things you need to know before choosing your web design team. To take advantage of this cool stuff and more, make sure you check out William’s site at www.will2design.com. -
Website design is important in your online business, and don?t not overlook obvious faults or omissions with it. There are some simple glaring errors that you might fail to notice because you are not using your own website yourself, and others that you do nothing about because they do not seem important.
One of the major difficulties that people new to internet marketing have to learn to overcome is to be able to look at their website as a visitor would. Because you know your product, or know a lot about the subject of your site, the layout makes perfect sense to you, but how does it look to somebody not as conversant with the topic as you are. Have you made assumptions that others might need explained to them? Are you assuming a knowledge that is not there?
Ask a friend or relative who does not have your knowledge to run their eye over your site, and then act on any comments made. It is easy for experts to pitch a website with too high a level of assumed knowledge.
Have you tried to use your own site? Have you checked every navigation link? There is nothing better designed to prompt a visitor to navigate away from your site than a broken link. If you are that sloppy with your site, what like are your products? That is the way people think, so make sure that all your links work on a regular basis.
August 22, 2008
With so many new websites going online every day it is no wonder many of them never succeed. We all hear about the new site that has only been online less than a year and has millions of visitors each month. Why do some sites do so well and others flop? There are many reasons for this and these are just some of the more obvious and often overlooked ones.
The landing page takes too long to load. Many website designers and marketers believe everyone has a high-speed connection, which is not the case. Even with a fast connection many pages will take up to 30 seconds to load, which is just too long. Unless someone really wants what you have, and can?t get it anywhere else, they won?t wait; and forget about the person on dial-up. Unless yours is a hobby site, or sales are not important to you, forget about Flash and large fancy graphics.
Site is not finished. This may not seem like a big issue except that people who go looking for something don?t want to see an under-construction animation where the information should be. You just wasted their time and probably annoyed them ?- not a good start. Do not advertise or promote something you don?t have unless you are doing a product pre-launch, and never lead your visitor down a road to an empty page. Its one thing to upload an unfinished site for testing, however, don?t promote it.
Bad navigation. If you have ever gone to a site and got lost, then you know what I mean. You click on a link and another to the point you give up looking for the information or product and just do a re-search for another site. This type of marketing may work in an offline store but it has no place online. Offline you could keep a customer in your store by creating a maze and therefore introducing them to more of your products. Online this does not work ?- the exit is never more than a click away, and don?t forget it. Make your site easy to navigate and have links, at least to the home page, on every page. Never try to trap your visitor.
No contact information. While I am not saying you should give out your address and home phone number, you must at least have an email link on your site. Many sites do not have an email and use a contact form instead. These forms are usually to hide their identity and your visitors will pick up on that. Remember, people hide their identity for a reason. The more open you are with people, the more open they will be with you.
Old content. If you want to get repeat visitors, you need new content; it?s just that simple. Many sites never change and rely on new visitors and customers. This is the hard way to do business, as a repeat customer is much easier to sell to.
Broken Links. It is a good idea to manually check your links as often as possible. Take a run through your site on a regular basis and mainly check links heading off your site. If someone else changed their site and you are linking to them as an affiliate, for example, your link may get disabled. You internal links should not cause many problems, but it never hurts to check.
If you are expecting to get a full time income from your site expect to put some work into it. The ?build it and forget about it? idea only works for hobbyists etc.. Most people making a full-time income online work at it full-time, no matter what they would have you believe.
Ted Curry is part of the marketing and design team at MEC Marketing, specializing in online marketing geared towards businesses just starting out, as well as established ones; offering affordable solutions for your business. Visit the MEC team at http://www.mec-marketing.com and get your online business rolling.
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Have you ever thought about working from home? If you have, you know that the majority of the so called “work at home” jobs are scams. After being laid off from my telecommuting job I found myself looking for another at home job to replace it. After you’ve worked from home for a while, it’s hard to go back to the corporate 9-5. In my experience, most of the work at home jobs out there appeared to be scams. You shouldn’t have to pay and employer to work from home.
I thought I’d be smart and sign up with a website that specialized in work at home jobs. I Googled a website that promised to give you leads from employers who were looking specifically for people to work from home. The home page listed a lot of national companies (Bank of America, American Express, etc.). It appeared that these companies routinely posted jobs on the web site. All I had to do was buy a yearly membership and I’d have access to those awesome jobs. Those national companies may have been known to hire people to work from home but I quickly found out that they did NOT post any jobs on this website. The membership was a total waste of my money. To sum it up, it was a scam. Were there jobs posted on the web site? Yes, but the jobs were for telemarketers and sales. Nothing for a computer professional. It bugged me that the same stale jobs would be listed each day as if they were fresh!
In my previous telecommuting job, I helped maintain a large intranet. I decided that I wanted to continue in this field. Website Designing is a legitimate work from home job. The beauty of this business is that it requires low start up costs. The only office equipment you would need would be a good computer, an Internet connection and website design software. The web design software I recommend are Macromedia Dreamweaver (html editor) and Macromedia Fireworks (graphics editor). Microsoft Front Page and Adobe Photoshop are also excellent choices. If you lack web site design skills, don’t fret. The Internet is jam packed with free tutorials and advice on everything you would need to know about web site design and development. You would only be limited by your desire to learn. You can also purchase professional website templates to give you a jump start on designing web sites for your customers.
That being said, web site design is a very exciting field to be in. The technology rapidly changes so there is always something new and exciting to learn, it’s a great outlet to release your creativity, you can make a lot of money quickly, and the best reason of all is that you can work from any location including at home in your PJs.
Given all of these reasons, many people wonder how to get started designing web sites for profit. As I said before, it takes very little money to start a successful online business. Once you learn how to design professional web sites (or use web templates), your only obstacle will be to market your business and win jobs. Sounds easy, but it’s not. There are many web site development firms out there who never win bids on projects. You could search the Internet for advice on winning web site design jobs. You can search for advice from business owners who are out there running successful web site design companies. This is a good approach but it does take time. I highly recommend visiting forums. Some of my favorite are Digital Point (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/) and Site Point (http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/).
Gina Hoover can be reached for questions about this article at http://www.hooverwebdesign.com. Gina’s company, Hoover Web Design specializes in professional web site design and products for website owners such as web templates, flash photo galleries, flash music players. This article may be reprinted as long as it is unchanged and a live link to the website is included with the article.
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August 21, 2008
The trick of having a good website is thinking about the visitors first and foremost. So, before you spend money on designers there are a few things that you should take into account first. You should first of all clarify who would be your target audience and why you are creating a website. What would be the content used in the website and what do you want to achieve with this website are the questions that need to be answered.
The next step would be thinking about your visitor. That is why the design of your site must be simple as well as consistent. There are always problems in compatibility with different browsers. So, always check your site with at least Internet Explore and Mozilla Firefox. Also, pay attention to the time your site takes to load. No one has spare time to waste and if it takes too long a time, you can be certain that no one give your site a visit the second time. The navigation systems of your site must be simple and easy. And always remember to add fresh content to your site.
The main page or home page of your site should be used as a sales letter. That is why it should have a sales message and this message must have heading that is keyword rich. The message should have a short paragraph that should inform your visitors about the products and services you are offering. Tell them the benefits of using the products and services explicitly.
Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to generating massive traffic ?Triple Your Traffic Fast’
Download it free here: Triple Your Traffic Fast
Download a free article marketing guide here: Secrets of Article Writing
Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building
Raymond Nesa is an experienced web marketer specializing in article marketing, traffic generation, and list building.
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Website Design, Development and search engine optimization are very much related now days in terms of site popularity and Internet presence. A website needs to be given special care after the initial development. Search engine optimization should be started along with the initial development of a website.
Your website should have a good design to attract your visitors to stay for longer period of time. The more time they will spend in your website, the maximum is the chances to turn them into a paying customer. A rough design may distract your visitors. The website should not take more than 30 seconds to load, the longer time to download less and less people will wait for it.
Many things need to be given special attention while designing and developing a website. SEO website design & development is the best option now a days. An optimized website design will help in proper crawling of your website. Your site can bypass from Google ‘Sandbox’ theory in a short span. It is also possible that its not caught by Google ‘Sandbox’ after proper optimization.
Web design & SEO</FONT> is preferred by most of the organization now days. You are required to consider many important things in site development so it becomes a search engine friendly site. It is also suggested not to do SEO yourself until you have a sound understanding of it and enough time to implement what you have learned. Being a search engine optimizer is a full-time job.
You can also get help from SEO consultants. They are professional website optimizers who can optimize your website to rank in SERPs of various search engines. You are also advised to carefully select your website optimization firm. Proper optimization can rank your website in search engines which converts in maximizing business, but improper optimization can have adverse effects on your website ranking. One internet marketing SEO firm?should analyze your website site and have planned strategy to follow to rank it in search engines.
About the Author
Deepak Rajput is the author & co-creator of e-commerce websites and information products. His involvement in developing, marketing and other online businesses for himself and clients is noticiable since 2002. You can also check his blog for SEO & SEM related articles at — http://www.semflicks.blogspot.com. (Copyright) 2006-2007 Deepak Rajput. You can copy entire Article/Press Release, modification is not permitted
August 20, 2008
If total content control confuses you, here is the simple explanation for this highly in-demand term that professional Sacramento Website Design firms catering to a wide-cross section of industry clients puts it as: Total Content Control refers to the ability to change the images, words and other content of a website. Using any computer connected to the Internet, a business owner can change the descriptions of services or product inventory and even include new pictures so that your website design comes up looking new and attractive each time. This is one major way in which, technology has made life easier for expert Sacramento website design companies that are dedicated to achieving affordable and effective web design ideas for varied clientele.
In a bid to widen their network and reach out to more and wider customer base, market-attuned Sacramento website design companies, such as Wheel Media and others that are client-centric, are looking to expand on services offered lists. This has now grown to include related and additional services like Email Marketing Solutions; informing and providing clients with one-to-one consultancy and newsletters that give detailed information about the company?s newest plans into relevant services like Internet marketing strategy research and customized report planning to create just the right website design based on target audience needs for the client, and other such. Much of these additional services have a lot to do with Sacramento website design firm owners realizing that e-mail is a great way to stay in touch with their own clients and keep them coming back; thus, they are sharing the secret for great web communication with their own clients looking for effective and immediate solutions to re-connect with their ideal website visitors and generate sales or enhance web presence!
The professionally managed Sacramento Website Design firm, like Wheel Media, is helpful enough to reveal a trade secret to the rest of the world looking for the ideal web communication tool and that is a perfectly designed and wisely-worded newsletter promoting their website. The firm designs beautiful HTML email newsletters and promotions and creates the sign-up form on their client?s website so they can opt-in. What works for them is the universal truth that doing good for others within ethical boundaries of e-commerce and personal profitability is sure to win results and customer satisfaction. Therefore, it comes as no surprise then that this Sacramento website design firm has thought one step further to accommodate client?s need for effective e-mail marketing after ensuring excellent quality of website design, then following it up with management services that track the results and ensure the clients are in compliance with the SPAM laws.
Shakir A is independent writer on Internet marketing, PPC, SEO, SEM, Online Marketing, Sacramento Website Design http://www.wheelmedia.com
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When designing a website many people make the mistake of trying to be too clever in the design area and forgetting what a website is supposed to do:
SELL a product and that means:
You don?t need a design that?s a work of art, you need to capture attention and that means getting people to read and take notice of your product or service.
Use these design tips to create a website that will capture your visitor?s attention.
You only get a few seconds so make the most of them.
1. Don?t make the front page to big!
People don?t like scrolling. You should have a small front page with economical artwork and a strong bold text message of the benefits you provide.
What is in it for them?
Make your visitor aware of the advantages of using you.
With many people using lap tops, have a front page that fits in a browser set to 1024 x 768 and shows the entire front page without scrolling.
2. Outline the benefits of using YOU
Your artwork is their as back up, don?t fill the front page with to much clutter.
Make it nice and clean with headings and sub headings to make your visitor take notice and explore your site.
It’s vital that the eyes of your visitor see the key benefits you are offering and this encourages them to click off the front page and explore the site.
A good way of doing this is to offer them:
3. A perceived value product or service FREE
Offer visitors a free newsletter, a report or limited time discount to capture their details and e-mail.
They may not buy your service or product today, but they were interested enough to visit, so may do so in future.
If you capture their email you can database them.
You can then email them regularly and close names that you would otherwise not have had the opportunity to.
Not everyone buys on the first visit, that however doesn?t mean their not interested as they were interested enough to visit your site in the first place.
4. Your Site Must Load Quickly
Your site must load quickly.
If it is over loaded with flash, sound or fancy graphics then it will load slowly and many visitors will simply click away.
Flash intros were big in the nineties, but should be consigned to history!
They are no use whatsoever in helping sell a product or service.
They annoy people and make them click away form your site and lose you a potential valuable prospect.
People are there to get information and buy and you need to give it to them.
They should be focusing on the text and the benefits of your product or service, nothing else.
People buy benefits; they don?t come to look at the design.
The web is NOT an art gallery it?s a sales mechanism.
5. Color
Color psychology is important.
People react to color and you need to keep the following points in mind.
1. Write off a white background (its easiest to read black text on white) rather than reversed white on a color.
2. Colors are a matter of personal choice, but the safest colors are: Steel grey, Burgundy, Dark Green and Dark blue.
Use complementary and opposing colors from a color wheel if using more than one color.
6. Graphics and pics should be used sparingly
Use pictures and graphics so they don?t over power your text message. Too many pictures and graphics will focus your visitor?s eyes on them and not your sales message.
Your objective is to make them read the benefits of your service or product and keep them reading.
7. Consistent & Easy Navigation
Navigation should be easy and logical to follow.
On each page, encourage them to contact you, or at least encourage them to give them your email address.
Make sure you do this on every page, you want them to get in touch base ASAP and close them.
8. Text make it easy
Most people don?t like reading long text and you need to keep this in mind.
Use punchy headlines and break the text with sub heads.
All these should stress the benefits of dealing with you and not the reverse ie how wonderful you are, let them decide that for themselves.
Think “you will benefit from” rather than “we provide”
Forget art and get selling!
You will speak to a lot of web design companies that will help you spend your money on clever and pretty designs however you should: Save your money.
Your website is an online advertisement and you should keep it simple and SELL your product using the above tips.
August 19, 2008
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Improving The Quality Of Your Website With Good Graphic Design
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Take a moment and think about the websites that you go to most often. Now think about the graphics on those sites. You might think immediately of a particular color scheme that coordinates with the company?s logo. Or you might think of a particular image that displays a service that the company provides. Perhaps you think about the way products are displayed. And in some cases, you may not be able to picture any graphics at all. Madison graphic design varies a lot in style and approach, but if you want to get the most out of your website, you need to decide what you want out of your graphic design.
If you’re looking for examples of good graphic design, Madison is an excellent place to begin. The websites of several Madison businesses make great use of this element in helping users to identify the business and get the most out of their online experience. And that?s the point of all this web development stuff, right? The customer.
The definition of graphic design means different things to different people. But most professional graphic designers will call your attention to five basic elements.
Balance
One thing you will observe in high-quality websites is their ability to balance information, navigation, and graphics on a page. The page should not feel too heavy on one side or the other, nor should it be top heavy. Yes, you need to think about how visitors will view the page, taking into account their tendency only scroll when they have to, but when you look at the page as it appears on the screen, does it look balanced or does one thing overpower?
Rhythm
Okay, you?re thinking to yourself, ?Rhythm in a website?? Yes, this is an essential element of a good web design. How do your elements move from one to the other? Is there an effortless flow of information? As your eye moves across the page, think about how you progress from one area to the next and assess if you have good rhythm.
Proportion
This is imperative to websites that are user-friendly. If you have ever been on a site that has content written in tiny, dark blue font, you know that proportion is vital to return visitors. On the other hand, don?t cram huge graphics on a page. Either shrink them to fit or go without.
Dominance
While you want there to be balance and proportion, you also need to be clear about what items should be emphasized on the page. If you want to draw attention to the navigation bar with links to affiliates, you need to highlight this. If you want the customer to take note of the great search feature you installed at the top of the page, put it where it can be seen and use appropriate graphics to make it a dominant element.
Unity
If your page looks like a mishmash of stuff from several different websites, you may have trouble getting your main point across. Similarly, if each successive page has a different format or color scheme than your homepage, you lose the unity of the site. To be successful, keep to a uniform graphics style, font, and color scheme.
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According to design style, web sites can be divided in to 3 categories:
* Ice Design
* Jelly Design
* Liquid Design
Where as Ice websites are considered as rigid, the box that contains the content is fixed to the left. Jelly websites are in between the flexible and rigid websites. The box containing the text centered at any resolution thus maintaining equilibrium. Liquid web sites are the utopia of flexibility; it makes the site free from all constraints. The feature, which makes liquid sites as unique, is their capability to expand or shrink to the available space on the screen monitor. They are independent on browser, window size or on the resolution the user is using.
The term “liquid” signifies that a website should flow effortlessly whatever space is provided. Whether you use a high-resolution monitor, this may mean that you need to resize your browser a little, which most people in that situation do. The key objective of liquid design is to make a website more accessible and user-friendly. Liquid design is based on the fact that Web sites should be universally accessible disregarding the tools people use to view them. It should take in consideration the culture, language, disabilities and technical details hence; the idea of liquid design emerges.
Features of Liquid design :
One of the key advantages of liquid design is accessibility. Liquid design adapts to whatever screen resolution or device a user is working upon. It makes use of the entire browser window and so maximizes the amount of content being shown on screen at any given time. Liquid layout does have its downsides. Unlike fixed width design, you lose control over line length, flow and placement of page items. Line length in particular can create serious legibility problems at high resolutions when the eye scans back and forth repeatedly. In addition, the loss of control over layout means that it is very hard to lead the user visually to the content you wish them to focus on.
Features of Liquid design Layouts :
* It allows the maximum use of space and control of space in a window
* It allows the user to set type size while adjusting layout around that size
* It can be displayed on various hardware with different physical sizes
Demerits :
* It can produce illegible or hard to scan line lengths
* It can allow images to become out of proportion to resized type settings
* It can create serious issues when printing even cut off some content
About the Author:
webmaster http://www.bluent.co.in
August 18, 2008
There’s more to creating a professional website then having a nice look and feel. Make sure your website lives up to the W3C standards (www.w3.org). Test it with their ‘tidy’ tool. This will make it easier for search engines to crawl your site, and also helps to allow disabled users to navigate your website. For example, a site with fixed font sizes (font sizes set in pixels for examples) will make it impossible for people that can’t see well to view your site. In your browser, if you go to ‘View’ and change the Text Size, you should still be able to view your site without having the template stretch or appear askew. This can be trickier then it sounds, but good and proper use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can do a lot to accomplish this.
Avoiding ‘landing pages’ also known as a ’splash page’. The majority of people browsing the web have a 5 second limit to their patience in having a web site load. If your site takes longer then this you’re going to loose a lot of traffic. You want your site to inform anyone viewing it of exactly what your website is about. This is also a key point in Search Engine Optimization.
The first headline on your home page should describe exactly what you are about. Keep your site consistent. Do not have one page appear differently then another if it can be helped. Changing the format of your pages from page to page easily confuses visitors and will cause a lot of people to hit the ‘back’ button before they get involved. Which brings us to the next point; get the visitor involved. Your opening lines should grab their attention, depending on the product or service you may be selling, let them know why they should choose you over your competitors.
Allow for the possibility that your visitors can’t see images, or, for security reasons, have Javascript disabled. Any of your website images should have an ‘alt’ (or alternative text) set, that describes what the image is, even if it’s something as simple as ‘placeholder’ (e.g. for spacer images).
Many of Search Engine Optimization articles will tell you how imperative it is to ’splash’ related keywords in your content. Looking at a lot of top-ranking websites you’ll see that this is hardly the case. You will of course naturally use keywords in your content that are related to the search phrases people will use to find you. That is the key point, keep it ‘natural’, search engines have evolved to expect this, and if anything, penalize obvious ’synthetic’ use of keywords. It looks like spam to them.
Spend time researching your target market. See what successful sites in your avenue are doing. Your closest friend is your ‘enemy’. Think about what they’ve done and see if you can take it one step further. Avoid popups. In all cases popups are considered obtrusive and annoying. Anyone telling you that they are a good way of grabbing peoples attention haven’t spent any time doing real market research. The fact is they drive people away, I have in fact seem traffic greatly decrease on sites that insisted on using them.
If you plan on using database driven scripts, avoid the use of ‘CGI’ queries in your URL’s. A good example of this would be a URL that looks like
‘http://localhost/mysite.cgi?page=my-designs&id=4934b’ There are methods that can be used, known as URL rewrites, that will allow you to take cryptic
URL’s like this and have then appear ‘friendlier’. A URL like that can be rewritten as ‘http://localhost/mysite.cgi/my-designs/4934b/all-about-my-designs.html The later part of the URL does not even have to be used in the script, but allows for a detailed description of what that page is about. This makes a big difference in the way search engines can index your pages as well.
About the Author
The article is sponsored by A-1 Technology Inc which is an established Software Development Company and is one of the best Software Development Companies in the era dealing in offshore outsourcing servies including website development, and software development. -
Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) have slowly but surely become a website design standard over the past few years. It was not that many years ago that people used Frames to position their content across their web pages and Tables gradually replaced this. Many low-end website developers are still very comfortable with Tables, as it ‘does what it says on the tin’. However, more and more people are now moving over to CSS, as virtually all the layout options can be achieved using the code.
One major problem with CSS is that not all Web browsers produce the same results and it has not been helped in the past by the various browsers employing their own way of interpreting certain CSS conventions. You can think your CSS design looks OK in the current version of your preferred browser and can then be crestfallen when you view your Web pages in another version that has destroyed the formatting. Therefore, when moving over to CSS, it is important that you use the capabilities that are consistently supported across the entire range of popular browsers. It is interesting that the new version 7 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has fixed a number of earlier anomalies, but many people are now waking up to the reality that IE7 has in fact caused problems arising from their earlier workarounds!
So why not bother with CSS, if Tables work for you? The principal advantages are as follows:
1. Web page code is generally much easier to follow;
2. The amount of code used to achieve the same result is much less. The general view is that by switching to a CSS layout, the typical page size reduction is between 50 - 60 per cent;
3. Download speeds for CSS pages are generally faster than their Table-driven counterparts. This is because browsers have to read through the table code twice before they are able to display the contents. They do this firstly to figure out the structure and then again to understand the content. It should also be recognised that a Table’s contents can only be presented to the screen in one go, whereas CSS content will drop in separately, thereby giving a better user experience. It is also possible to govern the order in which specific screen elements appear, so the user is not distracted by the more bulky and slower to load image files. Furthermore, because all the code involved with CSS page layout is held in one external CSS document and is cached, it is faster than Table layouts that need to be interpreted every time a new page is displayed;
4. It is much easier to edit existing pages and to add new pages, particularly in the area of subtle formatting amendments. For example, you can change the font or colour scheme across an entire website in literally minutes;
5. CSS delivers enhanced accessibility. In recent years the number of people using web browsers on hand-held devices has risen significantly and CSS plays an important function in delivering content to PDA’s etc through additional CSS documents. This just isn’t possible with Table-driven layouts;
6. CSS is considered to be more Search Engine friendly because they can spider CSS pages quicker. However, it remains to be seen if this has any tangible benefits such as an improvement on the your page ranking.
On the flipside, there are a few disadvantages to CSS web page design you should consider:
1. As compared with Tables, CSS involves a much bigger learning curve;
2. Because of cross browser support issues, the time spent implementing workarounds should not be underestimated;
3. New browser versions can catch website developers napping if you are not careful. You can find that earlier workarounds have been overcome and the look of your website has changed overnight.
Ultimately, your decision on whether or not to move over to see CSS will probably depend on your level of technical capability and the time you’re able to devote to understanding CSS layout alternatives.
About the Author
David Sielicki is Features Editor with Fetcher the UK’s products and services directory. He is also a freelancer with Web Affinity
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