web designer
The Maze of Information About Generating Traffic
Saturday, November 8th, 2008 | Web Design | No Comments
There is a huge amount of information online about how to generate traffic to your business website. If you are trying to work your way through it all to find the best way to get the traffic to your site, you are probably overwhelmed with the amount of information that is available. One thing that you can do is find a professional in SEO techniques to help you with your business website goals.
When you are planning your marketing strategy, it is important that you employ a variety of techniques and track them to determine which are actually working. Successful internet marketers know that tracking their efforts is a large part of developing the right strategy. Unless you have an unlimited marketing budget, you will have to decide which techniques are working and which ones you should stop spending money on.
Your SEO expert should be using tracking software to determine how your marketing strategy is working. It will need constant attention to make the adjustments that are necessary to get traffic to your site. Remember, without traffic there will be no business for your website; work with your web designer and SEO expert closely to make sure that your website is optimised to bring the business in to your company.
How Important is the Web Design on Your Site?
Friday, October 31st, 2008 | Design Inspiration | No Comments
Have you been to a site that was difficult to navigate and hence hard for you to find what you were looking for; broken links and the site difficult to understand? Think about the amount of time you spent on that site. Most people will click away from a site very quickly if they are unable to find what they want. Web surfers are notoriously impatient people and the web design plays a significant role in whether you keep those surfers interested or you lose them for good.
The choice of your web designer is one of the most important business decisions that you will make. Take a look around the web and look at what is working on other sites. Use your own experiences on websites to help you determine what it is that has kept you interested. The content on the site and easy navigation are the most important elements that you should keep an eye on.
Information is key on the Internet; if you can deliver clear and concise information for the people who visit your site, you are more likely to keep them on the site for a longer period of time. Most people who are surfing the Internet are looking for valuable information. Provide that to them and you will keep them on your site - give them difficult to read information and poor navigation and you risk losing them forever. Web design is the key to creating an interesting and highly visited website.
Google Chrome
Thursday, September 11th, 2008 | Web Design, Web Technology | No Comments
Google released their new web browser, Google Chrome on the 3rd September 2008. With the launch of yet another new web browser online the professional web designer now needs to consider the appearance of their website on this new medium.
As a professional web designer you should already be factoring in the various differences between Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari to ensure that no matter what the person is using they can see your website clearly and as intended. Each browser has their own unique benefits and downfalls; Safari ranking at the top for speed, and Internet Explorer ranking at the bottom for pretty much everything.
So how does Google Chrome differ and how does it affect website viewing? The first thing you notice when starting up Google Chrome is the amount of screen real estate you are given. All the clutter and various tool bars you are used to seeing on browsers like Mozilla have been completely removed. Google takes great pride in the simplicity and user friendly structure of this great new browser which features “one box for everything” – an address bar you can also use for quick and effective searches on your default search engine (which doesn’t have to be Google). That means you have to be prepared to show a lot more of your website on this browser which may result in ongoing lines finishing early and blank space at the bottom of your page if your web site does not adjust properly to the size. As a user, there is the instant feeling of a much larger screen with only open tabs at the top of the web browser and your start bar at the bottom. Even the traditional progress bar at the bottom has been removed and only a small hovering bar appears during loading and then disappears afterwards.
Google have only just released the beta version of their new web browser but it is easy to see this browser picking up speed and weight in the online community quite quickly. In order to get full browser compatibility ensure you have this browser in your arsenal along side the other four main contenders and you will know exactly what your website looks like on every browser used and you can ensure your website is ready for any major web browser changes.
There is nothing worse than visiting a website that does not function properly on your web browser or looks dramatically different such as overlapping text and images on smaller viewers or misaligned content. If you are engaging in a web design project, make sure that everyone can see your website the way you want it and ensure your site only conveys messages of professionalism, not incompatibility and poor programming.
Website Accessibility
Monday, September 1st, 2008 | Web Design, Web Development | No Comments
One of the most important considerations for every web design project is the target audience. Whilst in the past a lot of people were content simply to identify the main demographic such as “male teens” or “IT professionals” and to design accordingly, with technology such as screen readers becoming readily available for those with disabilities to get online much easier these days, it is important to take them into account as well. In fact, if you don’t take the needs of disabled users into account when building a website, you might find yourself getting in trouble for discrimination.
Web accessibility is about making your websites accessible to the largest possible audience, and this includes taking into account the many different devices the website may be accessed with, and the ways in which you can allow users to customise the content. For example, even just designing your website so that it can easily scale when the user increases the font size can make it much easier to use for those with a visual impairment.
There are many organisations and agencies attempting to standardise web accessibility to make it easier for the designers and developers to integrate accessibility into their sites. This is all happening alongside the standardisation of XHTML, CSS and the other web technologies, and you may find that you only need to make a few changes to bring your sites up to scratch. One great resource for accessibility information is the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). You can find a copy of their guidelines at Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and a more specific list at Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 which sorts the guidelines according to priority. Priority 1, for example, are all those guidelines that a web designer or developer must adopt in order for their website to be considered accessible. Priority 2 includes all those guidelines that should be implemented and the final priority is for those that a designer may include.
Putting in the time and effort to make your websites more accessible should be one of your top priorities when building new sites. Not only will this broaden the websites potential audience, but it also shows that you are a considerate designer and that you care about the people who view your work.