Blog Category: web developmnet

How does HTML5 change the way you should have your website?

25 July 2012

We’re blessed, in a sense, that today’s technology enables the construction of websites and various page elements without one actually needing the possess advanced knowledge. Take HTML for example. Although this is the fundamental building block of webpages, few people actually know what it is. HyperText Markup Language is basically the language—code—websites speak, and without that, you wouldn’t be able to construct viewable pages.

HTML was created by a physicist in the late 1980s and early 90s. Version 2.0, technically the first official version online, was made available in 1995. As you might imagine, a lot has changed since 1995. We’ve gone from basic CRT color TVs to HD flat screens; from bulky, unattractive cellular phones to sleek, slim smartphones. And, of course, from basic HTML to new various today, like HTML5.

HTML5 is a major revision to other coding language like HTML and XHTML. It deals with every single aspect you could imagine concerning the way your content is built, formatted and presented to an audience. So let’s take a look at the many different benefits of HTML5.

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Benefits of Using PNG images in your website design

27 June 2012

Building a proper website is kind of like exploring the cosmos. You need much more than one discipline to do it. You need astrophysicists, particle physicists, biologists, electrical engineers, and a host of other help. With a website, you need to worry about coding, content, videos, text, and, of course, images. And that’s before you even get into marketing and working on the upkeep of the site.

Having the proper images on your website is very important. Whether you’re talking about your site’s banner image, various thumbnails loaded up, or any other type of image, quality and size are incredibly important when other people stop in to view your site. Remember, we’re also speaking about graphic images here. It’s not like you’re just showing a picture of your face or your pet.

So, which format is better for images on your website – JPEG or PNG? Without a doubt, PNG wins out across the board. And although the file size is larger, you will find out below why using PNG images is just the smart move.

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Are you serious about your online business? Then have a proper website built and stay away from website creator platforms

26 June 2012

Having a website in today’s world isn’t a tough thing to do. If you sit down at the computer for five minutes, you can create a wide variety of websites and may never have to spend a single penny.

You can create a free blog on WordPress or Blogger. You can have a micro-site on HubPages or Squidoo. You can create a social networking presence on Facebook or Twitter. And you can even build your own website with services like Moonfruit, Weebly, WebStarts and MrSite

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Real online business is about delivering true value, not regurgitated valueless spam

20 June 2012

When developing your website and your overall business presence online, there are really only two main pathways you can travel. The first, and the most obvious, is the path most taken. This is the path full off of those little back alleys and dirt roads where everything is sloppy and bumpy. The dust is constantly spiraling through the air because everyone’s rushing down it, thinking they’ll get to their destination quicker. The second path, the clean, smooth, longer way around, is the path of professionalism. In short, the latter path is the path you travel to set up a real business.

Take a break from this article for 30 seconds and go Google a weight-loss product. Look for the top 5 results of products from non-national brands. You will find in the top 5 results at least 2 different products that are exactly the same, and you will find at least 3 websites that are so poorly constructed, using language that is so overused, that you would be surprised how they could even sell.

Well, don’t worry. If you do that search again in another month, you will find different results. Their money will run out and their business will fizzle out. Garbage naturally settles to the bottom. This is exactly why you need to recognize a real online business and avoid using the same old drivel to attempt to sell your brand and your products.

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Why Drupal is a lot better than Wordpress

25 May 2012

Getting into web business is a risky venture today not so much because of the difficulty involved with building and maintaining websites, but actually because it’s so simple to start that the competition is insanely dense. Thanks to content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, the average Joe or Jane would-be web entrepreneur can now easily design and integrate and manage websites like professionals.

If you’re in web business and are looking for a content management system, you may be wondering which of the big two to go with. Although there are many, many more to choose from, WordPress and Drupal are pretty much the industry standards for the time being, and when lined up side by side, Drupal seems to win out over WordPress in a big way. Here’s why.

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Hot Website Design Trends in 2012

04 May 2012

While internal navigation, SEO and other functionality and traffic-driving aspects of your website may be important, newcomers to the online business scene also need to realize that site design is near the very top of the list. Unique, innovative and original sites get much more attention and inspire much more excitement than bland, overused sites that simply blend in with the fray.

Sites with a touch of original flair consistently appeal to people more than the prefab cookie cutter templates available via your web host’s options. In 2012, there are currently some hot design features trending positive, and with a little bit of original tweaking, you can use one of these trends to stand out above the crowd.

Below, we’ll touch on five different website trends that are currently hot in 2012. These are trends just coming into their own, basically still in their infancy, so you can bet that they’ll be around for years. Getting in on these trends now will ensure that your site separates itself from the rest of the pack.

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What images you can use and which ones you can't use for web design

16 April 2012

Constructing a website is tricky enough without having to deal with any copyright infringement issues. Building a personal template, meticulously designing pages and loading them up to your server, and troubleshooting to ensure that everything’s working smoothly – the task can be quite daunting. Once you start dealing with legal issues, though, your entire effort could be for naught.

Images are a huge part of website design, whether we’re speaking about brand logos, header images, or any other types of images displayed on a website. More often than not, the images you use aren’t going to be your own; this means finding legal images that you can display.

So, which images are okay for you to use and which images should you stay away from?

To put it as simply as possible, you should always avoid any image that is not free to use. It is possible to find an image out there via a Google or Bing search that you can use, but unless it’s clearly stated that the image is free for public use, you should avoid it

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The importance of good navigation design for your website

09 April 2012

Take a quick moment to reflect on some of the best-looking, most popular websites you’ve ever visited. If you had to name a few reasons why they were so popular, you probably wouldn’t think about big-dollar marketing campaigns or teams of designers and SEO experts working to promote the site through the ranks. Instead, you would probably think about how easy the site is to navigate; how conveniently everything is packaged up for visitors.

This is a huge selling point of any website – its navigation. However, many people do not take this part of their site seriously. Sure, they may tweak and tinker until things look streamlined and presentable. But that’s not navigation. Building your site with proper navigation in mind is an aspect far more crucial than keyword placement, because while having new visitors to your site is important, having repeat visitation is what ultimately makes a site popular.

Navigation is about how your content is formatted and laid out, how your features present themselves to your visitors. It’s about the functionality of your site and how quickly someone can cycle through the content. It’s about a visitor realizing what your website is about within the first few seconds of loading the URL, and then being able to access any part of the site without having to fumble around looking for buttons and controls

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Rackspace: Review of Services and using Cloud Servers to go Virtual

02 April 2012

Founded in 1998 and based in San Antonio, Texas, Rackspace US, Inc. is a web hosting company that is responsible for millions of sites around the globe. They also cater to many of the world’s largest businesses and have won a slew of awards for excellence in hosting. They’re best known for their security and support, but since 2006, the new Rackspace Cloud has been turning heads in terms of an affordable and easy to use cloud server.

Rackspace Cloud Servers Review

As a cloud infrastructure, Rackspace’s Cloud Servers is a service allowing basic users to deploy multiple servers in an instant or to create advanced architectures. Their servers are virtual machines that run on Citrix XenSever for Windows and Linux and Xen hypervisor for strictly Linux.

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What are eye-tracking studies and how do they help my website?

10 February 2012

Since the earliest days of e-commerce people have been trying to understand how they can optimize websites to take advantage of the way people view information on a page. We already know a lot about how people read a page or an advertisement, so it isn’t that difficult to transfer this knowledge to a web page.

What Are Eye-Tracking Studies?

Eye tracking studies are studies done using a specialized piece of eyewear that records how the eye responds to stimuli, both active and passive. These studies use sensitive cameras and electrodes to see where the eye naturally rests, given various things to look at. Some of the results are quite surprising:

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What you need to look for in a good logo

20 January 2012

Your logo is one of the most important - if not the most important - pieces of your website’s graphic design. A poorly designed, or an over or under-designed logo, will rob your website of credibility and make it look like you don’t know what you’re talking about. There are no hard and fast rules for logo design, but here are a few things to think about:

Two Types of Logo:

Iconic logos are logos like the Apple image, which contain no words but represent a brand. These are harder to come up with, and even more difficult to associate with your brand, but can be highly effective if well-designed and cleverly associated.

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How do you structure up a returns policy for your retail website

25 November 2011

Sooner or later, someone is going to want to return something they bought from your online store. How you handle this process can decide whether or not that customer returns to buy from you again, even after having a bad experience with one product. Your returns policy will depend on what kind of industry you are in. For example, you cannot have the same returns policy for electronics and for underwear, but there are certain things you can do to make sure it is as usable as possible, without costing you a fortune.

1) Know the Law

Consumers are savvy about their rights, and so you need to be too. Regardless of your product, there are certain minimum consumer protection laws in most countries that govern when a person is entitled to a refund, and in how much time. You can choose to stick to the minimum here, or you can tailor it to suit your website specifically. Either way, if your returns policy does not meet the minimum legal requirements, someone will eventually call you out on it.

2) Protect Yourself

While it’s important to worry about your customers, it is equally important to make sure that they don’t bankrupt you by constantly returning products you cannot resell. Make sure that if you sell something consumable, or something that loses value immediately after being opened or used, that you protect yourself as much as possible against abuse of your returns policy.

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Make pages easy to find, how to create a great navigation menu

21 November 2011

If you run a site with lots of pages - be it a large eCommerce store or a multi-topic blog with over 500 posts - one of the problems you will inevitably run up against is organizing your content. At the heart of this problem is the top-level navigation, and how you organize it. Your limitations are normally that it can only contain a certain number of items. Other problems could be that you are not certain which way to create your page hierarchy.

Here are a few steps to take to make the process easier, and to set up your navigation to make it scalable as your website grows:

1) Map The User Journey
User behavior and User Stories are integral to software and website design, so it’s important to understand:

• Why your visitors are there
• What they are looking for
• What they are likely to click on when presented with a random page

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Why Create a custom 404 page

14 November 2011

No matter how well made you think your website is, visitors will somehow manage to confound it and end up at a URL that doesn’t exist. Making a custom 404 page ensures that, when this happens, your website handles it in the best way possible, and gives you the best chance of rescuing that visitor.

What Happens Without a Custom 404 Page

Encountering a message that tells you that the page you are looking for on a site - a page that you are pretty sure should exist - cannot be found, fills a user with despair, and destroys their confidence in your website. A visitor is much more likely to go back to Google and attempt to find the information or product somewhere else, than go back to your home page and start again, even if the page they’re looking for does actually exist.

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Why you should avoid frames in your website design

04 November 2011

Web designers are occasionally confronted with clients who have antiquated conceptions of what makes a website good. The most frustrating of these is the use of frames. Frames were cool in the early days of the internet, before CSS made styling web pages so much simpler. Frames essentially tell the browser to create a divide between two parts of the page, and to load a separate page into each panel.

You can do various things with frames, such as keep one part of the page static while the other part can be scrolled (useful for navigation), but all of these functions can now be handled much better by using CSS and Ajax. Here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t be using frames in your website design. After we look at these, we’ll look at a simple solution for using CSS to handle what frames used to take care of.

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What is a web producer

19 August 2011

Web producers play many vital roles in creating websites which are interesting for their audiences on every possible level. This means they are capable of not only making a site look good but also that it performs well. This involves a lot of factors which need careful planning and organising. A good web producer will know how to drive traffic to web pages and will know how to create an environment which will give visitors a pleasant user experience which entails how the content of the page is presented to them. They will be able to advise which is the best way to put content on a page as there are many different options to choose from and knowing the best one if often a stumbling point for many people who want to create a website.

Web producers have good background knowledge of design and technology along with excellent content writing skills. They are capable of bringing all the necessary skills it takes to create, build and develop a website that actually does work on every level. Although, very much like a film producer, they can also employ the skills of a team who are expert in each of these fields and who as a team work together in building a website. This means that the team they put together are skilled in web design, web development and computer technology.

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How can a web producer help me build the website I want?

17 August 2011

When you first decide to have a website built, you need to know just what to put on it. You need to know how many pages your site will consist of and you also have to know what kind of information to place on it to get traffic onto the site.

There are many ways of achieving this and it can be somewhat confusing when you start out designing the perfect pages for your website. However, if you use the services of a web producer who has the necessary knowledge and skills needed to create and build a good website, you will find that this expertise will help you out on every level.

A web producer will be able to advise you about the design of the pages which will suit the business or services which you are selling. He will be skilled when it comes to how you present the content of your pages to an audience. He will be able to advise you on how to best attract traffic to the site.

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