Web Design
10 Reasons Why Your Website Failed
10. You Hired Your Neighbor’s Son
You know he is not a professional but you know you can save a buck by using him. After paying him next to nothing, you find that the website he created hurts more than it helps. You find yourself taking your URL off your stationary and business cards and not mentioning your website to your clients. You’ve lost more than the couple hundred dollars you spent on it, you’ve lost the potential of a successful website until you have it redone.
9. You Outsourced Your Work
Another tempting alternative to what might seem to be costly work inside the country. There are two reasons why this alternative is very risky and painful for you and your business. First, communication problems. You will either have a hard time understanding or being understood by the firm or freelancer you hired and most likely will not be able to find a civil time to be able to communicate over the phone. Second, like so many have already found, you may be promised everything and receive a small portion of what you expected.
Get Free Web Designs
WebDevNews is happy to announce the official launch of it’s new sister site, Get Free Web Designs. Get Free Web Designs, is the result of collaboration between the people behind Xavisys and Blogging Rock Star and offers high-quality open source templates completely free! You can find open source templates in a number of great designs, and use them to create professional web sites that stand alone or integrate with popular CMS platforms.
Get Free Web Designs, or GFWD, currently has 167 open source templates for free download available on the site, and they are all valid XHTML! The designs can be viewed by author as well as being searchable by validation (XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.1), license (Public Domain, GNU GPL, Creative Commons), contrast, width (fixed or fluid), number of columns, and color. If you would like to get regular information on updates and the addition of new themes to the site, subscribe to the RSS feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GFWD-Design-Feed.
Increasing Profits by using Marketing Tactics
Giving Your Visitors What They Want
Too many times a web master will create a site that has meaningless information about their business. The problem is, web traffic cares less about your business and more about the what they want. Don’t appeal to their interests, and you’ve lost them.
So how do you appeal to these visitors? The easy answer, “Give them what they want.” The more important question you should ask is, “What do my visitors want?” To answer this question, you need to research three imperatives
1. Who are your visitors?
2. What attracted them to your site originally?
3. What do they want when they come to your site? Once you know who your visitors are, what attracted them and what they are interested in, it becomes very simple to attract and retain them.
The next question, “How do I find this out about my visitors?” There are plenty of tools you can use to do this. First, ask them. Open up a dialogue with your visitor and find out more about them point blank. A second way way to learn more about your customers is by using traffic analysis software such as Google Analytics. Not only will this software track the number of customers and the number of pages accessed, but it will also show pinpoint locations where your visitors reside, how long visitors spend on your site, how often they return to your site, as well as the amount of visitors who come to your page and immediately exit it. With this valuable information it becomes much easier to provide unique and quality content that your customers will love.
Read the rest of Increasing Profits by using Marketing Tactics »
Web Marketing Association Announces WebAwards
The Web Marketing Association released the results of the 2008 WebAwards, honoring the best websites in 96 categories ranging from advertising, computers, and consulting, to media, manufacturing, and television. Trailer Park won the “Pick of the Show” award for their website for the Harry Potter movie, built in Adobe Flash, with music, animation, and a billboard like quality that replicates the atmosphere of the film. The Risdall Advertising Agency won the “Top Agency” award, bringing home 29 WebAwards, the most ever garnered in a single year by a design firm. To take a look at these two top sites, visit:
Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix:
http://web.trailerpark.com/capabilities/sites/HarryPotter/
The Risdall Advertising Agency:
http://www.risdall.com/
To review some of the other sites that won WebAwards:
Read the rest of Web Marketing Association Announces WebAwards »
Vector Magic – Online Conversion of Bitmaps to Vector Images
If you are looking for a quick and easy way to add vector images to your website or blog, it is recommended to take a look at vectormagic.com. The site offers auto tracing capabilities that turn bitmap images into vector based drawings. The interface is extremely simple to use, consisting of just a few configuration steps after uploading an image, but the results are professional and add a great effect to your pages. Vector Magic can also be used when you want to convert a photograph into an avatar image. The site processes graphics for logos with two configuration options, and includes a custom setting specially designed for image conversion. After looking around the web for similar services and trying out a number of sites and applications, Vector Magic provided exactly what I wanted for this graphic design task, and provided high quality .png output as a free download.
Before
After
Read the rest of Vector Magic – Online Conversion of Bitmaps to Vector Images »
SEO – Search Engine Optimization Tips
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is largely hyped and mystified to include a lot of jargon and false promises that mislead people into spending money on services that don’t really do too much. What are the real facts about SEO that web designers need to be aware of, and what are the steps that should be taken to build page rank? The majority of internet users browse for information by going to one of the three main search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Results are compiled based upon search engine algorithms that factor a number of variables simultaneously. Most important of these variables are:
- Keywords – where they appear on the site page
- Page Rank – how many incoming links to a page & the rank of the referencing domain
If 99% of SEO revolves around these two issues, what needs to be done to optimize a site? Most important is to make sure the keywords are actually on the page. If the keywords that your users type to search for information aren’t actually present on the page you want them to find, there isn’t much to be done. Domain level keywords are the best, which is why top domain names have become so coveted and costly. URL level keywords, especially those that relate to page titles, are also very important. Often overlooked but vital to SEO are the meta-tag keywords. Without overloading them to become spam, these should be carefully edited to reflect the content uniquely on every page. A lot has been written about how much better websites with individual meta-tag descriptions for every page fare in the SERPs compared to domains using a single set of keywords for the whole site. It can make a big difference as to how your site is spidered and ranked, and which pages return for a query. So make sure to edit the meta-tags and descriptions for each page individually for best results.
Freelance Web Design – Top Sites
If you are a freelance web designer, developer, graphic artist, or outsourcing service provider, there are a wide range of sites available on the web to connect with other people to build new business. We take a look at some of the best of these that should be on your short list, and review some of the pros and cons of each. Freelancers should make one site that they feel most comfortable with their base of operations, building accounts and feedback on the site for core business, while keeping aware of the new posts and new projects being offered on others to catch the ones that are most relevant to their area of specialization. The competition on freelance websites is strong among service providers, and the rates can be quite low when set in an international context. Developers may find it valuable to build a support team through these sites as well when the work load becomes too heavy. The sites vary as to whether they require a paid membership and what commission they take from service providers and buyers. Smart management and attention to details will help you reduce your costs, but as always – caveat emptor. Make sure you test providers by giving a small project to complete before diving into a large project. You’ll want to confirm the working relationship, communication, and production quality before making any large commitments or site changes.
Freelance Web Development – Site List:
1. odesk.com
Without a doubt the best freelance site on the web today. From the number of jobs listed and the quality of development projects, to the innovative billing, collaboration, and work monitoring options, oDesk is recommended for developers and service buyers for any project.
GAF, or getafreelancer.com, has one of the most active user communities for freelance project development. The quality of projects isn’t always great here, but the volume of bidding and the prices are low. Recently opened a Euro branch of the site, so may split business between the two, weakening overall brand and community.
3. elance.com
eLance is owned by eBay and as such attracts a fair number of high quality project listings, and a lot of freelancers are doing really well here. However, their subscription fees for connects have you basically paying for every bid you make on site, and extra fees for extra categories, etc. Worth it if you take the time to build a presence on site and manage it like your eBay store.
The Top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems
As a web designer working online since Netscape 1.0 building sites for clients, the biggest change I’ve seen in thirteen years in the industry is the advent of the Open Source Content Management System as the preferred platform for development. Nothing is more illustrative of the change between first generation web standards and the web 2.0 evolution than the CMS trend. Providing a great base for social networking, including blogs, forums, wikis, image galleries, comment logs, ecommerce, voting, bookmarking, tags, and innumerable other extensions along with traditional web publishing methods, the CMS is the preferred platform for most web designers building sites today. Open Source has led to the establishment of huge, user-powered development communities that are dynamically changing and constantly upgrading, offering free software, themes, and modules for building professional web sites. The ubiquity of the shared hosting LAMP – Cpanel – Fantastico set up has popularized the CMS far beyond even the developer/design community.
The top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems:
1. Drupal
2. WordPress
3. Joomla
4. Media Wiki
5. Liferay
6. TYPO3
7. Moodle
8. Dolphin
9. Pligg
10. Movable Type
Honorable Mention:
Xoops, Geeklog, e107, Mambo, Nucleus
Read the rest of The Top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems »
CSS Trick: Turning a background image into a clickable link
While working on a design for a client’s site the other day, I had the need to make a background image a clickable link. Their logo was being used as a background image in the site’s header, and we wanted it to act as a link to the home page – like any good website should.
It’s simple to turn a regular image into a clickable link, but in some situations, it’s just not possible to use a regular image – so how do you turn a background image into a clickable link? First let’s take a look at my original markup (I’ve removed unnecessary elements for sake of simplicity):
<div id="header"></div>
#header {
background: #fff url(images/header.png) no-repeat;
height: 101px;
width: 800px;
}
So, how can we make our background image a clickable link? It turns out it can be done with a clever CSS trick. All we have to do is add the link markup between our header div tags, and apply the above markup to the link instead. All we have to add to the CSS is display: block to force the link to fill the entire space.
To handle browsers that don’t support CSS (those things are still around?), we should also add a span containing link text that we will hide with our CSS. Here’s what we end up with:
<div id="header"><a href="http://mysite.com"><span>MySite.com</span></a></div>
#header a {
background: #fff url(images/header.png) no-repeat;
display: block;
height: 101px;
width: 800px;
}
#header a span {
visibility: hidden;
}
And there you have it – a quick CSS trick that turns your background images into clickable links.
Download Design
