Internet Marketing Blog

Web Standards has been a term often heard by web professionals over the past decade and it seems that this has been a good thing for increasing the professionalism of our industry. But often the client has been left out of the loop on why web standards are important and not only that but can benefit them and their ROI.

The advantages for web designers are perfectly clear in that the first thing a designer or developer will notice when adopting web standards is that their code is:

• Easier to read
• Less bloated
• Much easier to bug fix

The first and third of these are directly related and provide the client with the benefit that maintenance costs should be trimmed as bug fixing becomes quicker. However, the second point in this list also provides a number of benefits to the client.

Lets look at these benfits in detail.

Firstly, with less bloated code comes smaller file sizes which equates to less bandwidth used by your site which can save some of the operating costs of your site.

Secondly, this smaller file size then equates to faster page loads which is highly beneficial as there have been many studies over the years that suggest that users are not prepared to wait too long for a site to load before finding somewhere else to go (how long is too long is a contentious point).

Lastly, though is an important benefit for many of our clients who use our Search Engine Marketing services to market their site and attain good traffic through Google. This benefit is that since April 2008 Google Adwords account users landing page load times have been taken into account when judging the quality of the page so quicker load times can directly benefit your Google campaign: How does load time affect my landing page quality?

Using standards is also good from the point of view that the code will then be future proofed against advances in web technologies such as new browser launches etc. As the new Google Chrome browser is a a standards compliant browser we are not having to recode to make any of our sites work in it, they work in it anyway due to being standards compliant.

Standards compliance is not as big a topic these days as it used to be but it is still worth reminding clients that there are benefits to adhering to the standards.

Every now and then you have one of those little problems, you are sure there must be a simple solution, yet for the life of you - you can’t find it.

Today I had the task of converting a few hundred supplied images into a useable format for web use. The supplied files were produced on a mac, and were free of defining extensions.
We Windows users do tend to find file extensions useful as do many online and offline applications.

Martin, our Senior Designer, who is recovering swiftly from allowing his 2 year old daughter to shave his head, managed to work out that the correct extension for these files would be a .tiff - (Tag Image File Format), having tried .eps , .bmp, .jpg and a few others.

I looked into the options available - those of you who have tried the Windows rename tool will understand that this was not the best way to proceed.

Initially I looked at Microsoft Picture Editor which, though not a great editor, has a very useful file renaming routine. The program, however, did not recognise the files I pointed it at as image files ( as they had no extensions ) - so refused to have anything to do with them. Next I researched several downloadable programs which promised to batch rename files, but had no real luck.

Ah, the joy of the Internet ( only last week I fixed my washing machine following advice on a forum), I found mention of a command line rename tool which I could use directly from Windows Vista. It recommended me to try opening up command line in the folder ( shift and right click ) I wished to edit :

ren *.* *.tiff

You can of course change the last bit to be anything.

As if by magic all files in the folder were immediately and swiftly renamed with the chosen extension.

Now that the files are viewable and editable Martin is batching them into .jpegs.

The term Web 2.0 is striking fear into the hearts of thousands who just on hearing the phrase are envisaging having to spend a great deal of money on making their websites compatible with this new type of ‘crazy’ technology.

In the words of Michael Winner “Calm down…”

Firstly, the term ‘Web 1.0’ only existed after ‘Web 2.0’ was born, as an after thought, and by way of explaining the World Wide Web prior to 2005, which really wasn’t any different at all. And secondly, ‘Web 2.0’ has nothing to do with any technical changes to the web exactly, but actually describes a ‘craze’, if you will, and the development and advances made in software and applications.

So, to finally explain what Web 2.0 is I will use words like blog and forum, Facebook and YouTube. Web 2.0 is merely the development of social media and how the web, which was once used for research and created by big companies, is now being utilising as a platform to talk, communicate and connect with people.

The key is interactivity and getting people talking and in particular your audience.

How can you use it?

You could think about adding a blog to your website that talks about the industry relevant to your type of business and give people the ability to comment on your posts. This not only will build you an online community, but help to optimise your site for keywords.

Why not join the YouTube and FaceBook generation and upload videos and links to your site. This is a great way of getting brand exposure as well as creating back links to your site, which are invaluable if you want to climb the search engine rankings.

Become the authority on your subject with sites like Squiddo and HubPages and go around the web telling people your opinion on blogs and forums and message boards. You can create back links to your site as well as creating a name for yourself.

It is all about talking, so if you want to talk to us about how we can make the web work for you, then call us now on 0845 838 7435 or email us here.

If you want your new website to perform well in search engines it is vitally important to plan your website information architecture and usability before the designers start working on design concepts.

The way you design and layout your website content and information has a huge impact on the way it performs in search engines. You need to decide what is the most important content on the site; it’s most likely to be your products or services. If your products and services are hidden away a few clicks from the home page then they aren’t going to perform well in search engines.

Here are a few factors to consider when designing a website for search engines:

1. The homepage is normally seen as the strongest page of your website by search engines. So any links on the home page will give more weight to the pages they are linking too. This will mean they will rank higher in the search engines.

2. Links and content at the top of a page are more important than links and content at bottom of the page.

3. When you label your links, make sure that they are descriptive. Don’t use the word “Products” or “Services”. If your products are “Telephones Systems” label the link “Telephone Systems”. The text within a link helps improve ranking of that term and page. Never use “Click here” link text.

4. The more internal links you have pointing at a page the more important that page will become in search engines. So try and design a site that has your main product or service categories in their own menu and that this is displayed on every page - this should be the primary menu. This will bring your services to the forefront of your website and give them good ranking. This is also good for usability.

5. When it comes to coding your website, make sure that the underlining code is clean and not ‘bloated’. By using the latest coding techniques you can move the important content and menus above the less important content and menus, even if visually they look like they appear under them. You don’t want the first link a search engine sees on your site is to go to a page such as “Contact Us” - it needs to be a link to your important content, i.e.: your products and services.

6. Try and not have off site links on the home page and always make sure they are below any important content. You do not want a search engine to come into your site and be lead straight off to another site. By doing this you are telling a search engine that you think the other site is more important than yours; this will devalue your site in the search engine, I’m sure you don’t want to do this!!!

7. Try not to use graphics for page titles or links. Search engines can’t read a graphic. If you do use graphics make sure that use the latest CSS coding techniques that can replace text with a graphic when it is displayed in a browser.

8. Homepage title text; make sure it’s not simply “Welcome to ……..”. It should be relevant to your services or products such as “Best4Systems – Telephone Systems, Headsets and Telecom Equipment for UK Business and Offices”

If you follow these basic rules when designing your website you will give yourselves a head start in the search engines.

So you want to redesign your website? You’ve just spent most of the day surfing the net looking at your favourite websites for inspiration and have drawn a blank. Whether you are a client looking for design ideas to give to your web design agency or a web designer, looking for inspiration, this can be a difficult task.

However, if you know where to look you can find some very inspiring work and luckily for you we have put a few links together of some sites that showcase great web design. Here they are:

Best Web Gallery - Flash + CSS Gallery
CSS Remix - A Fresh Blend of the Best-Designed Web 2.0 Sites
Design Shack - Inspirational CSS, Web 2.0 and Blog Design Gallery
Daily Slurp - A daily list of beautiful sites
Favourite Website Awards - Web awards at the cutting edge web design
Linkdup - World wide web stimulus

Having an all singing all dancing website is great, but the most important factor in having a successful website is that people can use it and easily find what they are looking for.

We recently worked with a company who we ran a test PPC campaign for. The campaign was very successful in that it attracted a lot of new visitors to the site, but it seemed that after the user got to the site they either had a quick look around or simply dropped out of the site all together.

The problem, in short, was with the site navigation and the fact that the enquiry process, which is what the client wanted visitors to the site to engage with, was hidden away and quite time consuming to complete. In addition the site was quite cluttered and untidy, with an array of unrelated adverts, which only worked to distract instead of enhance the visitor’s enjoyment of the site.

When you design a website think about what you want the user to do; be it place an order, make an enquiry or buy a product and make those things accessible. You should also consider the navigation and make sure that it is clear and actually aids the user in their navigation of your site. Pages that are buried don’t get read, so if it is important then make sure it can be found. You might think that something is straight forward but this doesn’t mean that everyone else will too. Ask a colleague or a friend for their thoughts. You know what they say, ‘two heads are better than one’.