Pack a Mail Blog

Posts Tagged ‘web’

Many businesses are moving their web sites toward CMS platforms so they can quickly serve up fresh content on a regular basis. This is a great way to keep visitors and search engine spiders coming back. But it’s not a solution to ineffective copy, especially on static pages of your site. And even CMS sites have static pages – About, Services, Contact, etc. – with content that can quickly get stale or simply stop functioning when they should be getting site visitors to act.

Perhaps you just threw those core pages together, your stats show the pages aren’t converting well, or you’re just long overdue for a revamp. The good news is that freshening up your web copy doesn’t have to take long to do and can have a noticeable impact. Here are a few updates to consider.

Update Your Bio

If you’ve recently won an award, presented at a conference or completed a training program, you should work it into your bio. But you don’t need a major change in your credentials to revisit the copy here. Does the page quickly sum up the highlights of your background and experience, show a little of your personality and make it easy for visitors to “get you?” If not, reworking this page is a great idea.

Add a Social Element

If you have a LinkedIn account, Facebook fan page, Twitter account or blog that you use for business, your site should have easily identifiable links or icons found throughout your site. If you tweet primarily business-oriented content, you may even want to incorporate your Twitter feed right into your site.

Change Up Formatting

It’s amazing what a visual facelift can do for your copy’s readability and interest factor. If you have solid paragraphs of copy, try adding bullets and subheadings to break it up and make it easier to read. Even something as simple as changing your link styles (color, decoration, etc.), can make visitors more willing to click around.

Cut It In Half

Paragraph after paragraph of text is rarely effective. It’s just too much information that your visitors probably don’t care about or don’t have time to read through. If changing up the formatting doesn’t help on its own, take a good long look at your copy and ask yourself if you really need that much. There is probably a shorter and more direct way to get the point across.

Repeat Your Call to Action

You want your site visitors to do something; you wouldn’t have a web site if you didn’t. That call to action needs to be placed on every page where it’s relevant. Do you want them to schedule a call, email you for your rates, opt-in to your list? Tell them that, and don’t be afraid to repeat it.

When is the last time you took a close look at your core pages? Do you think a freshening up is in your future?

Tables are our friends in Website Design! They allow us to show large amounts of information in a small space, but when designing tables for print or the web there are a number of guidelines you should keep in mind. The main aim when creating a table of data is to make it easy to digest what otherwise could be a large chunk of textual information. It’s the designer’s job to choose suitable backgrounds, borders, typography and images that go into a table to make it eye-catching and informative.

1. Breathing Space. Make sure the data in the table cell has some padding around it so that the information is easy to read.

Big Cartel

2. Typography. Generally it’s a good idea to avoid script and decorative typefaces and instead choose clean, legible serif or sans-serif fonts.

Fluxiom

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We who work on the Web live in wonderful times. In the past, we did of lot of trial-and-error learning, and the biggest hurdle was getting people to understand what we were on about. Over time, companies like Google, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook and Twitter managed to get the geeky Web into the living rooms of regular people and into the headlines of the mainstream press.

Now more than ever are there opportunities on the Web for you, as a professional, to be seen and to be found. There are numerous ways to become known on the Web (or at least to reach out to like-minded people):

• Use social networking tools.
  This is where the people are.
• Write a (micro) blog.
  Even if it’s just a scratch pad for your thoughts. This is how mine started.
• Attend unconferences.
  Everyone who goes is already a presenter, which makes it easy to begin.
• Attend and speak at conferences.
  Even if it means just asking questions. Conferences are where people find you.
• Partner and build alliances.
  If you can’t do everything on your own, find someone who completes the set of skills needed.
• Comment on other people’s work.
  People will find you inspiring if you ask the right questions.
• Build on other people’s work.
  Can something do almost exactly what you need but not quite? And it’s open source? Fix it for your specific purposes and release it for others who have the same needs.
• Release free code, designs or templates.
  Nothing gets you noticed more than giving out goodies.
• Listen and prioritize.
  We already have information overload on the Web; you can be a curator.

I expect to receive some flak for this article as it attacks fellow web designers and developers.

However, it’s time to provide a list of typical mistakes made by new web developers — but we were all novices at one time. Some

points may also apply to that antagonistic co-developer who refuses to accept any notion that their code isn’t perfect……

1. Ignoring web standards Web standards were invented for a reason: they help you create device-independent web sites and applications. Few people want to learn them, not everyone likes them and most developers will disagree with some aspects — but ignore them at your peril!

A novice developer will make typical mistakes such as:

• forgetting or using inappropriate DOCTYPEs. I still don’t understand why so many developers use a transitional DOCTYPE — do they really want to add font tags and background attributes?
• using old-school HTML such as table layouts and center elements
• not appreciating the subtleties of inline or block elements, e.g. putting h2 headings inside a span
• not validating their code. Or worse, using a validator then ignoring the results and arguing that validators are inherently flawed.

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Website loading speed has become the most important part of the website development from last few years. In other words the target is not only developing website but to code effectively in order to improve the response time of the website.

Why Speed optimisation of your website is Important?

At Pub Con, Matt Cutts from Google said there is strong attempt to influence in Google to introduce a new ranking factor into the algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with how fast a site or page loads.

Following are the few website speed factors which are If not handled properly may affect your website loading speed:

• Redirects
• Cookie Sizes
• Dom Access
• Use of Images
• Components size

We as a professional web design company have recommended a few essentials of how to optimise for website loading speed, so please click on the “Read More” for full article:

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