Alan Smith's blog

Good Web Design from a Web Design Company’s Perspective

What is a good web design? Many web design companies have to throw different criteria for defining a good web design and behavior of a website. There are some parameters that the web design company and designers to calculate and analyze the design of the website such as the structure, friendliness, typography, compatibility, reactivity, color, usability, integral of designing, etc. But, actually none of these parameters set the criteria of a good web design. From the perspective of a good web design company, a good web design can be achieved if a site has the desired effect, the purpose and goal.

    We can say that web design is an integral part of a website, but when the goal of any website is achieved then web design becomes secondary. In many cases it happens for the websites that are very simple, no flash and style, but they are in a good position. This does not imply that there is no need for web design because still that is required to get success in online business. There is strong competition over the internet because every day, thousands of website has been launched and so fascinated over there in market, so to challenged them and beat the competition, you need be differently in look and functionality than others. You can vary in design, easy navigation and to define all the parameters that good web design has.

    A good and professional web design can help you get traffic to your website and increase ROI. It is therefore advisable to hire web design company for website design. They’ll help you to achieve your goal in desired period of time with ease.

Web development as per SEO requirements

Wait, are you going for developing your website? Do you have any plan of its promotion in your mind? Are you developing it for your targeted users? Are you developing your website for increasing your revenue through online medium? If all this questions related to answer of “Yes” then you have to develop your site keeping those Search engine requirements into consideration. This means you have to develop your site which is search engine friendly so search engines can find your site and get listed in their database and by the way helps you to reach your targeted users.

Web development is now become so easy in this raising technology era. You can simply create your website through many CMS platforms but if you don’t create it SEO friendly then it is totally worthless for you. Your website is the medium to reach your prospective customers so if you have a website; you definitely need it to be a friend of search engines. Search engines increases visibility of your site to your prospects and give you a global presence. Hence it is quite necessary to make it search engine friendly. Following are some key aspects for making your website search engine friendly.

• Domain name selection – This is the first key features for getting good ranking in search engines. You have to choose a domain name according to your targeted industry and product; even you can choose a domain name in accordance with your targeted keywords.
• Content – After buying domain name you have to be ready with your website content. Content is the king in SEO so make sure that you have a unique content because if your content is matching with your competitor’s website content then you never get ranking in search engines because search engines believe that you copied the content of them. Let’s create your content by professional content writer.
• Headings – In web development, Headings plays a big role. By using proper heading in your content you can make it aesthetic. Also, proper headings make the job easy of search engines spider.
• Website structure – Your website structure can affect your optimization a lot. Your website structure involves your website’s font, color, navigation and many other things. Prepare a well structured website so search engines can easily recognize your content and get it properly indexed in their database. Also, create an easy navigation throughout website, this will help the users to easily find the information and also gives the right direction to search engines.
•  Graphics – Finally, a good looking website attract the users but keep in mind that search engines doesn’t like the Flash. Yes, search engine doesn’t index the flash content so if possible we have to avoid flash coding in web development. Also, in each images we have to put <alt> and <title> tag so search engines easily identify the images.

All of above components are using in SEO friendly web development. As content is the king in SEO you have to update your website content repeatedly so search engine’s spiders come back to your website again and again and by the way increase in indexing process will help you to provide updated information to search engines.

A journey from Simple web design to Custom web design

The history of the Internet is short, but so much innovative within short time. It has drastically changed how the days have changed. A good thing, internet has created thousands of profession like SEO marketing, online telemarketing, freelance writing, blogging and affiliates and web design. It is true that web design has been with us from past few years but at present it becomes a most important factor in the internet medium and in our lives as well. Can we imagine the internet without any animations, graphics, images, fancy text, and background music? It’s look scary when we imagine it for a while.

With the great innovation of HTML in 90s, we were being able to see the website with some graphics. Once upon a time, developers would create HTML pages by typing in code for each page that was to be part of a web site. This type of website called a static website which has to be developed only by web developers. After this era there are so many improvement has been done in the web development sector and nowadays Dynamic websites capture the market of web development. First of all we must have to understand the difference between Static and Dynamic websites. In a Static website, Developers have to create HTML pages one by one and all the pages are interlinked to each others. In a Dynamic website, developers have a more flexibility means if they want to change something in website then they have to only change a single file and output reflects to entire site.

This journey becomes so much interesting while it drives us to the simple view to aesthetic view. By developing website which is most attractive and easy to use, can boost your business and also creates a good credibility of website in the users mind. All those stuffs can be possible through custom web design implementation.

Ecommerce Website Design: General Awareness

Aaron one of my good friend and colleague has started his own ecommerce business having more than 5+ years of experience and need to hire ecommerce Website Design Company that helps in growing his business within short time in order to get good global presence and visibility too.

After analyzing and searching a good website design company he has decided to hire a company who is professional only in giving ecommerce website design with a good reputation. That helps in getting good ROI from ecommerce website.

Aaron being smart enough made one silly mistake, he had given full authority to website designer to think over his website and design for him, with every aspect needed such as marketing, hosting and many things. As you know professional person is a person who is having expertise in only one thing on which he/she is working on. Professional can never be professional other than his/her profession.

Being not professional other than ecommerce website designing he failed to deliver good result in marketing. Designing is apart from marketing job, once the designer has given design layout of website, marketing person will approve this layout and further designing process will carry on. Good and professional website needs proper planning and implementation to get success in every means. As old saying, designers can never plan as much as marketer can plan. Here are some points that marketing person should be clear with before handling over to web designer.

1. Ultimate Goal

2. Secondary Goal

3. Major Areas of Website

4. Targeted Region and Audience

5. Mandatory Task performed by User

6. Unique Display of Your Companies Product

I had mentioned points that are not sufficient, but some of the important point that are to be kept in mind when you plan for your ecommerce website.

Efficient Usage of Ecommerce Website

When business owner creates ecommerce website his main goal is to generate traffic on his site and after generating huge traffic his next step is to convert those traffic into sales. So aiming traffic, business owner can either go for various kind of marketing strategy such as Internet Marketing, so that he can get desired amount of traffic.

Next come conversion, from traffic to sales. This step is very crucial in ecommerce website because the ultimate goal is sales. You can increase sales by proper usage of design elements and providing wide range of products on your website. Because if once user doesn’t find the needed product on your site then they will divert from your site, so you should take care of this point very seriously.

Your ecommerce website design must be attractive and eye catching. You need to place right product at right place with enough explanation for same product. Because image only won’t work to convert product into sales, so along with image put enough description explaining the product displayed in image. Some points that are to be included while designing ecommerce website are:-

1.       Include Feedback form after transaction.

2.       Ask to give Reference

The advantage of keeping feedback form is you can improve your website and what the user is facing you can come to know, so according to feedback you can fix the issues and can get hassle free operating to your website users.

Advantage to ask for reference is to increase popularity of your website. At initial level you need marketing but after some time reference play an important role in spreading you website and even you can get benefit of mouth publicity.

Increase your sales by online website

Today, the website has become an important part of any type of business whether it is small of big. It is the moral fiber of any online business. If you really want to spread your business all over the world, you first need to have online business website. Effective website design can give global exposure to your business and increase the traffic gradually on your website. Regardless of your industry or the size of your business, you can force your website to find more new customers, hold your existing customers and convert more leads into sales.

First of all, you must have professional looking website with good and prefect navigation type and faster loading time because it will create positive impression of your company to your visitors. You need to inform them about who you are, what your business offers and how you can help. You need to provide your visitors with fresh content on a continual basis. It will be beneficial to create a steady stream of traffic to your website. Providing some helpful instructions or information about the products on your website, you can convince your visitors that you are offering the product or service they need. People always keep you in mind if you will keep in touch with them. So regular newsletters and updates to your website can help you better communicate with your customers.  It’s much easier to sell to customers who already know you and trust on you, so keep in touch with them and on stay top of their mind. Your website is open 24/7 hours, so your customers can interact with you at any time they want.

Having a website for your small business is great thing, but make sure your website has an easy navigation and quality content that makes communication with customers easy and still have it better.

Word press web designing - A trend to get most out of search engines

Word press being an open source is one of the best platforms to publish content. Though started as a blog publishing tool but now emerged as a platform to even host online store or even run entire corporate website, which can be accomplished through word press web designing. Nowadays many templates entirely build for word press is made available that can make the entire process of customization as an ease. One can even get the template customized in accordance with their business or personal needs, it offers unique and creative ideas of designing, one can even expect all functionality of content management with many lucrative features from the same. Recently I have seen many of corporate websites even integrating their website on word press platform, there seems Google and major search engines have shown positive sign towards such companies. Even the Google spam head Mr. Matt Cutt has shown positive sign for those word press users, though it don’t mean that if you switch to word press you will be at top of search the next day. But the architecture of Word press is such that facilitates various search engines to easily get through those websites. This is the major reason some of webmaster have seen to switch to Word press.

Apart from that stuff, there are people who use word press due to following reasons:

Themes: This is one of the most important features of word press, as being an open source many developers are involved in creation and distribution of those colorful themes, by integrating their signature in terms of resource links. Here one can get number of free themes along with some premium options too.

Customization as an Ease: Customization is what each web designer desires for and those stuff is made available at Word press. One can easily change the look of the entire website by making necessary changes with their programming language and CSS.

Free plug-in and Applications: Again at word press you can expect free plug-in which will increase the effectiveness of the platform. Free plug-ins such as Meta tags, 301 redirection and many such plug-ins will facilitates all those server and search engine related things as an ease, whereas in another case you must have some technical knowledge to handle those situation.

Let us conclude the talk by stating that Word press should be utilized more than for blogging purpose if you don’t hold enough technical skill. It can provide you with more than content publishing.

Boundaries Of Forum Posting For Website Promotion

Forum posting is a well known name in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) field, it is used by the seo guy or webmaster to increase traffic, getting backlinks to improve website page rank and crawling purpose. It is one of the best ways to promote your website having good web design structure and useful information. Main part of the forum is “signature” where webmasters put their keywords to get backlinks and traffic. There are two type of forum you will get one is dofollow – where website passes the page rank juice with external website and another is nofollow - it is just an opposite of “dofollow”. But big question is that how to do perfect forum posting? What is the common criteria webmaster should follow? Forum sites hate spammers and illegal activities.

Following are the common guidelines which are followed by maximum forum sites:

• Most of the sites are in English, so proper English and no grammatical error requires.

• Don’t write any insulting or offensive message to anybody either in thread or reply.

• Don’t discuss about off topics and no advertisements or referral link within body text.
 
• Don’t post any old post which has not been locked by admin. Reply on fresh topic and create new quality threads.
• Don’t discuss about hacking, illegal software, software piracy etc.
 
• Don’t use any word or symbol which having some offensive meaning and avoid spelling mistakes.

• Don’t show your anger on any post or replies just ignore it.

• Don’t post same threads or hijack other threads and also don’t copy paste other comments.

• Signature should contain less number of anchor texts. Putting more keywords in signature section as anchor text is considered as spamming activities.
 
Disclaimer: Those are the common rules for maximum numbers of forum sites, but remember that these are not limited, different sites having their own rules and regulation.

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Add HTML Tags As The First Word Of Title At Wordpress

Finally I have decided to add span tags around the first word of titles while working on wordpress theme and after searching a lot, I found “free-php.net” which contains the solution of my quires. So, below are the codes which you have to copy paste at functions.php file.

Note: “$” use for declaration of variables
            “echo” use to display content

function arixWP_title() {     global $post;     $title = '<h2><a href="' . get_permalink() . '" title="' . get_the_title() . '" rel="bookmark">' . get_the_title() . '</a></h2>';     $title = preg_replace('/<a([^>]+)>([A-z0-9_]+)\s/i', '<a$1><span>$2</span> ', $title);     echo $title; }

Wherever you would like introduce your functions.php file then just paste the following code:

<?php arixWP_title(); ?>

How to Creative User target Impress navigation in Website Design

Navigation designing and planning is very precious part of website creation like other parts in website development. Navigation is the only staircase to move around the website and only way for website owner to present their different services/product pages which are created for sales purpose only so for both Navigation structure and design is equally important. Here below we’ve mentioned different/attractive kind of Types and Styles of navigation structure which can be helpful to stick visitors/user on website for long time. Navigation is crucial and difficult part of website, which is newbie or non-technical person, cannot do it, for that one would require professional web design company.

Various Types:

Hierarchical website navigation: This structure of the site navigation is making from general to exact. This helps to present a clear, easy path across the each and every web pages from anyplace on the websites.

Global website navigation: In Global site navigation displays the top level sections and web pages of the website. It’s presented on each page and lists the main part of content sections/pages of the sites.

Local website navigation: Local navigation is the hyper/clickable links inside the texts of your web pages, linking to one another pages across the website.

Various Styles:

Text Links: Text links are single/phrase words consist of links on text which are enclosed by the anchor set of tags to make clickable text which moves the visitor’s one page to another web page to the website.

 Navigation Bar: A navigation bar is the set of site navigation links which all are clustered together. One can create navigation bar horizontally or vertically.

 Tab Navigation: Where the website navigations links come into view as tabs is called Tab Navigation. Similarly the tabs one makes use of binder to split the contents into separate sections.

 Dropdown Menu: This menu is most commonly used style menu for websites. In this generally visitor places their mouse over on a menu item, and immediately another menu is exposed.