29.05.2009

One of the great things about an analytics tool is that it allows you to track how your visitors use your website. Robot Replay goes one step further in actually recording their time on your site and allowing you to replay their actions via a video. Where Are Your Visitors Going? When you entice users into visiting your website, you don't know exactly what they will make of it or how easy they will find it to navigate around. By using a script from Robot Replay you can record their mouse movements and even watch them fill out forms on your site! Firstly, you'll need to sign up and provide an email address to activate your account. Once you've done this, you'll be asked to add a line of javascript to the <head> section on all of the pages that you want to track: Add the name of your domain that you want to track and click save. You'll then need to create a text file in the root of your website (they will give you a unique name for the filename) just to verify that you have access to track data from that domain. Once you've done this you are good to go! Viewing your users actions Once the javascript file has captured some actions, you'll be presented with a list of sessions to view: You can then watch any of these videos by clicking the "Play" type button on the right hand side of each entry. Here's an example of what you can expect from the captures videos:

Improve the speed of my website

26.05.2009

Along with some other common website design mistakes, you really want to avoid a slow website so checking and improving the speed of a website must be one of the things that you perform when it comes to releasing a new site for a client. We've come up with a quick checklist of some of the things we do before "going live" which you can hopefully incorporate into your own list. 1. Infrastructure Running a commercial website from a shared host can become a nightmare when it comes to performance. They are great in the short term as they are cheap and can offer you pretty much everything you need to set up as many new sites as you like. However, you may find that you are sharing this server with 100's of other websites and you don't know what traffic they may be getting. That's why as soon as we started out with new clients we went and purchased a dedicated server in a secure UK data centre (all of our clients are UK based anyway so it make sense to have less latency). We have complete control over the server and we can see exactly what effect customer sites have on the server (in case you are wondering, we've never got anywhere near the limits of what it could handle!). It really is worth the initial outlay and it helps us deliver a quality and fast service to our customers. 2. Semantic and well structured HTML Really, for any professional web developer, it should be a given that in this day and age that they are using semantic and well structured HTML for any website they develop. However, it still amazes me to see some web design companies (both locally and nationally) that churn out come awful behind-the-scenes mess when it comes to the actual HTML. Nested tables, outdated tags like <b> and <i> and in a recent case I even saw a (what I though was extinct!) <marquee> tag! Not only do this type of design make it difficult to maintain, I really think it gives other respectable web firms a bad name. It also compounds to the problems of a slower website as the browser needs to download more HTML that it can't easily cache. 3. Use HTTP Compression One of the easiest ways to dramatically speed up a website is to use HTTP compression. This means that whatever files you tell your web server to compress, they will be a smaller file when they are sent to the client's browser. Therefore, if the user has less to download, they will be able to do it quicker! We use IIS to deliver our client websites, and it was easy to setup with the help of this Microsoft guide on HTTP compression. 4. Check your image sizes One of the mistakes people can make when it comes to images is that they forget to check the image size, compression and type of their images. There are quite a lot of times when you can drastically reduce the file size of an image, without losing quality, simply by making it a different type of image. The three main types that are used are:

20.05.2009

Search Engines are often reported to penalise you for having duplicate content on your web pages. This can be a problem especially when using dynamic parameters in your URL's as your rankings can be negatively affected if you don't do something about it. This is where the "Canonical" tag comes in to help. What is the "Canonical" tag? The "Canonical" tag is a <link> tag that you can use to tell the various search engines what your preferred version of a URL is. Why should I use the "Canonical" tag? You should use "Canonical" tag to publicly show your preferred version of a URL as well as help the search engines consolidate link popularity to your preferred version. You should also use it to make sure you are not penalised for having duplicate content on your website. When do I need to use the "Canonical" tag? You should use this tag whenever you have pages that are practically identical, but can be accessed from different URL's. For example, images you have a shop on your site that displays products from a range of different categories. In one case you may have a LCD Television that comes under the category of Electronics and LCD, and any of these URL's will take you to the product page of a particular model: http://example.com/product.aspx?model=TV1 http://example.com/product.aspx?model=TV1&Category=Electronics http://example.com/product.aspx?model=TV1&Category=LCD If a user or a search engine visits any of these URL's the content of each page will br practically identical (maybe barring a breadcrumb trail with the category in it). At the moment a search engine may look down on this approach as it sees that you have multiple pages all with exactly the same content, even though you know there is a valid reason for this. Where can I find more information on the "Canonical" tag? The Google Webmaster Central blog has a post with more information on the subject as well as pointing out that other search engines such as Ask, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! also have blog posts on the subject.

Track your site with a Google Alert

18.05.2009

Whenever you come up with a new blog post, a new marketing idea or simply a new page on your website, you want to track it to see how well it does and who is talking about it. Using Google Alerts, you can receive an email whenever that page is indexed by Google so you can see exactly who is talking about you! Why do I need a Google Alert? There are a few reasons why you might want to utilise a Google Alert. Some of the reasons we use them are to:

Increase Your Client Base

15.05.2009

One of the biggest challenges that a new web design company has (ourselves included) is how to drum up new business. Once you've established yourself and have a solid customer base then this isn't so much of an issue as you have solid foundations and lots of people to call on for referrals and recommendations. To start getting people interested in your services, you will have to take a pro-active approach and go and promote yourself. Show people who you are, what you do and what benefit you can bring to them. Some of the ways you can do this are: 1. Search Google This sounds fairly obvious but searching Google can produce some very good leads in terms of new prospective clients. Terms such as "Freelance Web Design Jobs" and "Freelance Website Jobs" can highlight potential avenues that you can explore and can quite often lead to work coming your way, either now or in the future. 2. Advertise on forums Another great way to get the word out about your services is to go direct to the people who need them. You'll find that business forums such as UK Business Forums are full of people just starting out for themselves and these are a great target audience for you. 3. Referral Schemes Once you have worked with a client, you can start to use their contacts to help build up your own business. Offer them the chance to earn part of the fee that you charge if they recommend a client to you. There's then something in it for both of you and you'll be surprised how many people only find out about your services by "word of mouth" and being referred to you by a friend or colleague. 4. Competitions You can also increase peoples awareness of your new company by talking to local magazines or newspapers and offering to run a competition for them. Most of them will be happy to do this for free as it helps fill out their media with quality content that people are interested in while it obviously helps you by giving your free advertising! It's worth taking the hit by offering something for free if you can get 1 or 2 sales on the back of it. 5. Freelancing Websites Freelancing websites are where people post jobs that they want and web design companies can go and tender for the job (it's not just limited to web design but in the scope of this article that is what is relevant). Some of the ones we have used are:

Common Web Design Mistakes

12.05.2009

There are lots of mistakes that people make in web design, especially when it comes to usability. If you make something "hard to do" or "hard to find" then your visitors will usually make the decision fairly instantly that they don't like your site. These visitors may also pass this onto friends/colleagues either directly or by simply not recommending you when perhaps they could have. Here's some of these mistakes that spring to mind, so if you are designing a website have a quick check through this list to make sure you've thought about these: 1. Intro Pages Thankfully, these are becoming less common that they were a few years ago, but intro pages that have a big picture and a "click here to enter" approach can be really frustrating. You may think it looks good, but what purpose does it actually serve? Your visitors have an extra click to make and it takes them longer to get to what they actually want to view. I may be a bit more severe than others but I can recall even leaving a few sites before getting to the content just because of this annoyance. If you are using an intro page, it may be worth you viewing your analytic statistics to see if your bounce rates back up any of this. 2. Poor Navigation The reason that most people will visit your website is to find something. Whether that is a service you provide, an article/text/post you have written or a document you link to, that is most likely the sole reason they are visiting. If they haven't landed on your site in exactly the right location, or they want to explore further into your site, they will want it to be obvious how to navigate around your site to find what they need. Your navigation should therefore be easy to find and use and it should be consistent throughout the whole site. You don't need to be especially clever with the navigation, just keep it clean and tidy and try to think what you would want to see if you were a first time user on the site. If you do this you won't go far wrong. 3. Lack of search If I'm trying to find something on a site, the first thing I'll try is via the sites search box. If it doesn't have one, or it's not prominent on the page I'm on it really puts me off. It's not difficult to add a search to an internet based site as you can easily integrate google search into your own site. I actually find this approach better than most of the site specific searches as you often get more relevant results (after all, if there's one thing Google is good at it's searching). 4. Excessive Flash Flash can be a good way of grabbing your visitors eye and can be very good at providing an interactive experience so I'n not saying it should be avoided, but there's no reason to overdo it. If you stay clear of using it for navigation, and make sure that your site can still be accessed when Flash isn't present or is turned off on the users machine then this will give you a good starting point. Accessibility is the key here! 5. Pop-ups With the fairly recent introduction of mainstream pop-up blockers, there doesn't appear to be many times where a horrible little window pops up in front of you when you least expect it. Unless the user has specifically clicked on something to request a pop-up, why annoy them by making them close something they probably weren't interested in?! However, what I have seen recently is the introduction of a pop-up replacement; the javascript modal pop-up! Equally as annoying in the wrong context, this type of pop-up either stops you accessing any of the page behind it, or it just obscures your view. I'm not saying they shouldn't be used, as I especially like it for things such as photo viewing and libraries such as Lightbox and Slimbox implement it very well. What I do object to is poor implementations of it like where things just bounce down in front of you for no reason or where they ask you to take part in a survey just because you happened to view a page on their site. 6. Interfering Javascript I don't mean all javascript, I mean the sort that interferes with the functionality of the browser. Why disable the back button? If I want to go back I will. If you won't let me I'll probably just click the X button quitting your site never to return! Please make sure you're just using javascript to enhance the users experience, not deteriate from it! 7. Multimedia Audio and/or video can be a great way of showcasing something to your visitors when text simply won't do. However, bear in mind that this audio/video may not be the exact reason why a particular visitor has visited your site so you need to account for these people as well. I'd suggest making sure that you don't automatically start any audio/video samples and instead have a button that the user needs to click in order to start the multimedia. 8. Slow websites Even though we are pretty much past the days of a 56k dial up modem, you can't always rely on your visitor having a fast connection. If you really have to load something up on your page that takes a long time to load, make sure you an provide some feedback to the user to show exactly what is happening and how long they can expect to wait. Make sure you use a tool such as a Web Page Analyzer and YSlow to test the loading of your page and find any potential bottlenecks. 9. Spelling and grammar One of the easiest things to miss when creating a website is a spelling mistake or poor grammar. I generally run my text through Microsoft Word just to see if there are any glaring issues with my text before it goes live, as I think that if you read something where you are noticing errors then it really detracts from the quality of the article and make you think whether you can take the author seriously or not. You should also try to make sure that the text you are displaying is readable, so try not to stretch your text too far across the screen, make sure the font size is of a reasonable size and that the colours you use are easy to read. 10. Page Titles This is easy to overlook and sometimes it isn't given as much priority as it should but page titles are very important. Search engines are obviously interested in them as they show a very high level description of the page, but users are especially interested in them for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they help condense the content into a brief summary and they will give the user an indication of what to expect prior to reading the content. Secondly, users may have multiple tabs or pages open in their browser and by providing a clear title it will help the easily identify and jump to your page.

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