Web Design Archives

Carsten Cumbrowski has written a nice piece at Search Engine Journal about the 50 questions that you should ask to evaluate the quality of your website. He groups the questions into categories from Accessibility to Design to Security and even Legal questions. A sampling of questions:

Security: How resilient are forms to special characters? Accessibility: How compliant is the website with W3C coding standards? Valid HTML/CSS? Navigation: Call to action on every page, no dead ends

These are great questions and this is a checklist that should not be ignored when designing a website (and then performing QA on it afterwards).

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Who knew something as simple as a link in a footer giving credit to the web site designer could set off such a controversy, but that's exactly what happened in Adding Links To Sites You Designed Right or Wrong?.

In this Cre8asiteforums thread, the majority of web site designers see nothing wrong with wanting a link to their web site placed on the web site they designed and/or built. Some view this as a courtesy. Some put it into their contract. In general, it's been a practice we've seen for years.

However, someone in this thread steadfastly looks at this link as an SEO trick to get link juice and recommends that if credit is given, that it not be in the form of a link or if so, add the "no follow" tag so it passes no PR.

Battle lines were drawn. Interesting points were raised. This issue must have been one of those "I always wondered about that" questions. What happens if everybody wants credit?

Garrick writes,

"Footer:

Copyright © Company XYZ. All rights reserved.
Website Design by Joe
Graphics by Ken
HTML by Betty
CSS by Larry
Logo by Fred
Database design by Harvey
Programming by Anne
Javascript by Karen
Rollovers by Uncle Fred
Dropdown Menus by Maurice
Color Scheme by Wendy
Copyrighting by Irma
Server administration by Chuck
Photos by Janine
Graphic optimization by Julia
Shopping cart by Shopping Carts r US
Gateway services by Versign
Credit card processing by Harry and Sons

Where does it stop? There are lots of people one could hire to help build a site, who have worked equally hard to help make the site what it is."

For the record, I only come here and play when Barry and Tamar are away on holiday and can't yell at me for my silly posts. The site design and all the credit for this place is totally theirs.

At first glance, this may appear to be an odd question because we all banter about the pros and cons of ad distractions. However, this particular thread is remarkable because the person asking the question is an SEO practioner and is questioning the appearance of a long time industry website, Search Engine Guide.

The author asks,

I think that Jennifer Laycock is one of the best writers in our industry. Beyond the basic SEO subjects she addresses for beginners, the questions she asks about facets of the industry always strike me as important, fresh and worthy. I love reading her articles. Unfortunately, I've found myself going to searchengineguide.com less and less lately because of the abundance of Flash advertising on the site. Right now, in the top spot on their pages, there is an ad with a guy popping around a screen. This one isn't as intrusive as the last one that ran for weeks and feautured a rapidly morphing image of people's faces that had a flickering, flashing effect to it.

The thread covers distractions, ad sizes and types that may or may not hinder the ability to read and the risks involved with angering regular readership.

The kicker comes in when SEG site owner, Robert Clough, enters into the discussion. He learned a few things, and so is everybody else from his team's very public experience.

Cre8asiteforums discussion: Can Advertising Hurt Your Readership?

So how long do you drag out the training process after you complete SEO or design work for a client? Sometimes they just can't get enough knowledge. Other times you feel like you are holding someone's hand though a painful process of learning a technology they just don't "get". There is a good thread on High Rankings that is discussing how much training is needed after the job is done. Some are saying that it needs to be clearly defined before you start the project. Add a training fee to the bill and charge for anything after that.

The member ttw had a good suggestion, she says,

"Our contract usually official concludes when the site is uploaded to the client's server and goes live. From that point on, we offer ongoing maintenance at a per hour rate -- which includes a minimum of 1 hour for each service request."

I like that. Usually I budget training time into the project and often its very hard to expect what kind of "training" you will need to do. It takes getting to know the client before hand and what their expectations are. There are clients that just wanted it "taken care of" and then there are those that "wanttoknowitall".

The member Carolinebogart has a good point about the situation, saying:

"Trick for me was figuring out when the stop training. Joomla is huge, intelligent clients like to know stuff. I break it out into where their talents are best used, entering articles, maybe adding a menu item. "

Great way to look at it. Navigate to HighRankings for continued discussion.

Let's say, for a minute or two, that you are a web site. What would you ask the people that visit you? Do you like my hair? Nah. How about, did you like my landing page or do you think I look better on my homepage? Do you come here often? First impressions count, but who is it you're trying to impress?

Google?

See Cre8asiteforums, As a Site Visitor, What do you LOVE to find the most?. Bring beer.

Since the Eisenberg's new, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, is such an insightful book filled with ways at understanding how people use web sites, I thought it best to just jump into a discussion on it. Head first.

Even if you've never read it, or plan to read it, we're looking at some of the ideas in a thread at Cre8asiteforums called Persuasion Architecture and the Art of Agreement for Website Success. I've been taking notes on the book, to write an official review. It's taking longer than normal because I'm not skimming it. I'm enjoying every page.

One of the key points raised in it (and believe me, there's a ton of them), is that our site visitors have agreed to come to our sites. They weren't dragged there. They volunteered, often based on massive marketing efforts. They can just as easily click right off, unless the web page has something they want. This situation can be something as scary as asking a teenager to view a web site during the summer, that is about teens and educational stuff. If you've ever tried to get a cat to bark, or a teenager to go anywhere besides MySpace on the Internet, you will understand why you need to read this book.

Google has now re-branded Urchin to Google Analytics presenting users with better ways to “understand and influence visitor behavior and generate a higher ROI on marketing initiatives”. Yes folks! It’s offering a free hosted web analytics service, in hopes that advertisers, publishers and website owners will spend time understanding how people find their websites, navigate through them and convert on the goals of the site. With the free service, Google hopes it helps people spend money on their search marketing campaigns rather than on measurement. This is going to have a huge impact on both the search marketing and the web analytics industries. Draw your own conclusions.

But how much is really free? Google Analytics will allow you to track up to 5 million pageviews per month, no questions asked, no fees charged. So you have a BIG MONSTER website, then all they request is that you have at least one active Adwords account with an active campaign and spend $1 if you want, that’s all it takes. No more pageview caps. I’m sure they hope you spend much more than that when you see all the tracking benefits.

What’s more in this move, Google Analytics now allows integration with AdWords to better monitor “ROI metrics automatically without having to import cost data or tag keywords”, as well as tracking all of your other internet marketing initiatives as well. When you subscribe to it, you will see it as a new tab under your AdWords account. It now has executive, marketer, and webmaster dashboards for view quick summaries of “traffic, e-commerce, and conversion trends without hunting through reports.” Here is what else it offers:

• Reporting interface accessible directly from the google.com/analytics website if you don’t have an Adwords account


• Advanced visitor segmentation with over 80 web analytics reports


• Ability to track up to 50 websites within your account


• Site overlay


• Funnel visualization


• GeoTargeting with a cool map that shows where your traffic comes from
  
• It’s available in 16 languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and English.


• And much more…

For those worried on privacy concerns, this is what they say, “Google takes the trust people place in us very seriously, and we are committed to safeguarding the privacy of your data. We understand that web analytics data is sensitive, so we accord it the ironclad protection it deserves. Google Analytics is subject to the same industry leading privacy policy as all Google services: http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html”

On a personal note, I’m also very excited with the steps Google is making because my consulting firm, iHispanic Marketing Group, is proud to announce that Google Analytics has chosen us as one among other Client Service and Support Consultants to service the global Hispanic market. With this strategic alliance we are committed to delivering professional services for training, advanced support, and expert web analytics consulting to executives, marketing managers and webmasters in both Spanish and English. Our loyalty we’ve had to Urchin and to our clients have demonstrated great rewards. Google Analytics will be a fun ride moving forward to continue building leadership with the Hispanic market for search engine marketing and internet strategy.

For discussion on this topic, you’re welcome to share your thoughts in the SearchEngineWatch Forum’s thread: Urchin Now Google Analytics, Now Free.

Barry Welford, Cre8asiteforums Moderator, has posted this about the latest version of Netscape in Netscape 8.0.4 and Site Controls.

"It can basically be set up to show web pages either as they would be seen in Internet Explorer or in Mozilla Firefox. You can switch to the other by clicking on a small icon in the tab. If you want to check how web pages might look in the "other" browser, that's great functionality. It's all part of what is called Site Controls. "

Not sure if this will lure me away from Firefox and Opera, but anything that makes website development testing easy and convenient is worth a nod.

Fans of the book, "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug may like this review of a recent workshop blogged by Jonathan Broome in Brainspill

In the entry, Don't Make Me Think: The Workshop, With Steve Krug - Notes and Opinions, he recaps some of the tips and design guidelines presented at the workshop. Topics include On Graphics/Colors, Working with Programmers, Forms, Layout, Graphics, Order and more.

If you haven't yet purchased the book, a second edition is now out with more chapters. It's a popular favorite web design book and one of the few that makes you laugh your head off while you're learning new stuff. (Why couldn't school be this way?) Broome comments on it:

"Get the 2nd edition of the book, by the way. Chapter 12’s "Help! My Boss Wants Me To ___." is worth it. I was asked (just the day before leaving for the trip, actually) to "add some pizzazz" via flash/music, and this chapter gives expert testimony to back up your natural "Ugh, do I have to?" reaction."

Is it clean enough to eat off of? Is it elegant? There is a great thread going on over at HighRankings talking about the benefits of having clean HTML code on your website. The original thread starter has questions whether having clean code correlates to having high rankings in the search engines. He wants to know how you would even know if have clean code to begin with.

One the members says that having clean code and doing well in SEO is an urban myth. Its true, having sparkling clean code doesn't necessary mean you will have great search rankings nor is it a primer for ever having high rankings. Out of practice I am a big fan of cleanly coded HTML websites, its a standard for me and more out of continual principal then anything to set a good browsing environment for my visitors. It makes life a lot easier when you can easily read a website source HTML. You can diagnose errors, make changes, and reduce the size of the page for your visitors.

I think some of the confusion coming out of the clean code / SEO debate has to do with a bit of the history of SEO. Back in the days when SEO was more "optimization" than it is "link building" these days clean code did make a difference. Things were based more on on-page factors than on off page. Optimization is truely a process of cleaning up something to make it more efficient. When I optimized a website back many years ago, the primary goal was to get it cleaned up and essentially target it for selected keyphrases based on research. These days things are bit more complicated and not necessary worse either. Making sure you have clean code is really doing your due diligence for your high ranking chances so that can't hurt at all.

Thought I would mention two tools that help Web designers select colors for a site's theme. Because, as mentioned often at this site - if you get traffic but can not convert the user, its just a waste of bandwidth. Of course, a nasty color scheme might influence a search referral to hit that back button.

Tool number one is named Color Schemes Generator and it is the newer version of tool number two which is now named Color Schemes Generator Old. I wish I could remember exactly where I found this. I am pretty sure it came from Cre8asite Forums and I think the member that posted this was using the username cline (help me out if you know the source).

It's bad enough that I never understood why the US Department of Health and Human Resources produces such a useful site about user centered design, but now I've discovered that the Australian Government has gone and done the same thing.

For usable web design, the US site, Usability.gov is a fantastic resource. They cover accessibility, traffic log analysis, market research, usability guidelines, web design checklists, and more.

In Australia, you can find the same in the Australian Government Information Management Office's Best Practices section.

Their Better Practice #15 Information Architecture for Websites is a real gem. They offer checklists on navigation, user testing, implementing website search and information architecture.

Though offered by government entities, any Webmaster can find valuable help at these web sites. If you're learning the basics, or refining web site guidelines and standards, these two web sites offer a wealth of knowledge, and are easy to use as well.