Archive for the ‘Web design’ Category

Is e-commerce website the right choice for your business?

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Have you been thinking about selling your products online?

E-Commerce websites have become largely popular over the time.  There are a number of significant benefits to having a website with shopping cart.

Benefits of an e-commerce website:

Your shop is always open

By having an e-commerce website, your store is effectively open 24/7.  You are able to sell products even when you sleep.  Many customers do their research online before making a purchasing decision and a lot of this happens during evening hours.  By giving your customers the opportunity to purchase your product there and then, you’ll have a huge advantage over your competitors who don’t have a website with shopping cart.

You can sell outside of your region

One of the biggest benefits of e-commerce website is that it will vastly expand your reach. It will enable you to sell your products outside of your region, potentially to the whole world. With physical products the main limiting factor could be the shipping cost. On the other hand if you have unique enough product, customers would gladly pay more for overseas shipping.  With digital (downloadable) products, there are no delivery charges so selling e-books, software, training manuals, videos or songs is a piece of cake.

Better SEO

Larger websites usually tend to perform better in search engines. It has been proven that Businesses who’s website has more than 300 indexed pages in Google generate over 200% more leads than businesses with fewer than 300 indexed pages. Because every product generates at least one page on a website and your product description contains your relevant keywords, e-commerce websites are easier to find, than just a small static websites.

Increased credibility

According to a research  by WebCredibility.org, offering e-commerce functionality on your web site means it will be perceived as more credible by internet surfers.

Better connection with your customers

Satisfied customers tend to come back. By having an option for purchasing online, people will have a reason to come back to your website and it will be easier for you to connect with your customers via email newsletters, product updates and social media.

Things to consider:

Ongoing maintenance and updates

One thing to consider before rushing to your favourite web developer are the cost associated with having an e-commerce website.   While the biggest cost is in building the actual website, there is some ongoing cost involved as well.

Apart from the web hosting (say $20 / month) and domain name registration ($40 / year), there are the credit card fees (usually 1.5% - 3.5% of a transaction) and secure SSL  certificate ($100 / year).   These are not big charges - all up it’s less than $35 / month, but the biggest investment in maintaining the website will be your time.

You’ll need to keep an eye on the website, process the incoming orders and update your products when the specifications change.  Your e-commerce website should make this easy for you by giving you an option to track stock levels, generate invoices and packing slips for processed orders and automatically notify customers of any changes to their order.

Packaging and Shipping charges

It should be easy for you to deliver your product to the customer across the country.  This is why e-commerce is great for anyone selling small size products.

While an online shop is ideal for selling books, electronics and home made soap, selling a hot tub or a buldozer would involve some hefty shipping charge.

Check with your local post or courier company on the average delivery fees to different regions.  You can also setup your shop to calculate delivery charge based on the final weight of the product so you don’t loose money on shipping.

So when does it make sense to sell products online?

If you have a product that you can easily deliver (either by post or digital download) then selling it online via e-commerce website is something worth considering.  Setting up a website with shopping cart doesn’t have to cost you arm and a leg and if it’s done right, you could easily get your return on investment back within the first six months. After that it’s all profit!

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Women In Web Design: Group Interview

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Today we’d like to offer you another sneak peek behind the design community scene.  In an interesting post Smashing Magazine published a group interview of successful women working in web design field. These 16 female professionals discuss inspirational topics such as the influences that have had a big impact on their work, as well as practical details and how they managed to get where they are today.
In a male-dominated industry this is a very refreshing article offering insight to how top web designers work and what drives them.

Click here to read the full article at Smashing Magazine.

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Speed Matters: Google Adds Load Time to Algorithm

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Google recently added site load speed into it’s ranking algorhytm.  According to Google, the site speed will only play only a small part in the rankings and the biggest emphasis is still on the content and inbound links.

Although this change may only affect 1% of the search results, having a faster loading website could make the difference between the first and second place in the search results.

There is another, more obvious reason to optimize the load speed of your website. There is a direct correlation between website’s speed and the amount of time visitors spend on it (Source: Internal study by Google, Additional resources at O’Reilly Radar). Faster loading website means more more visitors, more hits and more enquiries.

Please see our post with tips how to make website load faster for more in-depth information.

Although site speed has become integrated into the algorithm, Google still puts tremendous emphasis on relevant content and incoming links. The addition of site speed will only affect a small percentage of search queries performed. Is is therefore still important to create valuable content and build inbound links that will return the best user experience for the visitor.

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How to Speed Up your Website

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Speed is an important aspect when building a website.  The faster your website loads, the more visitors it will attract which ultimately leads to more enquires and more sales.

There are a number of things that can be done to improve your website load speed. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Get a fast web server

Having a fast, responsive web server is a must. Whatever you did to optimize the speed of your website you did in vain if the server is overloaded.

If you’ve a simple website with few visitors then shared hosting is fine. For a website getting popular, it might be a good idea to switch to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with guaranteed RAM & CPU usage. If the website is already popular, a dedicated server will be the best performing one.

2. Optimize images

Know when to use GIF, JPG and PNG files.  Optimizing your images will dramatically reduce their size and they will still look good on the web.

GIF is suitable for images with few colors like logos, text & line art. When saving a GIF file, make sure you use a small color palette.

JPG is good for images with lots of colors & details like photographs. Decrease the quality of a JPG image before saving. It will still look good on a screen.

PNG, a format specially for websites, has great quality – both transparent & non-transparent – is specially functional when you’re in need of quality transparent images.

Always use the “Save for Web” tool in Photoshop, to compress your images in order to lower their size.

You can also use the Smush.It tools to take the compression even further without sacrificing quality.

3. Use XHTML/CSS for layout rather than tables

Tables are rendered slower than CSS by browsers. When using CSS, you can do more with less code. CSS-only website is more compatible with web browsers (including mobile browsers), has better SEO and loads faster.

4. Compress your CSS and Javascript files

Optimizing your CSS stylesheets and merging your Javascript files to reduce HTTP requests is another thing you can to to decrease your site’s load time.

You can also Compress your CSS files (you may try this, this or this) and Compress JavaScript files. It lowers the size seriously & doesn’t have any bad effects on your side. This & this are some of the popular compressors.

5. Use HTTP compression

HTTP compression is one of the most effective step with a little effort.

Today, almost every browser & web server supports HTTP compression. Using it, your files are sent to the visitor compressed & un-compressed on their side & you can have up to 90% success for the text based files (like HTML).

You have 2 popular choices with this:

  • HTTP compression: a feature of the web server (can be enabled on the server side)
  • Gzip: can be enabled at the site level. Here are more details.

6. Cache web pages

Caching is a superb way of decreasing the stress on the server by running more static files & less queries. It simply saves a static, HTML version of the page to be displayed & displays that file rather than the dynamic one.

For CMS applications like Wordpress, there are already ready-to-use caching plugins (like WP-Cache). For PHP, here is a great article from SitePoint.

A small note, caching can also be done at the web server level.  Unfortunately majority of shared web hosting plans do not offer server-side caching at this time.

Free tools

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

  • Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
  • YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
  • WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
  • In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below.We also recommend reading Google’s post about site performance.

What do you suggest?

Do you have any other tips to make websites load faster?  Please do share them with our readers.

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Research Shows Websites Influence 97% of Clients’ Purchasing Decisions

Friday, January 22nd, 2010
Influence of websites over purchase decisionYour website may very well be the most powerful marketing tool at your disposal.  Not only it is your point of contact on the web and the place for your clients and prospects to find out information, but your website also has a huge impact on your prospects’ purchase decision.  In fact a whopping 97% of the 200 surveyed buyers—from companies of all sizes—say a provider’s website has an influence on their ultimate purchase decision.
The survey was conducted by RainToday.com and included more than 200 buyers responsible for more than $1.7 billion in professional services purchased, such as accounting and financial consulting; architecture, engineering, and construction services; human resources consulting; IT consulting and services; legal services; management consulting; marketing, advertising, and public relations; and training services.

The influence of professional services websites on purchasing decisions has increased significantly over the past four years. According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. This is 23 percentage points higher than in 2005 and represents a significant increase in the importance of websites.

It’s clear that having a good, well established website that delivers results is vital for professional services firms. With more and more of our daily activities conducted online, having a good website could be the key to success for many businesses.
With a well performing website you can:
  • Establish that you are professional: through professional design, writing, and arrangement of content.
  • Establish that you are worthy of consideration: through an overview of your services, your client list, biographies of your professionals, and case studies that show how your helped clients.
  • Establish yourself as an authority: through blog posts, publications, videos, and other resources to help build credibility, reliability, and trust.  All of these are essential elements necessary to win clients and increase your sales.

How important is your website to growing your business?

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Google launched real-time search

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

It was bound to happen someday but now it’s really here: Google just launched a real-time search integrated into search results. It updates as things happen around the web in real-time. Live Twitter updates, news articles, blog posts, Yahoo answers, new web pages, all these now stream in the actual search results on your query.

Here is a demo video from Google:

So what does real-time search mean for your business and your online marketing?

Now it’s more important than ever to be active on the web, making the most of your website and including social media in your online marketing strategy.  You need to consistently produce high quality content that is not only optimized to get found in the top search results, but you also need to produce content that will appear in the real-time stream.

While it may take many months for your website to rank in the top 10 for certain keywords, you now have a chance to grab the attention of your prospects via Google real-time stream results.

If you’re on Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace you really should consistently post new updates.  The benefit is two-fold. Your subscribers and followers on these social networks have the potential to become more deeply engaged with your brand, but now you’ll also have the added benefit of leveraging Google’s massive search audience.

With the arrival of Google’s real-time search, inbound marketing truly is the way to go.  The best you can do with your website is to transform it from a static pages into a small publishing house that produces fresh, interesting content that your prospects are searching for right now, at this very moment, somewhere on the internet.

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Behind the SEO scenes: busting the Google myths

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

Many of our clients come to us with some idea how the search engines work and we of course welcome your knowledge and enthusiasm. Over the years some myths emerged about the mysteries of Search Engine Optimization. Because Google constantly changes it’s search algorithms, many things that did work in the early days do not apply anymore and are replaced with newer practices.

We think it’s important to keep you informed about the latest developments on the internet scene and we will keep our best to offer you the relevant information.

This article is going to be quite technical and if you want to pass and let us worry about the ins and outs of search engine optimization, we completely understand. After all, our job is to make your life easier.

Let’s look at some of the aspects of SEO and see what the experts at Google have to say about them.

Google does use Keywords Meta tag in web rankings

That’s right. Keywords meta tags are definitely a thing of a past. As Matt Cutts, Google Software Engineer explains in the video below, while some of the other search engines might still see some value in keyword tag, Google does not use it in the search rankings anymore.

Which is more important: content or links?

We always say you should have a good content on the website to get the most of it. If you have a good, interesting web site with lots of useful information, people are more likely to visit it more often and link to it.

As Matt Cutts explains, if you do have a good quality content, you have much better chance of getting the high quality inbound links.

Duplicate content & Multiple site issues.

Another gray area people generally worry about is so called “duplicate content penalty”. Some people worry that if you have two websites and publish the same content on both of them, one of the web sites gets “penalized” and will not show in the search results.

While this in most cases doesn’t need to raise concern, there are some disadvantages in having a duplicate content. Greg Grothaus, Google Search Quality Engineer explains:

If you are interested in knowing more, you can view more at the Google Webmaster Central Channel

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How to display spreadsheets on your website

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

EditGrid workspaceDid you know you can share and display your Excel spreadsheets online? You can embed even very complex spreadsheets right into your website for your customers to see. Perhaps you have a stock list that you update every week in Excel. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to display this same spreadsheet on your website so you can point your customers to it, without having to email them the latest version every time you make a change.

Not so long ago publishing spreadsheet online would require converting the whole file to hard-coded HTML table, which was always a laborous task. God help you if you wanted to make chanes to the table afterwards.

With the new web 2.0 technologies like Google Docs all this has now changed. You can use an online Office suite to upload your Word or Excel files, edit them-much the same way as you would with your usual program- and publish these files online. You can even invite other members of your team to make changes to your documents. Or even give general public access to your spreadsheet and have it updated “wiki” style.  Think of the incredible possibilities we now have at our disposal.

But back to the subject. Say you want to publish your spreadsheet on your website so you can update it easily and on regular basis.

Spreadsheet embedded into Joomla based websiteYou can use either Google Docs or EditGrid.com for this. I will use EditGrid in this example.

  1. Register on EditGrid website to create an account. It’s free for individuals and there is a very small fee for business accounts.
  2. Go to your workspace and upload your Excel .xls spreadsheet.  At the moment EditGrid doesn’t support .xlsx format so if you use the latest Office just save you document into the older 97 version.
  3. You can make any changes you need to you spreadsheet right from the EditGrid workspace.
  4. Click on “Publish” and choose what format or access level you wish to use. You can choose from a variety of formats - editable spreadsheet, read only HTML, PDF, Excel, Open Office and more.   Once you publish your spreadsheet, the system will generate a permanent URL link for you.
  5. If you’d like to embed this spreadsheet into your website, you can do so simply by using iFrame tag with the spreadsheet URL.   Here is an example of the correct iframe code:

<iframe src="/http://www.editgrid.com/user/username/spreadsheet_name.html" width="700" height="500"
frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" name="myInlineFrame">
TEXT FOR NON-COMPATIBLE BROWSERS HERE</iframe>

Because iFrame will just embed the remote site content into your own website, this solution can be easily used with many common content management systems like Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal etc.
Have a look at the screenshots here to see what this solutions look like in real world.
I hope this will come in handy to anyone who needs to display and share large tables or spreadsheets online.

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Goodbye Internet Explorer 6

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

We will no longer support Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in websites we build from January 1st 2010 onwards.

As you may already know, IE6 is a very outdated web browser, originally released in 2001.  It does not support the latest web standards and technologies compared to modern browsers which offer a rich support for HTML5, CSS2 or CSS3. Not to mention all the IE6 quirks and bugs which were sadly never fixed and that require a great deal of extra time web developers have to spend to make websites IE6 compatible.

Microsoft realized that the IE6 was not the greatest piece of software they have ever written and after about 5 years of development they released  Internet Explorer 7. Furthermore in March 2009 they even released todays latest version, Internet Explorer 8. Both successors offer a lot of improvements compared to the old IE6 and most importantly a better support of today’s web standards.

We decided to discontinue IE6 browser support by the end of this year.  This means websites build by us in 2009 will still be IE6 compatible, but starting in January 2010 we will not test IE6 compatibility anymore.

By doing so we follow a current trend of dropping IE6 support, as announced on a lot of popular websites like Youtube, Apple MobileMe, Basecamp or Digg.

Why are we dropping the IE6 support? IE6 is clearly a past-generation browser and cannot deliver a rich user experience that modern browsers can. Also this step allows us to focus on modern web technologies to optimize and enhance our templates without all the IE6 drawbacks.

With the HTML5 standard looming around the corner we´re sure that this will give our future websites an additional boost and we are very excited about things to come.

So on January 1st 2010 we finally say “Goodbye IE6″.

Goodbye IE6

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