White Space

Posted on Mar 29, 2007 by Jonathan to Web Design

There is a tendency with clients to add a lot of things to their websites or advertisements. The logic is simple: If there’s space – why not use it? Get something in there – anything. Use that space – it will help us to sell more.

This kind of approach leads to overcrowded and cramped designs. Another downside to this is user distraction. The extra item, logo or link that has been added now distracts the user from the original goal of the page or advertisement. The real point is to funnel the user towards a particular destination or action. If they get distracted – they leave and the “conversion” of interest into a sales lead is lost.

We encourage simplicity, its a better approach. Especially on the web, where users have a reduced attention span. Theres a statistic that says websurfers have a 70% shorter attention span than magazine readers. So a simple, clean look using lots of whitespace is the way to go. Oh yeah, one more thing, the white space doesn’t always have to be white. It can be any color!

Update Your Browser, You’ll Be Glad You Did

Posted on Mar 22, 2007 by Damien to General

Most of the challenges when working with CSS and PHP developement are “making it work” in all browsers. Previewing properly is the designers main concern and the difference in browsers makes things a little difficult. Some browsers have all kinds of bugs when it comes to previewing CSS, especially transparent PNG’s. Yeah, I’m talking about you Internet Explorer 6. In order to get things to work properly designers are forced to write backwards compatible hacks, IE6 fixes and tons of extra code just to make sure the users experience is as consistent on your office PC as it is on the much beloved office/home Macintosh.

Upgrading your browser is usually one of the easiest things to do but some people love to hang onto what they know. I’m personally not a fan of Internet Explorer but if you must use it, use the newest version, IE7. Most of it’s new perks are directly influenced by Firefox and it tends to render most CSS2 properly, making our jobs just that much easier. It’s more secure than older versions and seems a bit easier to use all around.

On to my favorite – Firefox. Simply put, it’s the best browser out there. It seamlessly renders CSS2 properly, has loads of add ons like Firebug, NoScript, Extra toolbars and plugins and so much more. On top of that you can easily customize the “look” of your browser by downloading Firefox Themes. No more shall you be stuck under Explorers blue thumb! Best of all it’s open source so developers are constantly adding new tools and extensions to make life on the web a convenient and enjoyable experience.

Either way, upgrading your browser will help with both useability, security, consistency and performance. Older versions of browsers have been exploited, broken down and buggy and though you may still have some bugs here and there life’s only getting better with every new version. So keep up the rest of us and happy browsing.

Usage of Larger Monitors On The Rise…

Posted on Mar 15, 2007 by Jonathan to Web Design

Okay its time to draw the line on screen size. If you have less than a 17″ monitor its time to get a new one. The cost is approximately $150 and they are available at any best buy or compusa. This minor upgrade will not only make your websurfing more enjoyable but it will reduce fatigue on your eyes. The flat screen LCDS put off less emissions than the traditional CRT tube displays and they dont flicker – so your eyes can finally relax .

Enough of the sales pitch.

The real reason for the 17″ upgrade is this: Designing for less than 1024 pixels wide screens is annoying. In a previous blog I mentioned something about designing for all screens. Well , I take it back. The new canvas size starts at 960 pals.

960? what about 1024 ?

The 960 value is basically a 1024 canvas minus 40-50 pixels for the browser scroll bars and boarders. I know this may be an extreme position to take and may sound inflexible but this a new era , web 2.0 is here.

Here are the best statistics I could find to support my case (note these are from 2003, webside story.com):

Screen Resolution_____August 2003_____January 2000
1024 x 768 or higher….57.84%…………33.97%
800x 600 or lower…….42.16%…………66.03%

Site Organization and Playing Well With Others

Posted on Mar 9, 2007 by Damien to Web Design

From time to time we’re all guilty of rushing through a site design and development phase and using poor organization and bad file naming habits. The more you work on professional sites the better you’ll get at it but that’s no excuse. Someone else may be working on your site in the future and you may not be around to hold their hand and explain what’s what.

I can’t stress enough the importance of having an organized file structure to your site. Where are the CSS files, includes files, JavaScripts, PHP docs and worse yet… where are the images? If you have trouble answering any one of these questions chances are you did something horribly wrong.

The larger the site the more important it is to keep all “like” files in one directory. I usually keep all JavaScripts in a “scripts” directory, my CSS files in a CSS directory, includes files in.. you guess it, an “includes” directory. By doing this you’ll be able to quickly find the files you need when created new pages or adjusting existing ones. The images directory also needs to be carefully organized as many of your images are re-used throughout the site via CSS and basic page graphics.

When these things are all over the place you’ll find yourself eating tons of project time just hunting for those necessary files. This costs the client money and will make your workdays much more difficult than they should be. Just because you’re short on time is no excuse to not place the proper files in the proper places. You’ll be happy you did in the long run.

So, in closing – get and stay organized! Future generations of web designers will thank you and you won’t come across looking like an amateur, you’ll look like a professional.

Determining Effective Daily Search Volume

Posted on Mar 8, 2007 by Melanie to SEO

After scouring the web for tools to provide me relatively accurate reporting on daily keyword reports I learned there was no quick fix. I say relatively because search engines don’t like to release updated
information on search volume for particular phrases, and if they do it’s very hard to come by.
Aaron Wall’s www.seobook.com has one of the most comprehensive keyword tools that rival even some pay services. The site explains their results as a statistical divide across search engine popularity with Google in the lead, Yahoo at roughly half of Google’s search volume and MSN about half of Yahoo.

As a matter of fact I’ll let them explain how it works:

“The keyword tool effectively analyzes monthly search Data across Google, Yahoo and MSN. Please note our tool
currently assumes Google having double Yahoo!’s search traffic and Yahoo! having double MSN’s search volume.
Depending on your topic / vertical and your geographic location the search engines may have vastly different search volumes. The tool can only possibly offer approximations. Exact search volumes are hard to find due to vanity searches, click bots, rank checkers, and other forms of automated traffic. Exceptionally valuable search terms show far greater volume than they actually have due to various competitive commercial forces causing greater automated search traffic.”

So using these results and dividing them by how many days there are in a month (on average there are 30.416 days in a month if you’re taking notes, and don’t get me started on leap year) you will get a fairly accurate estimate of daily search volume for a particular key phrase.

This process will help you narrow down and help you make a more educated decision as to the keywords you will use for your PPC campaigns as well as determining your target audience. This in turn will lead you to creating more focused content, leading to more traffic and better rankings.

Tags: search volume

SEO for MSN

Posted on Mar 2, 2007 by Michelle to General

Since I previously wrote about how to optimize for Yahoo!, I thought it appropriate to write about how to optimize for MSN.

While some of the tactics can be applied to all Search Engine Algorithms, like Keyword Density, Site Structure and Back Links, MSN also recommends that you focus on the following SEO tactics:

The Number of Pages and Their Relevancy:
One of MSN’s main goals is to “please their visitors”. For that reason, they place a large importance on insuring that a searcher will find what they need once they get to your site. If your site is larger and contains unified content, MSN will rank you higher than a smaller site or a site that contains varying content.

I know I sound like a broken record, but when optimizing your site, make sure your take your time and develop “Quality Content”.

Titles, Heading Tags & Special Formats:
According to MSN, “Titles are the single most important piece of code on your entire web page.” This is for two reasons. The first being, it holds a high level of weight in MSN’s Algorithm. The second is that it is your “window to the world.” When MSN returns their SERP (Search Engine Results Page), your page title is what appears as the first line for each result. This means that not only must your title be keyword rich, but it also must be enticing to the human searcher who will need to be drawn in by it.

Heading Tags are vital in seperating significant sections within your content. A Heading Tag is given a fair amount of weight withing MSN’s Algorithm, providing that they are not abused or overused. You should keep your Heading Tags short and to the point.

Special Formats:
Special Formats are basically text formatting that sets your words or characters apart from the rest of the content on your page. For example, bold, italics, font color, etc, are all considered Special Formats and will be caught by the MSN spider. By highlighting certain keyword phrases within your text, you are drawing attention to those keywords, stating that “Hey, these are important. Pay Attention!”. Additionally, another great way to make your keyword phrases stand out within your content is to make them links to other pages within your site. This not only makes that keyword phrase stand out, but it pushes both end users and the MSN spider deeper within your site.

Page Size:
MSN search requires that your page size not be more than 150K for two reasons. The first being, once the spider reaches 150K, they will just stop spidering your page. But the second is most concerning in that, the spider may determine the size of the page before they begin and ignore the page (or worse yet, the site) completely!

One of the best things about MSN is that while Google and Yahoo! have aging delays, when you change your content on your site, MSN will show those changes as soon as your page is reindexed.