Web Design Experts

Not long ago, fax machines were the best way to deliver business documents fast. But now it’s so easy to scan and email documents, and even capture digital signatures through email, the fax machine is quickly going the way of the typewriter. With email, recipients can choose to read and archive the message online, or print it out themselves on their own desktop printer. No need for individual telephone lines for the fax machine, taking up desk space, replacing toner, uncurling fax paper and listening to screeching fax machine tones!

Tables-based HTML websites are like the fax machine. At one time tables were the best way to render information on the Web. But like curled paper and fading ink, tables left something to be desired. Designers were constrained by tables that allowed data to be rendered only in tabular form. The clean, professional and creative layouts today’s best designers create with Cascading Style Sheets could never be achieved with tables-based HTML.

Cascading Style Sheets separate the presentation elements of a website (code) from its content (words). CSS allows web designers and developers to format the layout and style (fonts, spacing, text size, colors and so on) of multiple Web pages using one file, rather than entering the code to each individual page. Making changes to styles and layouts is much quicker and easier with CSS as well, as updating one file “cascades” the changes to every page on the site. There is less room for error, and the website maintains a professional consistency.

But web designers and developers are not the only ones who benefit from CSS. You as a business owner benefit even more. How?

• 1. Branding and Aesthetics
• 2. Better Usability
• 3. Accessibility
• 4. Search Engine Benefits
• 5. Bandwidth

A quick test to see if your site is using CSS is to load your website in your browser (any page will do). Right click anywhere in the window, and a menu box will appear. Click “View Page Source.” You should see keywords like rel=”stylesheet” or type=”text/css” near the top of the window that pops up to view your source code.

If you’re already using CSS, there may be other ways your business could benefit from a website redesign. Driving traffic, improving the customer experience, making your website more accessible to users and saving time and money on webmaster updates make it well worth the investment. Whether you choose to redesign now or in the future, make sure that your web designer and developer are skilled in CSS.

Michael A. Brown is the President / Web Development Director for the Professional Website Design company, WebNet Interactive a Milwaukee Web Design Firm.

Before I give my opinion on this topic, I want to post a little section on an article I read on bushiness week.

“The most common problem is that the Web developer, rather than the business owner, will register the domain name. Other times designers vanish before a site is finished. And a business owner whose expectations are unclear is asking for trouble.

The Council of Better Business Bureaus in Arlington, Va., received 1,971 complaints against Web design outfits in 2006, compared with just 603 in 2003. “The problem is definitely growing,” says Alison Preszler, a BBB spokesperson. “More small businesses realize the need to have a Web presence, so there’s more demand for Web designers. But as more companies enter that market, you’re seeing more that are not on the up and up.

Reading this broke my heart. That is why at WebNet Interactive we stand true to our 110% satisfaction guarantee. If you buy anything from us, it is yours and you own it. We also provide 30 days of free maintenance (on text). That is tough to find in the website design industry.

The advice I could give you is if you do need a website developer, make sure you know the sites that this developer has created and ask for references. Also check to see that the sites that the website designer created are owned by the person or company that the websites were created for, and not by the web developer.

It gets me every time. An owner of a website is bragging, “I get 120,000 hits per day” You think to yourself, Wow, that is a lot of traffic, but in reality, it is very misleading. I am not sure when or where, but somewhere along the line the general public was informed a “hit” is the same thing as a “page view”. That is not true. Let me explain why this is misleading.

You have a single web page with 20 images on it. Once that page is viewed by the browser it counts as 21 hits. Here is the breakdown. Since there are 20 images and one HTML file hitting the server; that counts as 21 hits.

Every time anything on a website shows up in a browser, it counts as a “hit” (hence the name hit, a file is “hitting the server” the files can be (.gif, .jpeg .png) images, css sylesheets, html files or anything else that is viewed). That is why the term “hit” is totally misleading and useless in a statistics environment. The important stats to look at are Page views, Unique Visitors and Time spent by an end user in your site. Those are the factors that speak volumes about the interface and context of your website. Those stats tell you, if your website is broke or fixed, as far as retaining traffic. So remember, throw out the term “hit”, (when speaking of your web stats) unless your main purpose is to confuse someone, then by all means use it freely. =)

Speaking of stats, I love the fact Google is taking the website statistics industry by storm. I really do love Google Analytics. More on that later, until then, raise those page views and unique visitors stats.

Website Design Chapter 1

I am going to start with a 18 part series here .. Chapter one is .. Design Process and Evaluation ..

Here are the methods of the Process I use…

1. Provide Useful Content

2. Establish User Requirements

3. Understand and Meet User’s Expectations

4. Involve others in Establishing User Requirements

5. Set and State Goals

6. Focus and Performance Before Preference

7. Consider Many User Interface Issues

8. Be easily found in Google’s top 30

9. Set Usability Goals

10. Use Parallel Design

11. Use Personas

Like anything … it’s best to make a list and involve other people… Website Design is so wide open nowadays that it’s easy to lose focus on what is important when building a new site…. Get the Details of the list right here… Website Design Chapter 1

We just launched our new website yesterday! Boy am I glad. It’s so difficult to launch a site sometimes, I want everything to be perfect. But once it launches it seems to work it’s self out and everything ends up being the way we all wanted it to look. I think that goes for any website I have ever built in my life. I am going to go through my process of how I design site in this blog.

First thing is first. The client has to know the Who? and What? of the website.

Who is the target demographic / potential customer?
What do they want to accomplish with their website design?

Once those answers to those questions are established then I move on with my graphic design team and discuss layouts. Then my design team designs the layout in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.

We begin slicing the image (once approved) and creating the css style sheet. During this time my copy writing team gets to work on the text content of all the pages on the website. This is the step where my team shows their value. Like a find tuned automobile or a basketball team that moves the ball around the parameter and gets the good look at the basket. There is so much going on at this point.

Once all of the tasks are completed, (if needed) we then do some internal SEO on each web page optimizing them for certain key words or phrases so it shows up in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Then we send a test sample to the client. And when approved, we go LIVE with the site with in 72 Hours. Then everyone pops open the Champaign because they website design is LIVE and looks great!

First of what is CSS Website Design? Well here is the definition from the world famous wikipedia.

“In computing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).”

This is a powerful language to know. If it was said 10 years ago that you could redesign a whole website overnight, people would have laughed at you. Now, thanks to CSS Website Design, that is a reality. Not only is that a positive, but you can throw away tables, which clog up the html code and at times, and make the code heavier. The usage of div tags is like having a aluminum golf club vs a titanium. Tables are useful, but Divs are lighter and more powerful. Also, div’s are google friendly. There are so many advantages of CSS Website Design. Make sure if you don’t know the art of CSS design, that you learn it. Your website will look like a billion bucks, and google will love it!

I’m sure you have seen them, in fact I know you have. You visit Google, MSN or Yahoo … type in your search query and end up on a website that looks like a 12 year old’s messy bedroom. I always ask myself, what was the web designer thinking?

I just can’t imagine that someone would open a store (I mean a free standing building, brick and mortar store) with holes in the drywall, wet paint everywhere, and tiles missing in the floor. That is what I think when I visit a poor looking website, and trust me, your potential clients will think the same thing. In fact, you have between 5-9 seconds to grab the end users attention before they click off your site. If you were to build a building, you would hire a construction company to build your building so it does not fall down. The same concept should be used for your website. I think a nice website does gives a company creditability, do you?

If you are looking to get online with your company, it is always wise to use the phase, Don’t bite off more then you can chew, as a nice reference. A lot of smaller sized company’s throw money and time into hiring a professional website design firm, and then the website ends up poorly marketed and the website loses out on traffic. It’s a chain reaction then financially putting that small company in the red, instead of where they should be, in the black making money and generating sales leads.

There are a lot of do it yourself-ers out there, and to those of you who are I say good for you! For those of you who are, but are scared to death to even touch a computer, let alone work on a website template, that is where us web guys (and girls of course) come into play. A lot of website design firms will sell you an HTML Website Template and then that is it; it’s yours to deal with.

At WebNet Interactive we put it all together so you can be part of the process, and get the professional website you want, for a fraction of the cost. (and no pulling out your hair working on the template you just dropped $1200 on) There are a lot of good HTML Website templates on the web… I normally don’t do sales pitches in the web expert blog, but today I’m making an exception, because I’m not fond of seeing nice good people, ripped off by other Professional Website Design Firms….

Here is my advice if you want to get an informative website about your company, but you are small company and do not have a lot of cash to shell out for a website.

1. You Pick the HTML Website Template Design you like the best.

2. Contact WebNet Interactive (Use coupon code TMP04) and tell us your choice.

- (You pay 1/2 down up front and 1/2 when the project is complete for your piece of mind and ours)

3. You provide the text for each page on your Website HTML Template (up to 6 pages).

4. WebNet Interactive will customize the Website HTML Template to fit your company’s needs.

5. We will upload your Website HTML Template files to your FTP server and your website will be live.

We think it is important that you have a website that you can be proud of and something that you can build on. It’s important to start small, and grow from there.

Michael A. Brown is the President / Web Development Director for the Professional Website Design company, WebNet Interactive a Milwaukee Web Design Firm.

There are over 1.1 Billion (yes with a B..) online. 211 million of those people are right here at home in the USA. Now if you take that figure and think about it. 211,000,000 people use the internet at least once a day for 10 minutes or more. It is a no brainier to have a website for your company. It is a powerful tool knowing that someone can visit a virtual presentation (be it text, graphics or some flash animation) of your company at any time of the day. I often have people ask me… Why do I need a website? … Well based on these numbers alone… you would be a fool not to.

Then you take the convince of the anonymity of a potential client. Most people including myself, do not like to be hassled when gathering research about a service or product. A professional looking website for your company can archive that. I always believe that if someone wants to buy your product or service, they will come to you when they are comfortable and ready to. If you hire a reputable website design firm, that can create a website that reflects your company, you will have a powerful tool that can work very hard for you and drive leads into your company.

Michael A. Brown is the President / Web Development Director for the Professional Website Design company, WebNet Interactive a Milwaukee Web Design Firm.

Whether you believe in SEO or PageRank and wonder which is more important, your thinking is irrelevant. You are wasting your time in wondering what is the correct answer to that question, since even if you knew it, there is little you could do to use that information.

Why do I say that? Because SEO, or search engine optimization, is a way of designing your website, and placing content in it, to satisfy search engine algorithms. Search engines are so sophisticated today that if you achieve that, then you will also satisfy visitors to your website. If you satisfy visitors to your website, then they will stay on the page they landed on and read it. They will then click to read other pages on your website and might even make a purchase.

Sure, some will leave right away, but if the search engines feel that your content is good enough for a high placement in their indexes for the search term, or keyword, that your visitor used to get to your web page, then it is more likely that you will achieve a relatively high stick rate of people to your site than a lower one.

Now, consider if you thought Google PageRank more important (and PageRank is correct, not Page Rank). You would then spend more of your time trying to get links back to your website than you would properly optimizing your site and filling it with good content. If you were successful in that difficult job, then Google, and possibly other search engines, would list you a bit higher in their indexes, not because their spiders thought your site was relevant to the search term used by the potential visitors, but because other websites thought so.

You will then get visitors to your website, and the page they land on would have to be relevant to the search term they used or they will immediately leave. If it is relevant, they will stay, perhaps visit other web pages and perhaps make a purchase.

So what is the difference? You get basically the same end result. How can you tell which is the more important. There is one simple way to do this, and one that I have used more than once. Design two websites round the same keyword. Make the keyword the name of the website and then apply classical theoretical SEO to one site, including some of the extra special tips that can make the difference between success and failure – in fact that DO make that difference.

Now apply only minimal SEO to the other and make sure you have exactly the same content on each, but rewritten to avoid duplicate content or that would negate the test. However, with the second site, you must generate as many links back to your website as possible, using non-reciprocal links where possible, but reciprocal links where necessary. There are a few ways in which you can generate lots of one-way links to selected pages on your site, and you should make that your home page for the purposes of this test.

Wait 4 weeks then check Google, Yahoo and MSN for the position of each of your home pages. You will find that your first website will generally be listed higher for the keyword that both sites are built round. Check again about 3 months later, and you will likely find that website 2 will feature higher as the links start to take effect, but then the first site will overtake it as it generates its own links naturally. Basically, what this proves to me is that it is essential to optimize your website for search engines in the classical way, but that for best results you must also have a good level of links back to your website. There are simple, ways to achieve both, but that would be the topic of another article. However, in the end, if you apply both, then you will achieve best results. I know that there are exceptions to this, but generally that is the case.

So, the answer to the question: SEO or PageRank, is that neither is the more important. They are both equally important, but it is possible to do one better than the other and then you would be tempted to say that your way was best. But you would be wrong!

If you did find what was the best, you couldn’t use that information since search engines rules are transitory but good honest content and classical SEO have always prevailed, as has a good number of links that others follow to reach your website.

Coming up I will cover more about the three major Search Engines, MSN, Yahoo and the biggest of course, Google.