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Web Development: An Important strategy for online business growth
1 year ago
Web development is one of the most essential and visible features of any website. As the development of website refers to the range of activities which specifically includes the following and leverage website work:
- Development of web software, such as: Web applications & E-commerce software
- Web server configuration and management
- Portal Website Design
- Payment Gateway Integration
- Discussion Forum
- Shopping Cart Development
- Social Networking Websites
- Content Management System (CMS)
- SEO (search engine optimization)
Web Development
Therefore, an ambitious business owner will take web development as his most important first concern.
Web development categorizes from the simplest activity to the exceptionally professional and complicated applications. This can contains very simple and easy plain-text page to complex applications of web-based internet, or social networking. There are various significances to the term web development amongst experts and professionals of the web. They mention web development as only to those aspects of making the websites which do not include coding and writing markup.
Web development is a comprehensive and versatile operational process and is a blend of exceptionally harmonized and independent activities, which leads to creation, promotion and subsistence of a web individuality. The scope of a successful web development service in today’s highly competitive world of web covers up an effective amalgamation of web design, programming, hosting, online marketing, sustenance and aliment of a website.
Well efficient web development applicability may assist you in different ways:
• It helps in creating positive web occupancy.
• It fastens online business growth.
• It improves and gives aid to various business activities like business correspondence, work processes and communication data
• Benefits from e-commerce support as well as an interactive customer feedback mechanism
• It traps 24×7 traffic proximity via a cost-effective and scalable web marketing plan.
web development
Critical and deadly Web development mistakes:
There are various things which are to be taken care of concurrently with process of web development. There are numerous determinants which you cannot afford to make an error in. Hence, they are the most destroying and critical mistakes of web development which are to be avoided.
1) High Initial Programming Costs.
A very usual mistake is to spend initially unnecessarily on programming before you yourself assure that the site can bring traffic.
2) Funding Fixed Expenses Too Soon.
The very next mistake is to spend very important funding on fixed expenses.
3) Buying Servers and Dedicated Lines Too Soon.
It is not at all necessary to work on servers and have dedicated T1 or T3 connections from the beginning as you expect more traffic immediately. You can begin off with a $30-$50 account with your domain on a server owned by an ISP.
4) Not Testing the Waters.
Never think that your idea is best because it is perfect on paper Test your product or service on a site that isn’t automated or doesn’t have the most commercial graphics possible.
5) Demanding Perfection Immediately.
6) Unprofessional and unbalanced Website design.
7) Lack of information.
Compatibility with browsers.
9) Inappropriate fonts.
However, the fact is that web development is a job of creating a website extensively comprehensive and functional which enhances it to be easy and user-friendly. Content management systems like WordPress have made it much elementary for programmers to develop intricate websites which are profoundly easy to use. But in addition there are enough of challenges faced by a web developer when developing a new website for a client who is just a newly born fish in pound. Web development is one of the most essential aspects of a website, and professionals will help to get the job done correctly.
Is This Cloud Adding Future of Web Design?
2 years ago
By the 7th International Conference on Cloud Expo to be held in the U.S. this November and the announcement that New York and Microsoft team to provide 100,000 city workers with access to the cloud, it is clear that the cloud is at the forefront of computer technology and a current buzzword in the field.
Cloud computing refers to anything that involves deliver hosted services over the internet and encompasses any subscription-based or pay-by-use service that, in real time, extends IT’s existing capabilities.
A clear benefit of this provision is the inevitable reduced cost incurred by any organization. The provision is not owned, with any resources being consumed as a service. The company only pays for what is used as a utility, therefore avoiding capital expenditure. According to New York City’s Mayor, “Through our partnership with Microsoft, we’ve found ways to offer our employees Microsoft’s newest computing tools while reducing costs to taxpayers.
By capitalizing on the city’s buying power, consolidating dozens of separate city agency license agreements into a single one, and paying for software based on use, we’ll save $50 million over the next five years.”
Until now, New York City’s agencies each purchased software individually, comprising more than 40 separate license agreements and even more maintenance and support contracts. With the new cloud agreement, all of the city’s software and services will be under one unified agreement, saving money and eliminating confusion.
Organizations also benefit from increased storage capacity as compared with that available on private computer systems. With a phenomenal growth in data quantities, companies are under pressure to store and protect not only new data, but older existing data that is kept ‘just-in-case’ to protect against any future difficulties. With this storage requirement comes additional costs associated with the greater need to manage and protect the data. Cloud computing provides a cost-effective solution for this ongoing problem.
With the continued advances in technology and ever changing needs of organizations, cloud services ensure that the most up-to-date software is available to companies. Similarly, the evolving nature of such provision ensures that companies are offered greater flexibility in how they access services and the many different combinations of services that may be required.
Possibly the most significant benefit arising from this shift in technology is the ability to access information from anywhere, resulting in greater mobility for employees. In the case of New York particularly, this benefit is exemplified by the fact that many of the city’s workers are not office-based and so will have improved access to services with resulting improvements in communication between agencies.
Despite the significant benefits associated with the cloud computing revolution, there is also concern surrounding cloud computing and its attendant security risks. The main concerns about cloud computing are security and privacy as data inside the ‘cloud’ is outside a company’s firewall and that brings with it an intrinsic threat of risk. With an increase in hacking attempts, companies need to implement strict security actions such as confirmed cryptographic methods to authenticate users.
This security risk extends beyond data storage to web development. It is evident that an unsecure server is bad for search engine optimization and for a company’s website. As identified by an SEO company, a lack of security in the cloud can result in the loss of search engine rankings.
As part of a rapidly expanding market and IT development, we must be open to technical progress, although maintaining some reservations about possible security vulnerabilities or their concerns. The spokesperson for the web design company in London, which recognizes the potential of cloud computing and technology in our daily lives. As web designers we often find ourselves caught in the daily activities on the Internet. Cloud computing May very well be the new technologies in significant changes in the market for web design, but in the end only time will tell.
How to use links?
Don’t underline words if they’re not links.
On the web, something that’s underlined is supposed to be a link. If you underline gratuitously, readers will be annoyed when they try to click those underlined words only to discover that they’re not really links. If you want to emphasize something, use italics instead (or boldface, or another color).
Make links blue or underlined, or both.
Users expect links in body copy to be blue and underlined; because that’s the way they appear on 99% of other websites. If you use a different color then at least the underline is a clue that a link is a link. Likewise, if you remove the underline but keep the link blue, then the color is the clue that a link is a link. So it’s best to use both blue and underlined, but using at least one or the other is acceptable.
What’s wrong is doing neither – having links that aren’t blue and aren’t underlined. How are users supposed to know what’s a link at that point? I ran across one page (no longer up) whose main link is red with no underline. To make matters worse, elsewhere on the page they use blue text, which looks like a link, but which isn’t. So users had no clue that the link was actually a link, and there was other text that looked like a link, but wasn’t. (I tried to bring this to the attention of the site owner but he bragged that nobody else had ever complained.)
Links in menus don’t have to be blue or underlined, as long as they’re clearly menu items. The blue/underlined tip is for links that are in the middle of the page.
Explain what you’re linking to.
When you’re able to provide more information about what a link points to, do so. For example, if your site has a Links page, include a short description of each site you link to, say 1-5 sentences. That way visitors have an idea of what’s on those sites, which will help them make their decision on whether to visit those sites, and help them find what they’re looking for, while avoiding what they’re not looking for.
Nothing is less useful than a whole bunch of links to other sites when those links consist of nothing more than the names of those sites (or worse, the urls). Without any description of what you’re linking to, readers are forced to visit each and every site to get an idea of what’s there. Imagine 100 of your visitors all repeating that same laborious surfing, needlessly. You could have told them what’s on those sites, because you (presumably) visited those sites yourself, so you know what’s on them. Do your readers a favor and share your knowledge with them.
Don’t open internal links in a new window.
The owner of a site I just ran across thinks it’s a good idea to pop up a brand new window when a visitor clicks a link within his site, but that only annoys users when they suddenly have a gazillion windows open on their screen. Opening new windows for external links to other sites is fine, but links within a site should always open in the same window. Visitors can still get around your site just fine when links open in the same window, because you did include a good navigation menu at the top or the left of the page as in tip F1 above, right? Opening new windows means that after five clicks within your site, your visitor’s screen is cluttered with six different windows.
Use descriptive link text.
The text of a link should describe what’s being linked to. You should never, ever use words like “link” or “here” or “click here” as the link text. Readers prefer to scan web pages rather than read every word, and you make that impossible if you use generic, non-descriptive words as the link text.
Ways to Get Unblocked
Web designers, like any creative person, can suffer from writers block. But because of our work, there are many ways you can learn to deal with the blocks and get unstuck. These six suggestions have worked for me to get new design ideas in the past and will work again.
- Be prepared for procrastination to try to block you. When I’m working on a new design or article idea, I find that that’s when ideas for other projects will come up. For example, I might start thinking of ways to paint my office, about the wool I need to wash, or a possible location for a new kitchen garden. I realize that these are just ways of procrastinating, but they are also things I’d like to do. So, if I’m writing or working on a Web design, I write them down and continue brainstorming my current project. I’ve found that if I write down the things I want to procrastinate, they don’t press as much as they would if I try to simply ignore them.
- Start in the middle. For some reason, many Web designers feel an intense need to start at the top of their Web page and design down. Yes, ultimately, you’ll have to think that way about the HTML or CSS, but when you’re working on a design, you should focus on the most important part first – and that’s not usually the navigation, branding, or advertising found at the top. When writing content, the same is true, I’ve found that if I start writing with a title, my articles are usually completely different than what the title says. So I have to write a new title when I’m done anyway.
- Step away from the computer. I’ve found that it can get very easy to get hung up on technical issues like HTML or JavaScript when I try to do an initial design on the computer. While I do most of my rough writing drafts on the computer, I do most of my designs on paper first. For one thing, they’re easier to erase and scratch out. Plus, since I use scratch paper for most rough drafts, so if I decide I hate an idea, I don’t feel bad about throwing it out.
- Take the time you need. Planning is one step in most projects that is both the most important and the least used. Most people, including Web designers, prefer to jump right in and start building things. If you prefer designing a page, you probably get out Dreamweaver or Photoshop immediately after starting a project. If you prefer developing pages, you probably jump right into the PHP or JavaScript to generate behaviors. But most Web design and development projects end up over budget, over time, or not meeting the requirements – and this is usually because the planning phase of the project was glossed over in favor of action. Take time with your planning and when you think you’re done, take a little more time. Planning won’t hurt your designs, but lack of planning will.
- Ask for help. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, but be sure to find people who can provide you with constructive criticism. It doesn’t help if they are too effusive about how wonderful it is, but someone who can’t find anything good is also not a lot of help.
- If you’re really stuck, do something else. The idea is to get your mind off of the problem you’re working on. This can allow your subconscious to think about it unobstructed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to sleep and woken up in the morning with the ideal solution completely formed in my head.
Tips for Effective Web Design
Listed below are some useful and rather important tips for designing a professional and high quality web site:
- Neat and Easy Navigation: Navigation of links on your site plays a big role in determining the stickiness of your site (how long your visitor stays and explores your site). Ask yourself this, What do visitors do as soon as they open your site? They would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find any other page that interests them.
- Clean Layout Design: A clean layout that uses a lot of white space enhances a site’s looks. Try to keep the focus on your content, use dreamweaver templates for this. Use fonts that will be available on all computers to prevent your site looking messed up.
- Program using pure CSS: The world is moving away from table based websites to pure CSS websites because it offers accessibility, reusability and considerably reduces file size apart from giving greater control over the look of your website. The single most important skill you can learn today to become a quality web designer is CSS programming! Even if you are not an expert at CSS you can learn to use the following simple CSS Styles Effects to enhance your website:
- Cool Text Effects using CSS Styles: Text Links Rollover, Text Case Setting, Text Spacing, Line-through Effect
- Bullets in HTML or Deamweaver: Using CSS Styles with bullets (shapes, decimal, roman-numerals, images, etc.)
- Links without Underline: Use CSS Styles to display links without the appearance of the underline.
- Optimum Load Time: Make sure your load time is low. For this you must:
Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They hugely increase your file size.
Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your site doesn’t have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
Use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever possible. SSI files once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster. - Design for all Screen Resolutions: A site that is easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay and read your content. For site with long pages of content this is very crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. Suppose your site doesn’t look good for a particular resolution it is very probable that the visitor will close the browser window feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. Designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and professional site.
- Ensure Web site scalability: Make sure your code and design is scalable. As technology advances and configuration of computers & their monitors keep increasing and varying it is impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and platforms.
- Cross Browser Compatible: Make sure you check your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1+, Opera 7+, Safari 3+ and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the worlds browsers.
Website Design Techniques That Make A Difference
website design techniques that make a difference between professional design and amateur one is that the amateur sites often do not get the attention that a professional website would receive.
Here are some techniques that will help:
Some useful information about websites design techniques can be explained by understanding what table-based website is, is it old, primitive way to build using tables, etc.SEO Perhaps if you are creating a table based website it would be best to consider CSS designs. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are popular and the language is much easier to use and to create quality tables which users can get to much easier.
That is straightforward, but what should be used for a professional website?
A good designer to start with, if you are building a professional website you want to ensure that you achieve the highest quality possible. You will need to consider SEO as well, so ensure that you have a designer that can either handle your SEO needs or point you in the right direction. The tableless CSS websites are great looking websites and the CSS is used to transform conventional forms into tableless solutions. Forms that do not have tables are often lighter and semantically precise.
Professional designs are often affordable, so if you are building a professional website using CSS language be sure to find a company who has a good reputation in web design. Try to avoid the amateur designers since you may well lose more money than you expect. One of the latest designs is the dynamic websites which amazing, most of the sites are crawled by Google.
Ways to Improve Your Website’s Legibility
Websites that make their customers work to read them are not the best way to get business. Miniscule fonts, text in colors that make it hard to see against the background color, and lines that are piled on top of each other are problems, but they’re easy to correct. Let’s jump right in and look at five easy fixes:
1. Format your text using CSS.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go – use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler.
2. Make the font size big enough to read.
Consider your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it’s never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn’t have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana.
3. Make the text contrast with its background.
The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colors if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there’s not enough contrast.
4. Give the lines room to breathe.
Don’t stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I’ll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line.
5. Break text up into chunks.
No matter how good a writer you are, people don’t want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that really interest them, or use bulleted lists to change the pace of the writing and slow down the scanning.
And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. Nothing irritates me more on a web page than spelling errors – it simply makes you look like you don’t care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spellcheck tool.
Making your website’s content more legible is easy. It doesn’t take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that’s more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors.
9 Ways To Present A Website To A Client
The Problems
As web-savvy individuals, it’s quite easy to grasp and understand the concept that mock-ups are simply static images that depict what a site would look like. However, what many web designers have found is that this concept is incredibly difficult for clients to wrap their head around.
We, as designers and communicators, try to make it clear to clients that what they are looking at is a static and flat image of their potential site design. Still, many questions and comments come from the clients after you present the design, such as the ones Verne Ho of Creating Briefing and many others, have experienced below:
- Why don’t any of the links work?
- How do I edit the text on this?
- How come I can’t highlight text?
- The website is too small (occurs because the browser has shrunken the image by default)!
- I don’t like the white space that surrounds the site.
- Can we center the site?
Place the image on a web page and send them a link.
People can probably better identify an image when it appears as they normally see it, such as in a web browser however it does create many more questions as I previously outlined above.
If you choose this method try to personalise it by uploading it to your own server… use the directory/clients/clientname/index.htm. Another tip here was to use the free .tk domain provider so that you can send them a link such as http://clientsdomain.tk which also looks quite professional.
Send A JPEG or PNG via Email
Sending a mockup by email is probably the simplest way however it is not always the best… Some users have small screen resolutions which means the picture may shrink which means more questions along with the other ones that I outlined above.
Use some kind of web-based application
Using a web-based application to showcase mock-ups reinforces the idea that it’s something on ‘display’ and it is not a live example which may lead to less questions.
Use the website CodedPreview
CodedPreview allows you to create simple HTML preview pages, showing what a template should look like when coded. Again, try to personalise it as much as you can, tailored to your client.
Create A ‘Client Studio‘
Rather than using an online based application, you can set up your own ’studio’ on your own server where the client can log in and view mock ups (jpg’s on a html page) which they approve… You can put revisions on the same page (new jpg’s) and once approved you can add a link to view the functional site in progress.
Export mock-ups in PDF
Rather than saving in jpeg or png format which is just an image that can be opened in the clients default image viewing software, having it in PDF format means, in most cases, that they must open the website in Adobe Reader. The advantage of this is that there’s less expectations for it to function like a website. The use of layer comps is also useful in PDFs to show variations of a design.
Skip photoshop and design in HTML
There are a few debates on this one and it usually comes down to whatever process best enables your creativity however this one is for you to decide.
Get The Client To Come Into Your Office
Although this is not always possible, it usually is the best way to present a web mock up to a client as it allows you to talk over the whole project together with the client. If you have this opportunity, always take it.
Send Them a JPEG or PNG & Ask Them To Print It
This was just an idea I came up with… if you send them a full scale JPEG mockup of the design and ask them to print it off, then they will not think that the website will function like it normally does which in turn will mean less questions. A disadvantage of this however is that the site will not be to scale.
7 Benefits of Having a Professional Website Design
CEO’s don’t dress like they’re homeless and wine tasting events are generally never held in the back of a liquor store. There’s a good reason behind this. People generally do not follow the “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” motto, so the very first thing they do is, you guessed it, judge your book by it’s cover. The same is true for website designs -people visit your site and immediately make a decision on if it’s a place they’re going to spend time (and money) at, or if they’re going to lump you in with the millions of other sites that look just like yours and move on to something else.
As you can see, the benefits of having a professional design can be great, especially if your website is geared towards building your business. Outlined in this post are 7 different reasons why it’s beneficial to have a professional web design.
1. Added exposure through CSS galleries
One of the benefits of having a professional design created is that you’re able to submit the website to galleries around the web and have it showcased to audiences that you would have otherwise never been in front of. This brings in added traffic, potential clients and also adds to your authority by being talked about across the web and showcased as a professional website.
2. Your first impressions do count
Like I discussed in the beginning of this article, your first impression made is an important one – and a professional website design is definitely going to leave a better first impression that one that looks as if it was put together by your cousins neighbor who is 12 and just got his first PC.
3. Highlight your expertise with ease
With a professional website design, you’re able to showcase the things you do best – if you’re a designer, the design itself showcases your skills and if you’re a writer, you’re able to utilize a great design to highlight areas you excel at – maybe setting up a call to action box integrated into the design that lets people know what you do and how they can hire you. This would be much better than just having a site slopped together with no real direction.
4. Better design + more eyes = More sales
With your killer design, you’re attracting visitors from all over the web – they want to sit & stare at the beautiful website design you’ve got on display and then, out of nowhere, they’re going to get the urge to pull their credit card out of their pockets and buy tons of products from you. Well, it might not happen exactly like that, but a good design that brings in more visitors is definitely going to have some of that trickle into your sales.
5. Less bugs and cross browser compatibility
If you hire someone who is great with IE6 but has yet to hear about the fact that IE7 and IE8 are out, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome are all web browsers and they’re severely behind the times, how do you expect them to make sure that your website is accessible to the visitors of your site? A professional web designer will ensure that your website is clearly viewable on all major browsers, thus giving you the ability to keep your professional appearance up in front of everyone viewing your site, even those who are viewing in the less-than-popular browsers (IE6).
6. Reduce your maintenance time greatly
With a professional website design, the time you actually have to spend cleaning things up and making sure everything is up to day drops drastically, giving you more time to focus on the things that matter most – traffic, sales and increased visibility. The majority of the time, your design will not even have to be touched for a year or two – until you’re ready for an updated look, at which time you can contact your original designer to give you a face lift, keeping your hands free to, again, make more sales and run your business.
7. Increased search engine visibility
Some people may not believe it, but the benefits of a professional web design also trickle into your search engine rankings and visibility. For starters, a professional web designer will ensure the code markup is clean and easy to read – great for spiders who crawl your page. The other increase of search visibility comes from all of those links and the added exposure your website design gets across the web – design blogs regularly feature the awesome designs they find across the web and the new clients you bring in will feature a link back to your site at the bottom of their site, increasing your back links (this is something you’d have to make sure your clients are OK with – I know from my business that 9 times out of 10 they’re fine with it).
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