website - Tag Archive

Tips on website design

22 Replies Rob Boirun

A notepad and a pencilWeb redesigns can be a huge undertaking. There are many things to keep in mind as you approach redesigning your or another website. Here are some of the basics of good web design to help keep your focus where it belongs.

User Experience

At the forefront of any web redesign should be the overall user experience desired. How do you want people to interact with your website? What do you want them to take away from your website? These are just a few starter questions to ask yourself as you go about planning the redesign. The easiest thing to do in order to answer these questions is to think about what you like about your favourite websites and what you dislike.

Design Aesthetics

The best designs are often the simplest designs, and keeping things clean is more inviting than a cluttered page. Cohesiveness in design throughout the site is key here. The content delineates one page from the next; not a whole new pallet of colours. Clean, modern designs are also easier for the user, making them more likely to interact with information you have posted, whether through a blog post or messaging forums.

Ditch the Gimmicks

This is not the time to go overboard and incorporate everything you have learned in your experience with web design and cram it all into one page. Ditch the shadow boxes and the splash pages, and make your page more inviting by making it easy for users to use and interact with the site.

SEO Friendliness

Incorporating aspects of SEO into your site’s design and content is very easy to do, but it has to be done right. Everyone wants their web page to ping higher on search engine results, which is easily achievable. Just make sure you are not taking away from the site content at the same time.

Check the Coding

Finally launching the web page after a redesign can be both an exciting and nerve-racking experience. After all the work that was put in to choosing the colours and overall aesthetic look, as well as the content, you want the launch to go off without a hitch. Nothing dashes the excitement of a site launch than to spend most of launch day fixing broken codes. Before you make it public, check your coding. Then double check it just to be sure.

User experience, above all, is the most important element. Having a website that users can easily use will keep users visiting your site regularly and will keep new traffic flowing in regularly. Keep the user experience in mind, and all the other necessary elements for good web design will fall easily into place.

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Daily Deal Market Ripe For Consolidation

2 Replies Angeline

According to Yipit, there are 384 daily deal websites operating in North America that it knows about. This number is almost certainly far higher once you consider all the smaller sites that are not able to run deals each and every day.

So is the market too saturated? Is the industry doomed to fail because there are too many competitors competing for an ever shrinking supply of customers?

In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone and one of the biggest communications companies of the time immediately dismissed it with the famous quote:

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

That company was Western Union and the lack of foresight for this new technology meant they were never able to compete in the profitable telecommunications industry – an industry which they had previously dominated with their telegram service.

Between 1894 and 1904 over six thousand telephone companies went in to business and from there mergers, acquisitions and closures happened to consolidate the industry to just a handful of companies today.

In 1939 there were 132 railroads in America, today that number is just seven as mergers, acquisitions and closures meant huge consolidation in that industry.

An early 1900's American train

The sort of train that powered America in the early 1900’s

In 2005 there were a huge number of social networks available, Myspace, Orkut, Bebo, Friendster and Classmates to name but a few. Today? We have one site, Facebook as the market consolidated.

In 2007 there was just one daily deal website worth mentioning which was Woot, a hugely popular and profitable website that continues to grow and increase its revenues. After the launch of Groupon it spawned off thousands of clones around the world, over 400 of them in American alone.

Since 2009 there have been 72 acquisitions in the daily deal industry, 44 coming in the last 6 months alone. Groupon have gone for an expansion by acquisition business model with at least 8 buys under its belt, Google too is eyeing up the industry with several acquisitions in the daily deal market to expand its Google Offers programme.

There are plenty of other acquisitions too, LivingSocial have bought at least seven daily deal sites and BuyWithMe have purchased 6 daily deal sites before they too have been purchased.

So just like other new inventions and markets spawned hundreds of clones, it might look like the daily deal market is in decline as the number of sites decreases but there is still a very healthy merger and acquisition process taking place as the deal market looks to consolidate and become profitable.

How to choose a domain name and a host

20 Replies Christopher Roberts

If you want to set up a website or a forum, it can be a process which takes a lot of time. Setting up a blog is usually a bit quicker thanks to blogging platforms, of which there are many free ones on offer.

If you are self coding your blog like I did with my old technology blog, it will probably take just as long as a website to set up. However if you are going to use a blogging system to do all the hard work for you, like Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Movable Type, Drupal etc. setting up your blog is likely to be a lot quicker.

WordPress prides itself on its famous ‘5-minute installation‘ but before you get there, and this is the same for any type of site, you need to choose a URL (domain name) and host.

The Official WordPress LogoSome places offer you free URL’s, like WordPress(.com) and Google Sites, however they often restrict the control you have over your site – for example you may not be able to have ads on the site, or you may not be able to edit themes.

Assuming you want to have a unique URL/web address, then you have the challenge of choosing your URL, and where to host it.

Deciding upon a URL

Choosing a URL can be very hard, however my best advice is to go with your brand. If you are setting up a computer review blog, and it is called ‘ComBlog’, then try to find a URL with ComBlog in it.

Some people would say work out what keywords you want to show up in the search results for, and choose your domain taking those into account, e.g. freecomputerreviews.net; yes such domains may help you in the short term, however once you are established, I think that a branded domain is always best.

Going back to the ‘ComBlog’ example, domains like ComBlog.com and ComBlog.info would be great for your site, as they are short – therefore easy to remember and simple enough to spell.

The type of hosting

The next step is choosing what type of hosting you want. Do you want Windows or Linux? If you just want to run a simple website, I would suggest a Windows powered domain, however if you want to run something like WordPress or many other blogging platforms, you will need a Linux server.

Your host

After that you have to choose who is going to host your site. If you have a server at home/work and that is running 24/7 (as if it goes down, so will your site if it is hosted there) then you could host it there. However for more bandwidth, space and security, you probably want to get someone else to do it.

The problem is, who to choose! You could go to individual hosts websites, and try and work out which one is best for you. Alternatively, you could go to a web hosting comparison site, like Web Hosting Search. Such sites can offer you a very detailed overview of different hosts and what they can provide. They also contain users opinions – helping you further to choose the right company.

One useful tool that such sites offer (specifically Web Hosting Search) is a WordPress hosting comparison. This can help you find hosts that offer WordPress hosting – if that is what you are looking for.

Things to check

Before choosing your host, look at what they are offering you. Are your emails free, and can you have as many addresses as you like (e.g. talk@ComBlog.info, hello@ComBlog.info, John@ComBlog.info etc.)?

Also, how much traffic can your site receive each month? I recommend that you have it unlimited (or as high as possible) as there is nothing worse than your host cutting you off because you are too popular! This happened to Chadrack, owner of WebIncomeJournal.com not so long ago.

Also how reliable is your prospective host? Is your site likely to go offline a lot, or do they have a 0 down-time policy?

Some hosts offer you your domain free if you host it with them, so do look out for offers 🙂

Are you looking to set up a website? What is your advice to those who are, or if you are, is this helpful?