7 things to be checked before launching a website

April 8th, 2009

There is a long road before bringing a website to the world, but actually launching it is the biggest joy you can imagine. When everything is done, all the pages are made and content is written and it seems like the work is over and you can make your website living, take a time and check few things out. These are things that are frequently forgotten but can affect your initial success.

Links

Make sure all the links in your pages work fine and lead to the correct destinations. Don’t just assume that all the links are working, actually click them.

Spelling

Make sure all the text is written without grammatical errors. Read everything once again yourself and ask someone to read it for you. Poorly written text makes a bad impression, so make sure your users won’t be disappointed.

Cross-Browser Check

Your website may look good in your preferable browser and be a complete disorder in some other browsers or other versions of the one you use. So go and make cross-browser check for your beautiful page. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same at every browser, but everything has to be working and the used has to be sure there are no problems. The most popular browsers are Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Chrome and Opera.

Titles And Meta Data

Page titles are the most important element for SEO, besides the users have to somehow know what the page is exactly. So make sure your page titles are unique for every page and are related to the page content.
Meta description and keyword tags are also important elements for SEO, though for the majority of search engines not that much as titles are. Anyway they may be helpful, thus make a description for every page at your website. Google users will love you for that. ;)

Functionality

Check everything carefully. Contact forms, search functions, shopping baskets and log-in areas are to be checked twice if not thrice. Ask people to do the testing after you did it yourself.

RSS Link

If you have a blog or newsreel at your website make sure you have an RSS feed and that users can find it easily.

Valid Markup

Make sure that all XHTML and CSS used in your website actually adhere to the web standards. Websites with valid markup tend to outrank websites with the invalid one.

Well, that’s it, now your website is all ready so go and launch it finally!
Do you have more items to be checked before you launch a website?

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Posted in General Talk, How To | 1 Comment »

Make sure your website is user-friendly

April 1st, 2009

It is a common knowledge that the Net grows and develops constantly. There are hundreds of websites launched every day, the competition grows and it’s harder and harder to make a visitor stay at a website. Make sure your website usability is good enough to bring comfort to your visitors so they stay at your website longer.

First of all avoid the inconsistent site-wide navigation. Navigation should stay the same throughout the website. Consider it an anchor that assures the user he won’t be lost. Make sure the navigation shows the list of locations to browse your website and the user’s current location.

Avoid registration required to view the site content. Hiding away valuable information won’t bring you more traffic, actually it’ll only frustrate the users and drive them away.

If you still need a registration make sure it isn’t too long. Don’t force your visitors to fill in looooooong forms, no one likes doing an extra job. So remove not necessary things from the form, the optional stuff can be filled out after the registration.

Make your texts easy to scan and read. No one will read a page of bold text, give your user something to focus on. Use pictures, paragraphs, large headlines so the user can easily find that specific thing he’s been looking for.

Make sure your site user can find your contacts if he feels a need to say he likes your website and appreciates your services. You do not have to give your phone number, a contact form will be okay.

All things mentioned above are important, but don’t forget the most essential for your success is the good and interesting content. Give your users what they need and they’ll appreciate your hard work.

What are other things to make a website more user-friendly you would suggest?

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Posted in General Talk, How To | 2 Comments »

Website Layout. Liquid or Fixed?

March 25th, 2009

It’s a long term argument whether a website layout should be liquid or fixed. Each side has hundreds of followers, but the argument doesn’t seem to be settled. So, what are fixed and liquid layouts?

In a fixed width layout each element has a specified size, the web page doesn’t change when the browser window is resized. Your website will look exactly the same on any browser and computer.

In a liquid layout the size of the elements adopts to the browser size and preferences of the user. The web page elements size increases when the screen resolution is larger and decreases when the resolution is smaller.
There naturally are major pros and cons of both fixed and liquid layouts.

Fixed layouts advantages:

* Gives a designer full control over the page display
* Allows you to place images exactly in relation to other elements and type sizes
* Gives the line length that is easy to read
* Predictable default printing behavior

Fixed layouts disadvantages:

* Doesn’t give the user control over the page and text size
* May create a not optimal type size
* May produce large amount of unused window space that may increase the amount of scrolling.

Liquid layout advantages:

* Allows a maximum use of space.
* Gives a user control over the web page and text sizing.
* Allows people with vision problems to easily change the text size to suit their needs with the layout automatically adjusting around the increased size.

Liquid layout disadvantages:

* May produce hard to read line lengths or unreadable text if the screen size is too large or too small.
* May cause problems with default page printing.
* The image size to text proportion may create a less eligible look

So what side of the argument do you take? And what kind of web designs do you prefer to see more?

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Posted in General Talk, How To | 5 Comments »

How to name your website

March 4th, 2009

Now that you are already working on your site design and its overall appearance and feel, have you chosen how to name the website ?

Starting a successful online business requires several important tasks to do, one of the most important among them is choosing a right domain name. The domain name identifies your website just as your name identifies you. To be successful you need people to remember your name so that they can find you easily.
So what is a domain name? Specifically, domain name is an alphanumeric unique name that fingers individual web sites on the Net. It can be up to 67 characters, that can be 26 English letters, numerals 0-9 and hyphens (-).
Note: domain name can contain several hyphens, but can not begin with one.
Domain names have extentions or TLD (Top Level Domain). These are based on the type of organization they are associated with.
Common extentions include:

.org     nonprofit organization
.net     commercial network
.edu     educational institutions
.gov     government agencies
.mil     military
.com     commercial business

There also are additional domain extentions: biz, bz, info, tv etc.

It is a common knowledge that the best domain names are long ago sold, but don’t get upset right away better be creative.

First of all remember that your domain name should be:
- short,
- memorable,
- related to your business,
- hard to misspell

Shorter domain names are easier to type and remember and the possibility of a mistake made is far less, but every rule has an exception. Some long domains can be easier to remember. For example ltspck.com is set of unrelated letters and is difficult to remember, but LayoutsPack.com that stands for ltspck.com is much easier to remember ;) .

You should also consider hyphened names. Along with some disadvantages there are great cons in them. Disadvantages of hyphened domains are:
- Hyphens can be easily forgot when typing a name.
- When a person recommends your website verbally he/she most likely will omit the hyphens in your domain.

Along with these minuses are great pluses:
- Search engines can better distinguish keywords in your domain name
- Your desired non-hyphened name can no longer be available, but the hyphened one most likely will be there. In this way you can get your desired domain name.

Now make a list of the preferred word combinations and start searching for the availability of these domain names. And don’t get upset if the first ones won’t be available. Remember to be creative and success will come to you!

What are the main issues YOU follow when choosing a domain name?

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Posted in General Talk, How To | 5 Comments »

The new great look

February 17th, 2009

For those who haven’t noticed yet – we have new beautiful looks at this blog!
These are only cosmetic changes, there’s nothing major changed.
The colors are now our corporate ones – green and orange. The right sidebar contains tag cloud, recent posts, recent comments, archive and categories, so the navigation should be more comfortable now.

So what do you think about our new looks? Do you find the blog more comfortable now? Is there anything you’d change? Please share your opinion!

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Posted in General Talk | 9 Comments »

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