5 Tips for an improved User perceptive on Your Site

Any good web publisher knows that it isn’t just content that keep readers reading and visitors returning. Interface design can be just as important as quality content. A bad website design can drive your audience away or seriously erode their confidence, just as they’re coming through the door.

Without some sound design tactics you end up putting a lot of work into publishing for maybe a couple of unique visitors a day. If you are attempting to get opt-ins and generate revenue from your site and you miss some key design tips you are going to suffer and your ROI will go down the drain.

5 Design Mistakes to Avoid

1. Too much advertising
this is something that seems inherent in so many designs, but should be obvious. If you clutter your site with advertising (in particular AdSense type ads) no one is going to stay long enough to find your relevant content. Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t sites out there that litter their site with advertising and get away with it — like GoDaddy. If you can claim the amount of traffic and exposure that they get, then the best of luck. But most can’t say that.

2. Placing Your Opt-in Form on the Right
statistically, this results in lower numbers of opt-ins. Most cultures in the world read from left to right. So, naturally the first place the eye wants to rest on a site is the top, left corner. This is where your opt-in should sit. It will be the first thing most people see and they will be more apt to fill it out.

3. No SEO on Images, Flash Elements, and Other Media
If you view the source code of a site, many do not contain titles or descriptions for their various media. These are wonderful opportunities to place additional keywords without overloading your content on your site. Many sites don’t even have an “alt” on their media which when you mouse over it, shows a phrase or text.

Again, these are free opportunities for keyword placements. Spiders don’t pick up images, flash files and a lot of other media. They cannot read their content. But adding alts, titles and descriptions you are able to give spiders code side content to read in those locations, upping your search results.

4. Too Many Keywords
For some reason, when it comes to keywords, people think, “The more the better!” This is incorrect. Search Engines will actually “flag” your site as overloaded. It comes across almost like duplicate content when you have multiple phrases in your keywords containing the same word. Most marketing guru’s will recommend about 7-9 well researched keywords.

5. Too Much Javascript, Too Many iFrames
Once again, more is not necessarily better. Both javascript and iframes take considerable amounts of time to load in comparison to a 72 dpi jpeg. There are sites all over the net that are loaded with one or both of these and by the time they finish loading you have taken the dog out, made a coffee, and stopped by the bathroom.

It has been proven that the average internet user decides in a matter of seconds if they will stay on your site or not. If it takes 20-30 seconds to load, you are probably losing half of your visitors almost immediately. Check your stats for bounce rates, exit pages and other data and see.

Source:cmswire

Benefits of Having a Content Management System (CMS) based Website

As the internet is maturing the existence and Web applications are emerging, web development is becoming essential for proper growth of business on internet. Web development make your work easy to be done on the internet and gives some lots and lots of advantages with high increase in revenue as with web development you can hit the international market as your target market.

A website is important if you are looking for an online presence. But once your website is up, it s crucial that you manage the content in an organized way. You will need to make many changes on your site. This is where E-Commerce Websites packages, OS commerce, Content Management System, CMS in short, come into play. Content Management System (CMS): This system is the core of web development and used to manage contents of a web site, providing the facilities for the creation, modification, archiving and removal of information resources from an organized repository usually saved in a database.

This tool allows you to maintain your site. CMS is a web application designed to manage the content on the website. Most companies, who put their contents on their sites, use it.

CMS is extremely crucial to the success of any website. It helps creation, storage, management and publishing of all information in an organized way. In short, it streamlines all the data in a consistent and accessible way.

Here are some reasons why your website needs a CMS:

1. Content updation on desire : Your website needs to be updated, as nobody wants to read stale content. With CMS you can update your web content in no time. It allows you to create, edit, organize, manage, and publish contents (be it graphics, image, documents, etc.) very easily.

2. Technical Knowledge not Necessary : CMS is for you. No HTML or programming skills required, which means you don t need to be technically sound to update the content. All technical details are handled by CMS. It allows you, your colleagues, and non-technical staff, content authors to update the contents.

3. No Time restriction : Don t let your site go without updates due to time constraint. CMS will allow you to carry out changes when they re needed. This is important if your business relies highly on the website. CMS usually simplifies the process required to post content.

4. Reduce Website Maintenance Cost : As mentioned before, you don t need to be tech-savvy to update contents. This not only reduces the site maintenance costs, but also lessens the need of website administration staff. The IT team can use their time more productively.

5. Archive Your Web Content : Archiving content is much easier, since a CMS uses a database to store, manage, and retrieve content. New contents get updated and older ones get stored. You can always revert back when the need arises.

6. Build Site Navigation : Content Management System navigation is usually dynamically driven, which means that future updates can be made without losing all the contents. Menus are generated automatically based on the database content.

7. Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) : If you want to drive the website s traffic based on keywords and phrases, then CMS can prove to be a good option. Many CMSs have built-in options that include keywords, meta tags, hyperlinks, descriptions, etc. These can be automatically generated from the site s content, resulting in improved SEO.

10 Good Things to follow in Web Design

1. Place your name and Website logo design (logo) on every page and make the logo a link to the home page (except on the home page).
2. Provide search if the site has more than 100 pages.
3. Write clear-cut and simple headlines and page titles that clearly give details what the page is about and that will make sense when read out-of-context in a search engine results listing.
4. Organize the page to facilitate scanning and help users ignore large chunks of the page in a single look: for example, use grouping and subheadings to break a long list into several smaller units.
5. Instead of cramming everything about a product or topic into a single, infinite page, use hypertext to structure the content space into a starting page that provides an overview and several secondary pages that each focus on a specific topic. The goal is to allow users to avoid wasting time on those subtopics that don’t concern them.
6. Use product photos, but avoid cluttered and bloated product family pages with lots of photos. Instead have a small photo on each of the individual product pages and link the photo to one or bigger ones that show as much detail as users need. This varies depending on type of product. Some products may even need zoom able or rotatable photos, but reserve all such advanced features for the secondary pages. The primary product page must be fast and should be limited to a thumbnail shot.
7. Use relevance-enhanced image reduction when preparing small photos and images: instead of simply resizing the original image to a tiny and unreadable thumbnail, zoom in on the most relevant detail and use a combination of cropping and resizing.
8. Use link titles to provide users with a preview of where each link will take them, before they have clicked on it.
9. Ensure that all important pages are accessible for users with disabilities, especially blind users.
10. Do the same as everybody else: if most big websites do something in a certain way, then follow along since users will expect things to work the same on your site.

Uncertainty of IT security and Internet User

According to a recent study Online Wellbeing Survey by F-Secure revealed that even users from US, Canada, UK, France and Germany don’t feel that their PCs and their email are safe from malware. While most internet users in the US, Canada, the UK, France and Germany have security software installed on their PCs, many remain unsure about IT security, according to the study.

Figures produced by F-Secure suggest that many consumers are unsure that their email is free of malware and other threats, while few people realise how frequently their security software’s antivirus definitions need updating.

On average, just under one in five (19 per cent) of respondents had an understanding that antivirus definitions had to be updated on a regular basis the whole time the day.

“It’s concerning to see that so many consumers believe their antivirus definitions are up to date while not understanding how regularly they need to be updated,” stated Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer at F-Secure.

However, research recently published by Get Safe Online suggested that internet users in the UK are becoming increasingly aware of the need for IT security, with more than 90 per cent of people and an even greater proportion of small businesses having installed anti-virus software on their computers.

The users from Germany were most well-informed though; even though they were most leery of E-Commerce websites packages and online banking, they understood best of all respondents how often antivirus definitions need to be updated.

27 Free Tools for Webmasters

Free and commercial software recommendations for FTP, image editing, and website development, as well as links to online tools to help with designing and promoting your website.

Software - Free

• AceFTP Free - Free FTP program.
• FTP Surfer - Another free FTP program.
• Google Toolbar - Integrates a Google search box into your browser, along with other useful features like a pop-up blocker and a PageRank estimator.
• PhotoPlus - Free image editing software. Great for resizing photos and creating graphics.
• The GIMP - Free image editing program. Powerful but a bit of a learning curve.
• Xenu’s Link Sleuth - Great little free program to check for broken links on your entire site.

Online Tools - Design

• Color Scheme Generator - Find triads, tetrads, and analogical color schemes. Produces normal or web-safe colors.
• ColorMatch - Create color themes based on a single starting color.
• EasyRGB - Tool to find color harmonies.
• FavIcon from Pics - Make a quick favicon.ico file from an image. Put this file in your root directory so when people bookmark your site they see your logo.
• Lorem Ipsum Generator - Create realistic dummy text to help you lay out a page.
• Lynx Viewer - See your site as it looks to search engines with this text-only browser emulator.
• WhatTheFont - Identifies a font based on a sample image, provided it is large enough and of good quality.
  

Online Tools - Promotion

• Link Popularity Checker - Check your link popularity on several major search engines and compare your results with other websites.
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool - Find the popularity of keyword phrases. An invaluable tool for SEO.
• Submit page to Google - Add your webpage for inclusion.
• Submit page to Yahoo - Add your site to Yahoo’s search engine.
  

Scripts and Programming

• Hot Scripts - A huge repository of free and commercial scripts written in many languages, including CGI/Perl and PHP.
• Master.com - A suite of free remotely hosted tools - a site search engine, a downtime checker, and more.
  

Stock Photos

• iStockphoto - Very inexpensive stock photos. You can also become a contributor and get free downloads.
• Stock.xchng - Free stock photos, many of very high quality.
  

Online Tools - Misc

• Check Domain - A simple and straightforward whois.
• Copyscape - Find sites that are copying your content.
• DNS Stuff - A compilation of many DNS lookup tools.
• Quick Character Counter - Calculates how many characters are in a block of text. Neat condensing function.
• Remote Website Tester - Useful if your site is down - sees if it’s just you or if another location cannot connect either. Displays the HTML of your site if it can connect.
• Wayback Machine - See how a domain looked in the past, if it was archived.

Professional Directories

• Portland Web Guide - Proud to Be PDX
• Portland, Oregon Web Design Services - from Marketingtool.com