Posts Tagged web development

Web Design – Planning Is Crucial For Success

Posted by amm on Wednesday, 27 October, 2010

Every business aspires to showcase itself on the internet. Website design and development is a difficult process that tends to be stressful at times. Following are some tips to get web development projects concluded on time and within a desirable budget. To know about things to consider that are sure to prove useful in creation of new website as well as enhancement of an existing one, read on.

Meticulous Groundwork

A detailed groundwork is a prerequisite for successful web site development. Important decisions include the number of pages that the website should have, or what should the graphics look like, etc should be taken in advance.

These decisions can be categorized into two buckets. Those that include matters related to the site visitors and those that include issues relevant to the company whose site is to be designed.

The audience related decisions include the identification of the target audience, ways to market the site to them, their areas of interest, the kind of content that would drive them to the site regularly, ways to make them interact with the site and so on.

The company related decisions include the goal of the website, whether it is to educate the user or to sell something, to entertain or to offer services; where the web content would be sourced from, how frequently would the site be updated, and the yardsticks for performance measurement.

A great website design and development project must include the above mentioned pointers during its initial stages. These prove to be immensely useful during the subsequent phases of the project. Based on this, the developers may shape further strategies that may include introduction of interactive formats on the website such as live chats, blogs, forums, videos, animation, registration forms or database interfaces.

Customized Website Design Templates

Most web designing companies generally offer attractive web templates. These can be used as it is to create quick, easy and affordable websites. If they choose, the clients are able to determine the basic website design along with minor modifications that might include font sizes, color schemes, etc. However, these templates allow limited flexibility with only a minor scope for modification. Quite often the photos or the logos need to be carefully created keeping in mind the height to width ration and resolution.

These templates however, are of great help to novice designers due to their easy-to-use modules and guide them step by step. If yours is a sophisticated project, it is highly recommended to invest in custom web design for better results.

Custom web designs offer way more opportunities to website developers than template designs. Design firms that are well versed with these find it easier to unleash their potential while at the same time, keeping into consideration the all-round requirements of the clients. The website should be able to offer the basic purpose of its creation. To generate more traffic to the site, it should be simple, user-friendly and appealing.

A Perfect Blend of Attractiveness and Ease of Use

A website must be attractive and easy-to-use in terms of both, designs and technology. For this purpose, expertise of talented web designers must be sought during its creation or up gradation. A site should not only be equipped with necessary keywords and meta tags for optimization for search engines and web crawlers, but also be pleasing to look at. A proper combination of beauty, ease of use and search engine optimization is a prerequisite for an effective website. Daljeet Sidhu is the author of this article.

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What Every Web Designer Needs To Know About Site Performance

Posted by amm on Friday, 20 August, 2010

WebSpeed Optimization Overview

Since Google’s recent announcement that web page load times are now a ranking factor web designers and developers have been required to pay additional attention to site performance considerations. Here are just a handful of considerations that today’s responsible web developers need to keep in mind.

Most of todays web pages are made up of a collection of components including CSS files, javascript, images and often movies. Minimising the number of elements and therefore the number of HTTP requests necessary to render a page is crucial for fast page load times.

Around 80% of the end user’s response time is consumed in waiting for all of the page elements to download. This waiting time is know to cause visitors to leave an ecommerce site and visit a faster loading competitor. Using a content delivery network to serve the static content, including javascript and CSS files, can significantly reduce this time. A content delivery network is basically a collection of servers setup in various geographic locations to efficiently deliver content to users.

As web designs become increasing complex, richer and more engaging to the end user they need an ever increasing number of components in order to render, such as Flash and javascript. On a first visit a number of HTTP requests are made in order to download these elements. If these are cached then there is less to download on a subsequent visit and this can be controlled using the ‘Expires’ header. This is commonly used for images but can be effectively used for all components including Flash and stylesheets.

Compression is another technique that every web developer should be using. GZIP is supported by around 90% of todays browsers and it can reduce the size of many elements by as much as 70%.

There are lots of additional techniques that are both good for search engine optimisation of web pages and will also improve the user experience. For example: stylesheets should be located at the top of pages and scripts at the bottom; both javascript and CSS files should be minified; and javascript and CSS should be in external files; also, reducing the number of DNS lookups and redirects is always a good idea. Good luck.

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