Web Design & Web Development Blog

as imagined by consumers

1. “My friends brother’s can build me a website – everyone is a web designer”

Sometimes this is the case, when that person is a web designer by trade. It’s funny how something simple like changing a navigation to something more usable can improve a websites conversion rate by a mile. Sure, I can build my own house if I got a book or two, but would I really want to live in it?

2. “I have FrontPage/DreamWeaver, therefore I am my own web designer.”

On the same note as the previous one. These are just tools, just like a sledgehammer, but does that mean you can carve a work of art? Can you chisel out the fine details by hand (edit HTML code). I still encounter several designers who use such tools, but still cannot make a simple hyperlink by hand, let alone diagnose bigger HTML and CSS problems.

3. “A great web design is cheap, and is a commodity these days”

This is true, if you want a cheap site. You get what you pay for still rings true, but be sure to shop around for a good web designer. The cheaper the site, the better your product, business, sales, marketing, persuasion copy needs to be. Great web designers are getting more difficult to find these days amongst the sea of wannabes.

4. “Moving a little box, or other changes, on my website should only take a few minutes”

Structural changes can take the longest. Plan, outline, wireframe, your site before filling it in. Then once it’s filled in, avoid the layout constantly.

5. “It looks so easy, so it must be easy”

A web design is not a Microsoft Word document. Browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc…) are all different and confused amongst themselves, and our job is to make all of them work, while be limited within huge constraints.

6. “I saw this other site that looks and acts great, so I can have the same thing, right?”

Sure, but would you know the difference between a $1,000 website and a $100,000 website? Most people wouldn’t. Sure you can have anything you want, just be prepared to pay for it. I have lost track of how many people wanted a site like Nike.com or some dynamic, drag-and-drop, t-shirt factory website; oh, and all for under $1,000.

7. “I want my site a certain way, and my way is right”

Again, no. If you hire a very experienced web designer, chances are they know more than you do. I have seen numerous great websites go down the tubes when the client wanted to change it. If your web designer says that your ecommerce website does not need a splash page, and that it will only reduce the number of people that buy from you, then believe him.

9. “My website will be finished on time and on budget”

Web design is like anything else. Unforeseen delays, challenges, and changes are all possible and probably quite likely.

10. “We web designer is on-call, can make changes on demand at my will”

Especially not true if it’s an independent freelancer. Typically, keeping them on the phone to make changes while you dictate them only works for smaller changes.

10. Every website is created equal

There is a lot of short and long term value that can go into a website design that a consumer should be aware of as they shop around.  A custom, high quality website design is often needed, while other times it’s not (for the ultra-budget minded).

I will detail some of these out in upcoming posts.

Usable? Maybe somewhat. Intuitive? Absolutely not. What good is a site if it is not intuitive? A site that stops at usability is really only good if your site visitors are robots, search engines, zombies, and other non-humans.  As a little background, Grokdot discusses how usability fits in the larger scope of your website’s ability to convert users. Here’s the list of why useit.com is so un-usable (has someone already registered unuseit.com?:

1. There is no condensed organization of site information. Everything feels so loosely connected, that I don’t know were to begin.  Thats why they invented categories, tags, heirarchies, etc…

2. Lack of clear boundaries between sub-sections on the main page

3. Overly busy, and weird layout homepage–hard to know where to start because lack of visual queues.

3. The lack of clearly organized data in a time-oriented fashion, as you might find on a normal website. News should be much more organized in time/archived fashion

4.  Page width so wide (totally fluid) that I can’t keep track of the line I am reading on.

5.  No images as to break up monotony, or just make it more readable or convey meaning.  It’s a website; not “War & Peace.”

6.   A site search which makes it difficult to find what you are looking for (more above the fold please).

7.  The lack of a clear summary, purpose, goal of what his site is about (neither short nor long).

8.  Lack of a sitemap.  Even with 600 pages indexed in Google, he could make a bare minimum attempt to create some sort of sitemap.  It’s a standard thing these days.

9. So much talk about himself that it’s hard to find anything usable.

10.  If I missed other points, I apologize as I had difficulting using his site to find these type of problems.

He is most famous probably cause he was the first to start talking about it, while spending more time promoting himself to tell others how great he is, than on anything else, and in fact, there weren’t a ton of people/businesses directly competing against him for quite some time it seems, so no one else had the opportunity to call themselves experts.

Jakob.  It’s time to get with the times and go “Usability 2.0,” and to stop making obscure statements like “The letter ‘C’ is 95% bad”

If you agree with me, link to this article, Sphinn it, or Digg it.

Let’s vote for a new website design usability hero of the web (leave comments below).

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update
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No Mr. Nielson, I will not come work for you, and I will not remove this post. I am not for sale.

As well as for redirecting the non-www version of your site to the www version in the easiest and best way.

There are other ways to do it, such as through your domain registrar, but they create a variety of problems.

This article applies to Linux/Unix/FreeBSD hosting (which is the majority of hosting these days), and is written for the mildly technical, to webmasters.

Lets say you own a domain: MySiteRocks.com

but because you think people will mis-spell “Rocks” you also own: MySiteRox.com

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT

It helps the search engines and real site visitors in a BIG way. Want to create a nightmare of a problem for search engines? Then ignore what I am about to say.

THE PROBLEMS

Lets look at it from a visitors perspective first.

In most cases, this redirection is setup so that when the visitor types in the mis-spelled version of the domain, they stay on that misspelled version as they navigate your site. In other words, their address bar looks something like this: http://www.mysiterox.com/contact.html
What would be best is if the address in the visitors address bar, automatically updated (redirected) to the correct spelling of the site. Not only because they will learn how to go the correct website in the future, but also because if they sent you an email to the misspelled version, you would not ever receive it. It also decreases the chances of other more complicated problems related to the website as well. I see these problems constantly.

Now, let’s look at it from a search engine perspective. This applies both to extra domains if you have them, as well as something you should do even for a single domain. And that is to have:

http://mygreatsiterocks.com

automatically redirect to

http://www.mysitereallyrocks.com

You could even do it the other way around (www points to non-www version) although that is uncommon to do it that way. Search engines are a bit dumb sometimes, and they seem to sometimes fail to realize that those two addresses are indeed the same site, believe it or not. Its a problem called cannonicalization.

The solution:

You need to setup what is known as a 301 permanent redirect. There are other redirect types out there that are bad for a site when it comes to search engines (generally speaking) such as a 302 temporary redirect or a Javascript redirect. This redirect not only applies to extra domains if you have them, but also redirecting the non-www version of your site to the www version.

Regarding the extra domains, some hosting companies will have tools to do this, but it is common for them to use what is known as a ServerAlias directive in your hosting configuration file. This will have alternate domains that you want pointed to your main domain.

After you have ensured that is the case, then you can create and upload an .htaccess file in your site’s document root if there’s not already one there. Your document root is the folder on your hosting account that contains your website files and is often called public_html, www, or something similar.

In that .htaccess file, you can add this:

RewriteEngine On
# REDIRECTS NON-WWW TO WWW VERSION OF SITE
# AND REDIRECTS ALTERNATE ALIASED DOMAINS (SUCH AS TYPOS) TO REAL DOMAIN.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mysiterocks\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=""
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mysiterocks.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This will not only redirect non-www to the www version of your site, but also redirect other domains you have pointed to this website.  Note:  This uses what is technically known as mod_rewrite, and is a feature of Apache web server.
By the way, if you are placing links to your site from other places on your site, or getting links from other sites, always use the same link. e.g. If you are usinghttp://www.mysiterocks.com then always use the www. Also don’t put index.html at the end unless thats how your homepage appears. You can create a rule to redirect index pages if you want, but I have rarely seen a real need to.

How many web design and development companies would dare claim this?

SEO Dark Lord - 100%

Are you an SEO Expert?

I did have to look up a couple obscure answers such as why the Bluefield directory was majorly penalized, and what the most popular search engine in Korea was, but there was not a single question that pertained to real-world and generally accepted search engine optimization development that I couldn’t answer answer. I think some of the questions are utterly useless such as who invented PageRank (although I did know the answer).

Because of a factual error in #62, my disagreement with some of their statements (I have evidence), and the vagueness of a couple of questions, I did do it a second time–but it shows that I am willing to understand other viewpoints of SEO. I can say I learned something new that may come in useful: the robots-nocontent tag. In fact, I would not trust anyone that claims to have gotten a 100% score the first time around (especially since a lot of the questions are gray, and the factual error that exists). I got a 90% the first time, but again, I still can’t honestly believe they have volumes of evidence to some of their claims–no one does in SEO.

I do think they should:

1. Stick to more factual or widely accepted elements of SEO, instead of their opinion.
2. Stick to more relevant optimization questions (stay on target)
3. Expand the test with more questions
4. Offer questions with a way to prioritize the answers from most to least important (e.g. what the most most important factors…
5. Offer community feedback,giving credit to those with higher trust/credibility
6. Be more precise in writing their questions and answers, and other factors that make it more about test taking skills than about SEO
7. Reduce the double-negative writing in some of their questions such as “How will this not help your site not rank?”
8. Perhaps offer a premium (paid) SEO test, with free form answers.

Anyways, if you are a web design firm, search engine optimization company, or someone who takes SEO seriously, test yourself and post your results.

Or why it’s maybe not best to hire your brothers friend after all

It’s going to begin by reviewing their portfolio, but even their portfolio is not going to tell you about all the bad designs, or designs that were never properly completed. Simply asking them is unlikely to get you a real answer either.

When hiring a custom site designer, call around and ask a half-dozen website designers in your area. If you find prices from other companies that simply don’t fit in, be cautious. The ol’ adage still applies “If it’s too good to be true….”

You may even find a friend or a student willing to try it out. These sometimes work out, but truth is, you will have no real assurance that they really know what they are doing if your site’s goal is to drive business, sales, reputation, etc… This is much more true when dealing with anything beyond an informational, or brochure type of site; but even a great brochure site needs to have a purpose, unless you need it just to make you feel good about yourself. Which ones of these apply to your informational site?

• create awareness
• capture interest
• fuel desire for prospective new business
• generate qualified leads
• be marketable through channels such as search engines
• educate
• maintain contact with and inform current clients
• be easy and affordable to maintain after its complete
• be engaging

Here are a few real-world examples:

1. For example, there was a company that had an informational site with the ultimate goal of using the store locater feature. After a complete overhaul, this goal (or sometimes referred to as “conversion rate”) increased by 50 times. I am sure they had a lot more business as a result at their brick-and-mortar store fronts.
2. I have seen sites built beautifully using Flash (usually un-beknownst to the site owner) but they were practically impossible to rank in the search engines the way they wanted to; nor could they simply hire another site designer to ever edit it for them since they did not have the original Flash files. This is really bad if you need to switch designers as it may force a complete redesign.
3. I am not a trained as a custom site designer, and I built a site once for a family member. After a redesign later on, the conversion rate, and therefore sales, tripled. Yet more proof that hiring a great custom site designer can really help an online business.

In my next post, I will cover some of the questions you should ask when trying to find a potential custom web designer

And why it may or may not be for you

When all is said and done, a custom web site design definitely costs more than a template website design. But, does your site really need a custom website design? Maybe not. For example, if you scan the 100 top converting retail websites, you will see that most of them are virtually identical in many regards. Some are literally mirror images of other web sites. You would think they were all using templates. And trust me, those companies spend a lot more on brand recognition than smaller companies can afford to.

Perhaps this standardized look and feel is slightly less common once you venture out of ecommerce, but even then, in all the years I have been involved in custom website design, I have yet to find a real study that shows template sites are less effective than complete original custom web site designs.

A custom website design can add originality and enhance a site that depends more heavily on its brand image.  Does it equate to more dollars? I have not seen many cases yet. More important factors are questions like does the site drive the visitor to action, and can they accomplish the goal with the greatest ease possible?  Resturcturing of websites, or their layout has been shown to be very important in driving sales.

I am not trying to steer you away from a custom web site design, but I know that is is not always a necessity for every company that is in its infant stages.  I can count numerous, insanely great looking sites (that you probably know) that simply do not make money.  They have much bigger things to worry about.  Of course, for most well-established businesses, spending $1,500 - $7,000 on a decent custom website design is very good option for them.

I am actually aware of numerous cases people I know are buying “custom web site designs” built, only to have a slightly modified template delivered to them (unbeknownst to them).  I’ll cover that another day though…