Design Before Code or Horse Before The Cart

I’m always amazed when I meet a website owner who tells me that the first time they saw any version of a new site design was when it was shown to them as a web page. How can this process be helpful to anyone? There will, undoubtedly, be changes to be made—probably extensive and time consuming changes. The programming environment is very inflexible when it comes to big changes in the look and feel of a site.

Software developers have made it very easy to create the layout of a site prior to any actual web programming. Changes are easily and intuitively made. As long as certain guidelines are followed (pertaining to the limitations current browser capabilities), a complete and approved design can be created and then used for making the necessary parts that will become a website. Adobe Systems is the clear industry leader for such software. I use their complete Master Collection of applications. But there are other suitable applications, including many in the ever-growing open source market.

My process always involves client contribution. I show my client design concepts (usually more than one) with the invitation to offer changes and/or suggestions. Then there are other ‘checkpoints’ along the way at which I will show the progress. Ultimately, the collaborative effort can then be converted to web-ready graphics and there will be no surprises upon completion.

I would be happy to apply this process to your website. Contact me for a free consultation.

Standards, Compliance, and Accessibility

If you are the owner of a website, and you care how your site is seen, I encourage you to go through the following steps.

1. On a Windows PC, view your site using Internet Explorer version 7 (26.6% usage), version 6 (20% usage) (you will need to find a computer with IE6 because Microsoft does not allow both versions to co-exist), and Firefox (44.2% usage).
   • does everything look right?
   • turn off javascript and view again (see below)
   • if you have any Flash on your site, disable it and view again
2. On a Macintosh, view your site in Safari, Firefox, and Opera.
   • repeat the steps above

Current browser usage statistics
Current operating system usage statistics
Disable Flash in Internet Explorer 7
Disable Flash in Internet Explorer 6 (USER BE WARNED!)
Disable Javascript

The reason I encourage these steps is because any web developer is responsible for doing these things and much more. Unfortunately, there are many problems which can occur due to browser inconsistencies and user level options. Most site owners are unaware that their site may be broken when viewed within other conditions.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has assembled standards that should be followed for any website to provide a visitor with the best user experience. This includes standards that will allow the hearing and sight impaired to benefit from your content.

If you would like a no-cost evaluation of your site, contact me.

Search Engine Optimization

Whether your site is an online store, an informational site, for social networking, blogging, gaming, or whatever, you probably want people to find you. And usually there is a specific group of people that you want to find you and maybe some kinds of people who you wish would not find you. This is all done through Search Engine Optimization.

The topic is far too large to cover here in a comprehensive way. There are many books written, online advice offered, and businesses specializing in just this area. Large companies have full time staff devoted to improving their ranking with search engines.

Many variables will contribute to your site’s ranking. But there are some basic steps that can be taken to give your site the best chance of being ranked highly.

One of the most important strategies for SEO is what’s known as link popularity or inbound linking. This refers to the number of times that your site’s domain is linked to from another site. The more times that one of the search engines records your domain in its database, the higher the value it places on that domain. But relevancy is important. If your domain is linked from a completely irrelevant site, the spiders are smart enough to figure that out and will not include it.

There are also important strategies which should be used within the programming of your site. This is known as organic SEO. All the spiders look for a sequence of related pieces of information. Things like page name, page title, page description, keywords, headers, image tags, link descriptions, and paragraph text. All these things taken together, provided there is consistency and relevancy among them all, are what the search engines will use when considering the value of your site relative to the criteria that a searcher is using.

Link popularity and organic SEO are techniques that do not cost any more than the initial time to implement. Outside of fee-based strategies, these are the best approaches to getting your site seen by your target audience.

For a no-cost evaluation of the optimization of your site, contact me.

Visitor Tracking

Let’s say you own a retail store. Your observation of the visitors to your store showed that 90% of them walked in through the front door, went directly to one section of the store, looked closely at the bottom shelf or that section, and then walked out. What would you do with that information? You would consider what is on that shelf, in addition to considering why the other sections of your store were not getting any attention. Then you would naturally make some changes.

These observations can be made of the visitors to your site. Most web hosts provide some basic visitor traffic software, usually through a control panel, which you can use to analyze the effectiveness of your site. You can also establish an account with Google Analytics which is a free service and offers detailed data about your site.

These tools can help you analyze your site’s effectiveness. You can determine where visitors are coming from, what search words they are using, what pages they visit and for how long, what time of day, week, and month sees the most traffic, etc. Empowered with the data, you can then make modification to your site, the ways and methods you promote, and other business building strategies.