5 tips on flintshire
Web Design - Visitors Don't Read
When you are designing a website or your thinking of getting a web site created, remember that vistors rarely read a page, they simply scan it.
So it's important to ensure that your message you are conveying on your web site is clear and your 'call to action' is obvious. Web design is very important, but usability is also key to a successful web site.
SiteOne of Flintshire says: You have got seven seconds to make an impression!
Web Design in Firefox, Tweak for IE
When designing a website never use Internet Explorer to test your pages with. Allways use Firefox.
There are two main reasons for this:
1. Firefox renders more closely to the w3c web standards than IE does (by miles)
2. Firefox has lots of neat plugins to help you test your designs (Firebug for one)
Once you have tested that your web design is perfect in Firefox you should then tweak or hack your CSS to work for IE. Firefox is definitely the web designer's friend.
We all know IE is a law unto itself so don't be a slave to it. Design your website to the correct standards first - Always!
Use Social Network to get your website indexed on Google - SEO Tip
First of all never use Google's add site link to submit your web site to Google. It will take ages to work.
It is best to place a backlink on an exitisting web site for Google to spider naturally. If the site is spidered regularly then all the better.
However, for fast results submit the site to DIgg, StumbleUpon etc and tweet about the site adding the full URL. You could be indexed on Google within hours...
Then, your new web design can be found by millions!!!
Which Hosting Account?
If you had asked me that question a year ago I would not have hesitated. It would have been Windows Server using IIS. However, in my view things are changing. More and more I am turning to Apache and Linux. Why? Well mainly it's my recent love affair with Wordpress which definitely works better under Apache in my view, mainly because of Permalinks.
IIS cannot handle url rewriting out of the box and does not work with .htaccess natively. So you need some form of plug in/add on.
So, if you need to rewrite your urls (especially for Wordpress), then I would always go down the Apache road. However, if you really need to use Windows based servers then you can always install URL Rewrite Module 2.0 (for IIS7) or the brilliant Helicon Isapi Rewrite 3 or their new Helicon Jet packages which are both under $100!
I have to say Helicon have a fantastic support service and will help you on any Regex writing problems you have with their package.
Web Design - Image Optimisation
Now that Google is looking at download and rendering speeds to rank pages, it’s worth thinking about what you can do to improve your website's rendering speed. SEO now seems to cover every aspect of a web design!
There's a plethora of things you can do to address this issue but the primary and probably the easiest thing you can do is optimise your images. Photoshop has got to be the worst program to use, especially as it always seems to add extra metadata that is totally unnecessary.
One program I have found that does a fantastic job or reducing the file size and remove metadata too is JPEG & PNG Stripper - http://www.steelbytes.com/?mid=30
It's free and fast and all you have to do is drag and drop your images into its window and hay presto it’s done!
You can reduce your image file sizes by 75% by using this neat little program.
One final tip. No matter what program you use to optimise your images, BACK THEM UP FIRST! Just to be on the safe side.
