9 tips on siteone
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!
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!!!
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!
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 - Back Up Your Data
It is a disaster waiting to happen. It's already in the post. But we rarely keep it at the forefront of our minds - data loss. I have to admit that I've been caught out more than once. But never again, I never want to feel that sinking feeling of realisation that everything has gone, never to be seen again.
All my SQL Server data is triple backed up. Twice a day as a SQL backup and nightly as a complete mirror onto another drive as well as running a RAID configuration. This is by no means unusual and this kind of paranoia should be reflected on to management of local files used to design or develop a website.
Here is my regime for keeping my web design data safe:
1. Keep all your files (including psd files, mockup files, raw images and copy) on a USB harddrive. I keep one with me all the time.
2. If you have hosting set up for the website your designing, upload the same files on a 'backup' folder that's below or on the same level as the live public root folder. This way you won't have all your files available to the world to view! Check your hosting terms and conditions as some hosts don't like you storing files in this way.
3. Register a DropBox account. Its free and really cool. I use it to keep a back up of all my fonts and Photoshop brushes, patterns, swatches and other add-ons. So whereever I am, I have access to that data. If you upgrade your account you can keep entire websites and support files easily.
4. Finally, I also keep a complete record of every web design I've ever done on a RAID configured NAS box. This also allows me to keep complete mirrors of all my PCs and Laptop.
With web design, whatever you do, don't ignore the importance of keeping backups. With so much data storage technology available, whether it be hardware or virtual, there is no excuse! Do it or be damned!!!
Record your SEO Changes on Google Analytics
If you are running an SEO campaign of any description or size it's vital to record your amendments, changes and link building activity. I find it's quite handy to add my SEO activity on Google Analytics using the annotate function.
All you need to do is open up Google Analytics, go to the dashboard of the site you are monitoring, click on a datapoint and hay presto, 'create new annotation' appears under the datapoint data. Just click on that link and type in your SEO note!
What makes this a top idea in my opinion is that the annotation is placed directly on the Analytics timeline so you can see when you made the change on your website / web design and how that change affected your results!
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.
SEO Rank Tracking
For some time now I have been using Rank Tracker which is part of SEO Powersuite created by Link-Assistant.com : http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/. All my web design clients here in North Wales have benefited from the use of this software as I can see exactly what search engine optimisation is and isn't working.
It allows you to track your keyword positions over time across all the main search engines for your websites/web designs. You can select your local national versions of the main search engines too. Rank Tracker keeps a record your positions and shows a graph of each keyword you are tracking. All the data can be exported to spreadsheets and you can copy and paste the graphs directly into Powerpoint.
For me, this is an invaluable piece of software and no SEO expert should be without. Take a test drive with the 30 day trial version, I am pretty sure you will end up buying it!
SEO - Using GZip
Now that Google is looking at page rendering speeds, it's a very good idea to ensure GZip is enabled on your server to get that extra SEO tick in the box for your web design!
In a nutshell, GZip will compress the webpage server side, transmit it across the internet and then your web browser will 'unzip' it and render the page. Significant improvements in page rendering times can be achieved using GZip.
However, despite this being a great idea, many hosting services don't have GZip running natively which is a pity. If you are hosting using Apache, then you are in luck. GZip can be instigated by coding up .htaccess using the following:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
IIS7 should have GZip running by default and if not you can set up GZip programatically using microsoft.web.administrator. However, with IIS6 things are a little trickier. So long as you have direct access to IIS on the server then it is just a matter of checking a couple of property boxes and your done. But unless you have a dedicated server, this option is pretty much unavailable to you.
If you are having trouble getting GZip to work contact your hosting provider.
