JBCR Virtual Solutions Blog

Archive for the ‘Web Site Design’ Category

A new client of mine ran into a prob­lem that I have seen too often and thought it would be of inter­est to my readers.

When you hire a web design com­pany it is very impor­tant that you have an under­stand­ing, at the very least. Hav­ing a con­tract in place is much better.

Why?

Well, for one, if you have your web com­pany pur­chase your domain name for you, and arrange your host­ing for you, it is impor­tant that both of these are reg­is­tered to you and not the com­pany that is doing the web work for you.

Now, it is not unusual for a web design com­pany to pur­chase the domain name and arrange host­ing for the client, but the client’s name should be listed as reg­is­ter and the web design com­pany as tech.

In the case of my new client, and oth­ers I have worked with, they come to me for changes, or redesign, of their site only to dis­cover that, in fact, they do not own the domain name, they can­not get any infor­ma­tion on the host­ing and even worse, depend­ing on the com­pany, they have no rights to their web site even though they have paid for it.

If you do not pur­chase your domain name or arrange for your host­ing just make sure that you receive proper doc­u­men­ta­tion so you do not find out, down the road, that you don’t own your web site.

Read sim­i­lar arti­cles here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html

One process many clients don’t under­stand is ‘slic­ing and dic­ing’. When we first cre­ate a client’s unique web tem­plate, the ban­ner, side menu, etc., this is done as an image. In most cases it is not pos­si­ble just to stick up and ban­ner and have a back­ground color with a light inner table, except with cer­tain sales pages or ezine tem­plates, for example.

Why Slice and Dice to Cre­ate a Website?

The short­est and sim­plest answer is the smaller the file size of the images used in a web page, the faster the page will dis­play. This in itself is a good enough reason.

Web­site vis­i­tors tra­di­tion­ally have a very short patience span. Broadband’s steady pro­lif­er­a­tion has not changed this. If any­thing, vis­i­tor expec­ta­tions is now that pages should load instan­ta­neously. At rate, the longer they have to wait for a page to dis­play, the more likely it is you will lose them before they have viewed your offerings.

So how does slic­ing and dic­ing pro­duce faster page display?

Have you ever seen a page with cen­tral table with shad­ows to make the table appear as if it were float­ing on a layer above the page? Here is an exam­ple using a site we devel­oped: http://www.iaccweb.org/ . The left and right edges of the cen­tral table are tiny tiled ver­ti­cally to pro­duce the effect of a solid graphic. The slice is a very small file size, so takes much less time to dis­play than if we had used a side graphic big enough to fill the required area. This brings up another rea­son — why we slice and dice images.

Read more of this arti­cle here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Dice

Jan

In our pre­vi­ous seg­ments of this report, we dis­cussed how you can real­ize a higher ROI by sav­ing money on web­site update by using CSS, Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets.

Sav­ing money is mak­ing money, but in addi­tion to sav­ing you money, a web site that uses the min­i­mum amount of code required to “make it all hap­pen” gives addi­tional money mak­ing advan­tages too!

MONEY MAKING ADVANTAGE

KEEP THOSE GOOGLEBOTS HAPPY (AND OTHER SEARCH BOTS TOO!)

Search engines send out auto­mated soft­ware called “crawlers” or “spi­ders” to look through web­sites for con­tent to list. Those crawlers have a lot of Inter­net to cover. It gets big­ger every day and as it gets big­ger the crawlers get less patient about the amount of code they have to wade through to extract what they came for, which is your con­tent. Help the bots help your client/customer find you. Keep the code used to dis­play the con­tent as min­i­mal as pos­si­ble. This way they “crawl” more rel­e­vant, index­able con­tent, and less code before they move on.

Cur­rently crawlers are set to check the first 250 lines of code on a page and then move on to index another page. They index from the code view, not the text view you see. This is impor­tant to remember!

Read more of this arti­cle here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#3

was read­ing an arti­cle the other day that stated that web design com­pa­nies lack SEO knowl­edge and ‘their com­pany’ not only builds sites but also makes them search engine friendly.

This is not new and this is not news.

My opin­ion is in this day and age any­one who hires a web design com­pany must ensure that the com­pany designs with SEO in mind. Long gone are the days on web design alone. As an exam­ple, and this is a very basic one, a CSS should be cre­ated with any new web site. You may ask what a Cas­cad­ing Style sheet has to do with SEO since it really is a design issue — well, basi­cally, too much un-necessary cod­ing is not SEO friendly. A CSS should be cre­ated in an exter­nal file and linked in the page. Let me show you an example.

Here is an image a site with no unique CSS:

Here is an image of a site with a unique CSS:

Lots of dif­fer­ence in code — right!

JavaScripts should be in an exter­nal file as well.

So, yes, ensure that your web designer is con­sid­er­ing SEO when design­ing. It is a must now!

Jan

All the web sites we cre­ate are cre­ative to vary­ing degrees. Clients that are in par­tic­u­lar indus­tries need a more cre­ative site than oth­ers. For exam­ple, Gre­gory Col­lett, actor, required not only a graph­i­cal cre­ative web site but he also needed a show­case of his work, both print and film. This require­ment brought some chal­lenges and, in my opin­ion, won­der­ful results.

For exam­ple, his still pic­tures needed to be dis­played with some­thing more than just thumb­nails that you click on to make them larger. So we used a script and cre­ated this photo gallery:

You don’t really see the ‘beauty’ of this until you start to look at the pho­tos. First you can pick the cat­e­gory from the drop down side menu (series). When you land on the page it is on Bas­ket­ball and Soc­cer. Now if you take a pic­ture and drag it up the larger area it shows the larger photo with the small thumb at the side. Try another — again the larger pic­ture in the main area and small thumb at the side. To see other types of still pho­tos just click on the drop down box and dif­fer­ent images appear.

Photo and move reels is a page with thumb nails of movies Gre­gory have done. See here. There are thumb nails that when clicked on take you to a new page with some stills show­cased, or in the exam­ple of Bor­ing Or, for exam­ple, you can also click on ‘movie reels’ and see a sam­ple of the film.

Of course the resume rounds out the actors portfolio.

It’s chal­leng­ing and fun to do a cre­ative site like this for actor Gre­gory Collett.

I will show you a dif­fer­ent one next time.

Click here to view our gallery of web sites we have created.

Jan