Good Design Practices Tag

10 May

Posted at 18:50h in Business, Websites
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Accessibility is a concept that is intertwined with the concept of usability. It refers to creating the website content available to all people. The Internet has transformed the lives of people during the past decade. People have been able to do things that they were not able to do before, this includes the people with disabilities. People who are impaired do not have as much opportunities compared to people who are well and able. The Internet has provided them avenues for communication, information gathering, social interaction, engaging in cultural activities and it provides them with employment opportunities. However, statistics have shown that the potential of the Internet to provide these certain opportunities is still not maximised because the people with disabilities are hindered by usability issues from using it to the fullest. The benefits of improving accessibility of websites will not only benefit the people who have impairments but will affect the whole web community. Businesses, services, information campaigners, everyone will benefit. Some features include: provision of inter-operability of applications; access for the disabled; localisation and customisation. Recommendations for Improving Website Accessibility Listed below are some of the key recommendations from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which was developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C on how to improve the accessibility of the contents of a website. 1. Provide alternatives to audio-visual content Not all people will be able to use different kinds of content. These people may be disabled or may have a lower version of Internet browsers. Movies, sound clips, animations and other contents should be translated into text alternatives so as to provide information to the broadest range of viewers. 2. Developers should not rely on colour alone Many people are impaired in colour differentiation. Developers should not rely too much on the use of colours to relay information in the websites. Charts that are colour-coded should be modified and the background and foreground colours of the websites should have enough contrast to enable people with colour differentiation impairment to easily navigate the site. 3. Clarification of the use of natural language Content developers usually mark up the changes in natural language in their websites. They should be able to identify the dominant language that is used in the site so as to avoid confusion. 4. Control of content changes that are time-sensitive This issue particularly involves people who have visual or cognitive impairments and those who are not able to read texts that are moving quickly. Movement is seen as an over-all enhancer to the look of the site, but it may pose some problems to people with cognitive impairments. 5. Accessibility of user interfaces that are embedded Objects that have their own interfaces should be made accessible, and alternative solutions must be provided if this is not possible. 6. Provision of orientation and context information The provision of information on how the objects are organised is important to provide people with guidance on how to access information. There are other ways of improving a website’s over-all accessibility to make it more usable. Developers should take into consideration the different people who are going to view their websites and make them focal points in the designing process....

08 Sep

Posted at 06:16h in Business, Websites
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You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimise their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need. Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimisation. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in. But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimisation. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday. So just what is search engine optimisation and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimisation to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating. With search engine optimisation you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let us just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all. Search engine optimisation is utilising tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business. Search engine optimisation requires a lot of work to be fully realised. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimisation. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme. You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimisation. You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites. Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimisation are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimise your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding. If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimisation. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality. Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimisation. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company....

26 Feb

Posted at 18:28h in Business, Websites
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Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you are designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website. Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site. You should also go to a greater length and optimise every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. Use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance. If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size. On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the colour information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely....

26 Dec

Posted at 18:36h in Business, Design, Marketing, Websites
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Convincing your prospects to purchase from you is a hard job, but have you ever thought that you are making the process twice as difficult for both parties if your prospects are convinced but do not know how to buy from you? No matter how good you are at convincing your prospective customers, they will not buy if they find the process cumbersome. First, to make it easy to buy, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimise the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site. Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects' desired payment method. After all, it wouldn't make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they will not be able to pay you when they want to. On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing? Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects' confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet. As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximise your profits....

26 Feb

Posted at 13:49h in Business, Websites
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Your business website is like the headquarters of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible. There are a number of good Website Design Practices that can help you achieve this: Navigation Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion. Short Paragraphs Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content. Fewer Images Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimise them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size. Browser-friendly Make sure your website complies to web standards and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Chrome but breaks horribly in Firefox you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors....

07 Apr

Posted at 17:49h in Business, Websites
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A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. Quite simply, they trust you. You can keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods. Update frequently with fresh content Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites Start a web blog Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your website and keep it updated with latest news about yourself and/ or business. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website. Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers, all of them are visitors coming back to your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day. Carry out polls or surveys Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your website to keep visitors coming back to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results....

03 May

Posted at 13:19h in Business, Websites
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First of all, what is RSS? It stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website. An RSS is a means of publicising updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so that they can decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source. The Pros RSS gives benefits to both readers (users) and web publishers. It gives you the latest updates, whether it is about the weather, new music, software upgrade, local news, or a new posting from a rarely-updated site as soon as it comes out. Since an RSS feed provides a summary of the related article, it saves the user’s time by helping s/he decide on which items to prioritise when reading or browsing the net. It gives the power of subscription to the user. Users are given a free-hand on which websites to subscribe in their RSS aggregators which they can change at any time they decide differently. It lessens the clutter in your inbox. Although your email address will be required to enjoy the services of online RSS aggregators, RSS does not use your email address to send the updates. It is spam free. Unlike email subscriptions, RSS does not make use of your email address to send updates thus your privacy is kept safe from spam mails. Unsubscribing is hassle-free. Unlike email subscriptions where the user is asked questions on why s/he is unsubscribing and then the user would be asked to confirm unsubscribing, all you have to do is to delete the RSS feed from your aggregator. It can be used as an advertising or marketing tool. Users who subscribe or syndicate product websites receive the latest news on products and services without the website sending spam mail. This is advantageous to both the web user and the website owner since advertising becomes targeted; those who are actually interested in their products are kept posted. The Cons Some users prefer receiving email updates over an RSS feed. Graphics and photos do not appear in all feeds. For conciseness and ease of publication, feeds do not display the photos from the original site in announcing the update except for some web-based aggregators The identity of the source website can be confusing. Since RSS feeds do not display the actual URL or name of the website, it can sometimes get confusing on what feed a user is actually reading. Publishers cannot determine how many users are subscribed to their feed and the frequency of their visits. Moreover, they would not know the reasons why users unsubscribe which could be important in improving their advertising. The feeds create higher traffic and demands on the server. Most readers still prefer the whole update over a brief summary of the entry, thus they still access the site. ...

26 May

Posted at 18:56h in Business, Websites
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There are many factors that affect the usability of a web site. To make sites noticeable to users, site owners must make use of attractive design and functional content. The usage of fonts is one of the factors that can draw or veer away visitors to a web site. Good fonts are important because it has an effect on how fast users can read whatever content that is present on the computer screen. Fonts are utilised to make the majority of the web page elements, such as navigation bars, buttons, links, and menus. It is the text that will express most of the web site's content. At present, the fonts that are commonly used in the Internet are Times New Roman, a serif font, and the Arial, a sans serif font. The primary edge of serif fonts is that it is more comfortable to read it on paper, because serifs help individualise each letter. However, this advantage can be rendered useless when the fonts are viewed on computer screens, since factors such as screen resolution can affect the clarity of texts. So how do fonts influence the overall usability and legibility of a web site? There are two major categories of font faces: 1, Serif These are fonts that contain small appendages in the upper and lower part of a letter. Examples are Times New Roman, Century, Bookman and Courier. These are the choice faces to be used for large quantities of text. 2. Sans-serif These fonts have only primary line strokes, and possess a simpler shape. Examples of these fonts are Futura, Helvetica, and Arial. They are usually utilised for short phrases. Font style pertains to the usage of elements such as italics, underlining, and boldfaces to give better emphasis to the contents of a page. It is not advised to utilise underlining on web pages, since most of the users are used to associate underlinings with links. Boldfaces should be used in a strategic way. Too much usage of boldfaces can be distracting from the content, since they are extremely visible. Since italics are not very legible on the screen, they should be used infrequently, just enough to provide emphasis and definition to terms. Avoid using absolute font sizes. Doing so may hinder users the ability to adjust the sizes of the text to go along with the specifics of display devices that they are using. It is recommended to let users manipulate the size of the texts, especially if one plans to keep the web pages short. Choosing font colours should be done with care, it should maximise the legibility of the text in contrast to the background of the page while setting it apart from colours used for links. For light backgrounds, one should used fonts in black, dark green, dark brown, and dark blue. If the background is dark, fonts in white, pale green, and pale orange should be used. If possible, use only one or two font colours in a page, excluding the colours for the link pages. There are images that look like fonts. Avoid using them. There are several reasons why one should not utilise .jpg or .gif images to acquire special effects. First, images takes a long time to download, and when it appears, the quality is not the same as the text produced by the by browsers. Second, there usually is a problem when resizing images. Third, these images cannot be recognised by voice-enabled browsers. It is said that Sans serif fonts should be used for standard and top-of-the-line web site designs, specifically the Arial and the Verdana. It is recommended to use the same font throughout a page, but headline sizes can be added and the subheadings can be written in bold form to prevent monotony. Again, it is preferable to give users the ability to control the size of the texts, since some of the users can be visually-challenged. Some studies show that fonts that are tinier than 10-point gets slower reaction from users. It is advisable to use fonts that are at least 12 or 14-point in size when it comes to people over the age of 65. The quality of a well-designed web site is that it can be accessed and used by people from all walks of life. Web sites should be designed to suit everyone who will be able to visit them....