Web Design Tips and Tricks

7 Sure Shot Ways to Improve your Website

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Improving the little things your site can make a huge difference, here are few, simple, sure shot ways through which you can improve your website dramatically.

• Logo design - A well designed and thought out logo plays a very important role in projecting a professional image of the company. The company logo is present on all representations and communications of the company. As a result, the logo is the first glimpse of the company that a prospect or a customer gets. First impression is the last impression. Very often people form their opinion about the company based on this first glimpse. Considering its importance, it would be foolish to compromise on logo design and have a cheaply turned out and unprofessional looking logo. This kind of logo is sure to make people think twice about working with your company, as they may take it for an inefficiently run amateur enterprise with limited capabilities. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the logo, and if it needs improvement, then to engage the services of a good logo designer to do the job professionally. You will be surprised at the change a good company logo can bring about in people's perception about the company. A good looking and professional logo also generates confidence in the people towards the company.
• Technical correctness - All information available on the website must be technically correct without any grammatical or spelling errors in it. Otherwise, people would not take the website seriously and professionally. There is nothing, which is sure to harm a website than wrongly spelt words and grammatical errors. When people see these kinds of mistakes, they take the website to be an unprofessional attempt by a novice. This problem is solvable by using the services of a technical reviewer to check whether the content is correct or not. While various editing tools available nowadays are good for dealing with spelling, grammar and typographical errors. However, they forget that these mistakes can also happen due to other reasons such as typing too fast or because one has forgotten to use the editing tool etc. Therefore, it would be advisable to be cautious and not leave anything to chance.
• HTML validation - The same correctness should also be there in the programming and coding of the website. With content errors, a website may continue to function but with programming errors, the site will simply not work. In addition, there are strong chances that the search engines would reject sites, which have programming and coding errors in them. This problem can however be solved by using the services of a good HTML validator to check the code. Such tools quickly reveal any coding errors that are there in the website. One such tool is the built-in html validator found in Allaire's Home Site Pro. Others similar tools are available on http://www.htmlvalidator.com.
• Contact information - Contact information is very important to conduct business. All website visitors should have easy access to this contact information at any point. One can employ various ways to supply this information. You can put address and phone numbers in short on every page, on top or bottom of the page. In addition, you can give the contact information in detail, on the contact page. The contact page can also have a form through which people could send you their queries and contact information, for your follow up action.
• Order form - Many times visitors to the website would want to place an order online. For such customers an order form should always be readily available on the website. This order form should be professional, well thought out, user-friendly and efficient so that the ordering process goes through smoothly. To make the order form easy for people to fill up, it should be short asking only the relevant questions. People are less likely to fill up a lengthy order form. The website should always display an updated order form with current dates and information such as the number of years for the credit card validity. In addition, there should be no frivolous links or banners on this order form.
• Update your website frequently - The same rule that works for credit card expiry also applies to the rest of the website. Whatever information is available on the website should be current. At no point should visitors feel that the information is stale and no one is managing the site. This is particularly evident in case of dates and years for example, the copyright year.
• Optimizing the images - Images or graphics look very nice on any site. However, images and graphics take time to load due to their file size. As a result, to display graphics and images on a website it is important to optimise them. In the process of optimization, images are compressed to reduce file size through any good compression software such as Ulead Smart Saver. In addition, one can also include the size of the image in the html image tag so that the rest of the page continues to load while the image is opening.

While developing and updating the website it will be great to try to use these points. These points are sure to bring about a dynamic change in the look, content and efficiency of the website.

Okay, one of the reasons why posting has been light on this blog is because we have been busy. My wife and I have also had our first child (well, two years ago) and to be honest, our work has become less innovative in terms of doing cool new things and more iterative, as in we have been applying a lot of the cool things we learned and developed over the last few years.

This happened because we changed our business model from agency style to "plug us into your operations and we will be your dev crew" style.

Anyways, every once in a while we like to take stock and see where we may be able to gain some time so as to try and work in our next direction or new model, whatever that may be. The applications that we use are often places where we can find cool new stuff and gain time.

What things have you done to find extra time? Please, share below!

Here are three things that, in the last year point five have helped us find some extra time.

1. Navicat: we moved all of the bits of PHPmyAdmin accesses over to navicat at about the end of 2007 and this was an excellent move. Tonnes of time gained.
2. TeamViewer: for quick support and desktop sharing with remote staff.
3. Buying a netbook and using Maxivista and Ultramon: adds two new monitors to my existing setup. I now have a 4 monitor two computer setup which allows me to not only have two more monitors but I can also have open two versions of many of the apps that I use (useful for multitasking with teams etc.)
4. Moving simpler client sites to WordPress: now that it has one step upgrades and almost doesn't require the use of an FTP client to get up and running on some hosts.
5. Dictation Software: I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking for writing some course and blog materiel lately (pre-writing for my new blog). I find this is saving me a load of time and I am getting more written then ever before.

So what solution have you implemented lately to buy you some extra time?

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