Web Design Tips and Tricks

Should I Re-design My Site?

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There are a lot of reasons your site may need a re-design. Some may be more obvious than others. You may have asked yourself the question: Can my site benefit from a re-design? Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will have an answer. The most common reason to redesign a site is that it's outdated. If your site hasn’t been updated in the last 3 to 5 years you may want to have it evaluated. Some new programming has come out over the last few years. Today’s newer sites have cleaner designs. Some scripts are no longer needed. Newer programming can improve your sites functionality. If your site is an e-commerce site, your code may have too many charters in the query strings. You can benefit from a clean up of those dynamic urls.

Does your site have a plain or “flat” look to it? Are the colors dull and lifeless? How does your site stack up to your competitor’s site? You want your site to appeal to your visitors. If your site looks amateurish, people may be hesitant to buy from you. An attractive layout tells potential customers that you take your business seriously and so should they. Is your site hard to navigate? Have you added links to your menu that are now out of control? Re-designing will help you organize your site for better use by the user. If your site is too confusing and people cannot find what they are looking for, they will leave. Depending on what type of business you are engaged in, there may be thousands of sites just like yours. If potential customers can’t easily navigate to what they need at your site, they will quickly go somewhere else.

Is your site still hosted on a goecities or other free hosting service? Domain names are cheap. Some even come with free or low cost hosting. There is no reason why you should be on a free service. To be taken seriously you need to establish your company name or brand. That starts with a domain name. Finally, is your site optimized to help you acquire a high ranking on search engines? If not, your site is likely not helping you reach your full potential. Remember, no matter how good or bad your site looks, no matter how easy it is to navigate and no matter how clearly your layout expresses what you have to offer, nothing will come of it unless users actually visit your site.

Think about whether or not your site suffers from:

Bad color scheme

Use of old or bad SEO methods

Confusing layout

Lack of overall optimization. (Save money doing SEO and re-design together) Long loading times

Unnecessary, old and outdated pages

A programming method that precludes you from initiating your own updates

Non search engine friendly pages

These are just a few reasons to have your site re-designed. There's a lot of improvement that can come out of a site re-design. Ask yourself if these common problem areas may pertain to your site. If they do, you may be losing potential customers or clients. In short, you may be losing money. After you have your site re-designed, write a press release. Let the world know your site has a new look. If “Mr SEO “does your site re-design, we will distribute your press release for FREE.

Firing a function from your browser

The concept is as simple as firing a function from your browser, and it leans on PHP's call_user_func_array.

I'm going to outline the concept as I have implemented it. This exact implementation may not work in your case, but perhaps you can adapt it to do so.

if(isset($_GET['f']) && function_exists($_GET['f'])) {
$func = $_GET['f']; // Get function name.
unset($_GET['f']); // Drop function from from get.
// Fire and print function, passing 
// remaining GETs as function parameters.	
print_r(call_user_func_array($func, $_GET)); 
exit;
}

In our CMS/Framework, we set up a controller with the code from above to respond at a given URL, for example http://www.example.com/__FOO. By passing a function name as a GET variable, in this case 'f', and the parameters necessary for that function to work as subsequent GET parameters, the result of that function will be printed to the screen.

So, http://www.example.com/__FOO?f=hello_foo&a=world would fire the function hello_foo('world'), perhaps printing Hello World! to the screen.

This allows for a quick and dirty test of a given function, and can be done remotely on a live site, if necessary, without touching any files or whatnot.

We hide this behind an authorization wall and also clean our parameters before they get to this level, so if you try this, keep these points in mind.

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