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Suggestion #1 - URL First of all, your URL is very important and since it is the address to your website and what everyone will use to find your place on the web you need to put some careful consideration and thought into it. You don’t want to come up with a URL that already exists as a .com and register it as a .tv. If you do this, you will just lose customers to the com. Likewise, you don’t want to register a URL that has nothing to do with your website or content either. Be thoughtful and register a URL that pertains to your services or products, is as short as possible, and is spelled easily. Suggestion #2 - Host The next thing you must do is find a web host. Since you are on a shoestring budget you will be tempted to save money and go with a free host. Do not do this. Do anything you have to do to convince yourself that free is not always better because in this case it is not. Frequently the free sites don’t get indexed by the search engines, they don’t provide much space or bandwidth, and since they are free you can’t do too much about it when the site is down or you went over your visitor limit. Instead, find an affordable host and there are many for under $10 per month, offer decent bandwidth, storage space, e-mail services, as well as other tools you need. Suggestion #3 - Professional Templates When it comes to designing your site, many hosts have tutorials and wizards that will help you do so. However, you will want your site to be as professional as possible so keep this in mind when choosing colors and the like. Also, use professional templates that you can buy or download for free online. They will give you the professional appearance you want for free. Suggestion #4 - Text When it comes to loading text on your website make sure you break it up into small chunks, use bold words, bullets, numbers, and anything else that you can think of to make it more readable. Avoid small fonts, light colors, or strange texts. Also, remember that the search engines use keywords in your text to return results, so be sure to include keywords in your text as well.
This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al. APIs and data portabilityThe blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail. Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:
A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail. Caching is good contingency design practiceAs I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible. A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above. And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 |
More Articles:1. Wording Up Your Website By Glenn Murray Back to basics. Forget funky design, good copywriting is the key to a clear and intuitive website.Are you losing business because of your website? More and more customers are logging on to the Web to decide where to spend their money because it is quick and convenient, and they can jump from site to site instead of walking from store to store.Web savvy customers don't need to be patient, studies have shown that you need to engage a potential customer very quickly by giving them easy, fast acce… 2. Seven Free Tools for Your Web Site A search utility makes your site look more professional, aswell as providing a useful service that will make yourvisitors return. I've been using FreeFind,http://www.freefind.com/ , which will spider your site onrequest or by schedule, and sends an e-mail report of searchterms that your visitors have used. You can also have a'What's New' link and page, with an icon if you want. Youcan set member-only pages not to be spidered.Visitor feedback is also a good idea - though some of theresponses I've… 3. Five Core Elements to a Successful Website It seems to me that many of you who are new to building websitesare having trouble figuring out exactly what makes the differencebetween a website that's effective and one that doesn't produceresults. For example, I recently received this from a reader ofmy e-zine, Marvin Baerg:> This is a suggestion for an inclusion of an article on site> design tips. It would be great if you could give some URL's of> 'excellently' designed sites with the reasons WHY they are> superior, in order to give a model… 4. The Core Elements of a Successful Website It seems to me that many of you who are new to building websites are having trouble figuring out exactly what makes the difference between a website that's effective and one that doesn't produce results. For example, I recently received this from Sybren Design Chronicles reader Marvin Baerg: This is a suggestion for an inclusion of an article on site design tips. It would be great if you could give some URL's of 'excellently' designed sites with the reasons WHY they are superior, in order to giv… |
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