Posted by weblinkindia on September 2, 2010
A website’s popularity depends as much on its design and content as on its user-friendliness. A major aspect of this is the loading time of a website. Now you may ask, how does this affect the viewership? Imagine surfing the internet and coming across a website related to a highly interesting topic but the only glitch is that it is taking too long to load properly. Needless to say this compels you to close the page and search somewhere else. As for designers who make websites with elaborate coding, every effort can fall flat if their websites do not load properly or run too slow on servers. Although there are many factors that come together to increase the downloading time but today we discuss a major factor here and that is CSS optimization.
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets control the designing aspect of a website and if optimized properly these can help in the formation of a well-designed website that loads quickly to show its content. Permitting browsers to directly access information from the .css files that are related to the styles, these sheets eliminate the need for repetitive information reading, each time the page is loaded.
- Remove redundant coding and combine scattered codes at one place.
Through smart coding you can drastically reduce the loading time of a webpage on a computer and if the discrete codes are combined into one then rendering occurs earlier as compared to pages with redundant coding. Also, some properties like CSS !important override should be used only if required.
- Use CSS Sprites.
This enables you to store multiple images at one place and allows faster webpage loading. The combined segment can then be displayed selectively, using CSS properties of background-image and background-position.
- Use CSS Optimizer Tools like CleanCSS and YUI compressor to delete things like:
- Unnecessary characters
- Whitespaces
- Useless properties
- Repetitive selectors
- Keep all Cascading Style Sheets at one place or in a separate external file.
This is done to trim down the requests sent to the HTTP Server and having a single file means that only one request will be sent, resulting in faster downloads to the client’s computer.
- Place CSS on the top of pages to load them faster.
This is based on the fact that the CSS scripts placed here will be rendered first because the parallel downloads are blocked by scripts. This also prevents the display of blank white screen and content that has not been styled.
- Some other steps that can be taken include:
- Grouping styles that are alike
- Use CSS shorthand
- Deleting unnecessary line breaks and comments
- In many browsers using ‘@import’ causes WebPages to slow down so use this sparingly or better still use ‘link’
A cleaner code with smart placement definitely translates into the speedy rendering of WebPages on a server. With the further support of minification tools, you can easily increase the number of time your website is viewed by people. We will be back soon with more tips on how to make your website load faster and become more popular with web surfers. Watch this space!
Posted in CSS | Tagged: CSS, Style Sheet, CSS Optimization | Leave a Comment »
Posted by weblinkindia on August 30, 2010
PHP is worldwide adopted by web developers for its simplicity and capability to fetch stable, faster, and economical results. For more than a decade, PHP has been serving as a trusted scripting language to simplify & streamline variety of web exercises, which would otherwise be difficult to manage. In this blog, we are going to discuss in brief the transformations that PHP has seen in its evolution period.
Created by Rasmus Lerdorf, a Danish/Greenlandic programmer who wrote the original Common Gateway Interface component, PHP has undergone radical changes since its first official launch in 1995 to the latest stable release PHP 5.3.3 (launched on 22 July 2010). PHP initially comprised a set of Perl scripts, whose use was limited to maintain Lerdorf’s personal homepage. But later the need of more functionality was sought which necessitated Rasmus to write a larger C implementation with which efficient communication with databases can be established.
The further development of PHP was taken over by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans (the two developers from Technion IIT) in the year 1997, who rewrote the parser and built the base of PHP3. Then came PHP3.0, which had globally famed for its robust extensibility features. This version was supporting different kinds of protocols, databases, and APIs; thus tempted developers to be a part of PHP for adding new extension modules. PHP 3.0 was at the public testing for almost 9 months and then it was officially launched in June 1998.
Just after the release of PHP3.0, the two developers i.e. Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans have once more started the rework on PHP’s core, with the aim to maximize its performance for intricate applications. However, they primarily focused on the modularity of PHP’s code base. With the launch of PHP 4, they have re-proven the worth of this revolutionary scripting language. Now, as a result of continuous improvements, PHP has reached to its fifth version and serving the diverse needs of developers with much efficacy and comparatively serving their more complex functions.
Today, PHP’s contribution in World Wide Web can be measured with its use which accounts for more than 20% of the hosted domains.
Posted in PHP | Tagged: PHP, PHP History | Leave a Comment »
Posted by weblinkindia on August 26, 2010
Search Engine Optimization has revolutionized the way viewers access the web and the manner in which the content for web is developed. Needless to say, SEO operates on a certain set of concepts and rules that define it and help in its improvement. Today, we will discuss some of these important rules & concepts and what basically separates them. Read on, if you are an online writer, a beginner in SEO or if you just want to know more about this interesting optimization model in a simple way.
SEO Rules
These define the basic pattern on which the optimization of a search engine works conforming to pre-set rules that may or may not be technical like:
Coding
- Incomplete HTML tags, missing tags or tags with no association can cause a problem with SEO Checkers.
- Too short or too long keywords are rejected so make appropriate and relevant keywords.
- Some characters or words have no SEO value e.g. copyright or the © symbol. So, avoid these.
- Not more than 150 characters in Image or Alt tag.
- There should ideally be one canonical link, one <h1> tag and one tag for description.
- Form proper hyperlinks; the details for this are available in many books and online sites.
- Use attribute value correctly in the ‘nofollow’ tag to avoid blocking the content.
Content
- Rankings drop for pages that are too large of if they immediately redirects the reader to another page.
- There is nothing worse than duplicate content, which can harm the rankings of all websites that are displaying it.
These are just a few of the numerous rules that underline SEO; you can easily find more on the web.
SEO Concepts
SEO Concepts depend on various aspects like the correctness of coding and usage of tags, the number of authoritative sites linked to the particular webpage and the frequency of the pages of your website being selected by users from results.
Underlying Notion
- No missing information either in terms of coding or content as it causes problems in the formation of pages and does not make it reader friendly. The Search Bots definitely avoid such websites.
- Keep the webpage unique, in terms of the keywords being used and the content itself. It is sheer common sense- why would a website be ranked higher if it contains something that is already present on the internet?
- Location of search term, its relevance to the page and frequency
- Placement of the ‘Robots.txt’ file on your website guides the search bots in managing, which pages to consider and which ones to ignore while ranking.
- Crawlers mainly check certain tags in a webpage, which should be properly formed and placed for correct evaluation like: <title> tag, tags for headings & hyperlinks and the <meta name=”keywords“> tag.
- Content should be keyword rich but avoid the use of placing keywords just for the sake of being detected by the crawlers- it does not work. Many times you can find websites that mention a horde of keywords in a single paragraph or beneath an image but these only spoil the aesthetics of the page while playing havoc with its rankings.
Search Engine Optimization is a process that may take some time but gives valuable results for website owners and internet users. Understanding and implementation of SEO Rules and Concepts is equally necessary to get the edge. We will post more such articles in the future to create better awareness. Happy Optimizing!
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | Tagged: SEO, SEO Rules, SEO Tips | Leave a Comment »
Posted by weblinkindia on August 23, 2010
Cascading Style Sheets or CSS manage the whole designing of a website with one-click changes. The latest version of CSS is the CSS3 version which basically differs from CSS2 in the incorporation of Modules and other changes. Modules enable the designing to be done in a lesser time with more ease while updating individual features and specifications. The CSS3 version supports many more browsers than CSS2, but be sure to test it on all operating systems and browsers.
Other major changes/additions include:
- New Combinator
- New CSS Selectors
- New Pseudo-elements
- New Style properties
Now let us discuss these in detail.
Combinator
New addition of General Sibling Combinator is done to match sibling elements of a given element through tilde (~) Combinator.
CSS Selectors
While CSS2 had ‘simple selectors’, the new version calls them the components as ‘a sequence of simple selectors’.
Pseudo-Elements
Many Pseudo Elements have been added that allow in-depth yet easy styling and a new convention of double colons ‘::’ has been introduced.
Style Properties
New Background Style Properties
Multiple Background images can be layered in the box using different elements like background image, position and repeat.
Border Style
Styling of borders has been extended to images and rounded designs which includes creating image of the borders and then automatically apply image to the borders through CSS.
Additions in Properties
- Border-radius, image-source, image-slice, and the values for width outset and stretch have been added in CSS3.
- Properties for managing boxes like shadowing, wrapping and breaking have been added.
- CSS3 has done away with complex structures for div tag and makes it easy for hassle free designing of multiple table-less columns. This can be simply done by putting in the number of columns in the browser that need to be added in the body element along with their width, color and height to make the text flow through the columns with ease.
New Background Style Properties
- With the addition of the new ‘local’ value, if the element has a scroll bar then the background scrolls with its content.
- Background-clip, origin, size and style properties have been added.
- Background shorthand property has been added in the size and origin properties.
- The changes to previous Background Style Properties include:
- Repeat property now has two values name space and round that space the tiled image in the box uniformly and rescales background images to tile it multiple time in the box.
More New additions
- Modules for grid creations and template layout.
- User interface module has been updated with the feature of adding/designing many elements.
- Ruby and Paged Media module allow more support for languages, paged media and with flexibility in using style sheets by Media Queries is also present.
CSS versions just keep getting better with time which means improves the programming platform for developers resulting in faster and more efficient website designing. CSS3 mainly gives a simple interface that can be worked by beginners as well for making better and more appealing website styles.
Posted in CSS | Tagged: CSS | Leave a Comment »
Posted by weblinkindia on August 19, 2010
What is HTML 5? To understand what exactly HTML 5 is, you need to understand the concept of HTML. What is HTML then you may ask? HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It can be defined as the most predominant markup language, which is used for the creation of web pages. 
After HTML came HTML 2, 3, 4 and now the latest, HTML 5. Like its immediate forerunner HTML 4, HTML 5 is also a standard for creation and presentation of content on the World Wide Web. What is the connection between HTML and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? SEO reflects how search engines work and what people are searching for and it also optimizes the website, which involves editing its content, HTML and other source coding. So, SEO is basically used to enhance HTML source coding. Though the new HTML 5 may affect web developers and web designers as it appears to be a programming language but it is still an XML based presentation language. Its new tags and elements are very easy to use though its complexity can lead one to believe otherwise. It would be important to discuss the effects of HTML 5 on SEO to understand the concept in a better manner.
- HTML 5 will enable a web designer to tell the search engines how to segment a page. Segmentation is the separation of a page into several separate parts like headers, footers, menu, main content etc.
- The introduction of a new <article> tag will allow the marking of separate entries in an online publication, like a blog or a magazine. It will do away with the <div> tag.
- The new <section> tag in HTML 5 can be used to identify separate sections on a page, chapter or a book. Each section can then have its separate HTML heading.
- <Header> tag in HTML 5, not the same as the head element, is a blessing for SEO experts because of its flexibility. The <header> tag, unlike <H1> tag, can contain a lot of stuff, including H1, H2, H3 elements, paragraphs of text and hard-coded links.
- Another feature, the <footer> tag, though does not allow the inclusion of information like the <header> tag, can still prove to be useful for SEO purposes.
- One of the most important new tags would be the <nav> tag, which can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages.
The above mentioned are some of the major tags that will affect SEO apart from the new <audio>, <video> and <dialogue> tags, which will also allow further create separation of content into different categories. Other less important tags like article, aside, canvas, command, datalist, details, embed, figcaption, figure, hgroup, keygen, mark, meter, output, progress, rp, rt, ruby, source, summary, time and wbr have also been included in HTML 5. As all new innovations are not readily accepted, it might take some time for browsers to adjust to HTML 5, which will take time for HTML 5 to spread worldwide.
Posted in HTML 5, Search Engine Optimization | Tagged: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, HTML 5 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by weblinkindia on August 16, 2010
Every new innovation is either accepted or rejected widely. Recently, the new Google Design was launched for users worldwide in 26 different languages. The new Google Design has been accepted worldwide by many users but some of the loyal users have also spotted some major discrepancies in the new design of Google. Let us first take you through the different features and changes that have been introduced in the new design.
- One of the major changes is the appearance of the word ‘Google’. The Google logo is now larger and brighter and the shadow outline is reduced to give it less prominence. The overall effect gives a modern appearance.
- The search input box is bigger and more pronounced.
- In the new design, you will not have to click on the “Search More Options” button to display the left hand side of the search page. It appears there by default with options such as blogs, discussions, images, updates, books, related searches etc.
The above mentioned are some of the major differences apart from the changes in functionality, which has improved considerably. Though widely and enthusiastically accepted by users and navigators, we will take you through the various advantages and disadvantages of the new Google Design in relation to its impact on SEO (Search Engine optimization).
The Major Advantages Would Be:
► One of the major advantages is that the new Google Design offers some of the hidden aspects of the search on the main menu. The most prominent and important would be the position of the blog results and the new discussion items displayed on the menu. This makes the search broader and more extensive.
► The similar results are now more accurate and useful and the searchers now have more options for their search. The search produces results, which otherwise would not have shown on the menu. As you cannot be everywhere at once, it takes a bit of an effort to find the most accurate search result.
The Major Disadvantages:
► The new Google hurts major sites, which contain long tail phrases as the search becomes too complex, revealing too many results.
► The new Google Design is being dismissed by some as being too cluttered and messy. The tools and options embedded on the left side of the menu are more or less redundant as they are attractive but not very useful.
After receiving positive and negative responses, there is still time to decide whether the new Google Design is impressive and acceptable or ineffective and a dud.
Posted in Google Design | Tagged: Google Design | Leave a Comment »
Posted by weblinkindia on August 12, 2010
Search Engine Optimization is a technique by which you can improve the visibility of your website by means of organic or algorithmic search results. A SEO may be aimed at searching several things including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This helps in building a web presence for the website. Over and above this, who would not want to be ranked on top of the Google Search Result!!! SEO is presently known more for its visibility issues than anything else. An SEO adds to the uniqueness of your business; makes it something apart from the general. Now, a question that is sure to haunt you as soon as you understand the importance of an SEO is What Kind of SEO Services Do You Really Need??? Here we are to resolve the issue for you to some extent. Let us look at some of the instances that may clear your idea of having an SEO.
- A Local Business:
For a local business, what we need is a local SEO. Your business’ listing on the Google maps or any other directory can help people avail your services. Therefore, a local SEO is undoubtedly required for a local business.
- Start up:
By Start Up, we mean a situation when a business offers something absolutely anew. Possibilities are that people may not even be aware of what new you have to offer. In such cases, a video SEO may be of some help for presentation matters.
- E-commerce:
An SEO can be of great help to those engaged in e-commerce or internet marketing. People can get through to them via SEOs to search for products that they are actually looking for. You should make sure that your links have updated list of your offerings to make them find what they want to.
- Global Player:
By Global Players it is meant that your business has its operations in other countries as well. But often it becomes difficult to make your global presence felt world wide. For the same, you have the option of going for a language free content which may involve images etc.
This is just an absurd beginning to all that SEO has in store to offer you. You may search for many more utilities that an SEO can provide you. So, make your presence felt because WHAT ONE SEES IS WHAT ONE DOES!!!
Posted in SEO Services, Search Engine Optimization | Tagged: Search Engine Optimization, SEO Services | Leave a Comment »
Posted by weblinkindia on August 7, 2010
Web Design India
Adding multimedia to your webpage is always fun because it adds life to your web pages and makes them more active. Before adding any kind of multimedia, whether it is sound, animation or video, make sure that it will not drive your customers away. You should also be clear about how multimedia can benefit your visitors and solve their problems, without distracting them. Using unnecessary videos or sounds may attract visitors for a while but it will not last for a long.
There are certain things, which one should consider before adding multimedia to a website. Through this write-up, we are telling you about the five basic things that should be considered before taking a step ahead in this direction.
Avoid Limiting Multimedia to Only One OS
The most common mistake done by the people while adding multimedia to their website is that they restrict it to only one operating system only. You should understand that multimedia applications are not platform independent, so you must check their playback on various browsers and operating systems before uploading them.
Auto-Playing Multimedia Can Actually be Harmful
Strictly avoid playing multimedia automatically because it distracts visitors. The visitor might be surfing through your website during office hours or at public place so the sound of your multimedia may not be as pleasant for them as it is for you and they may have already some other music playing, which will be interrupted by your multimedia. All these factors might put your visitor off and they will get distracted from your website.
Have Enough Space and Bandwidth for Multimedia
Before planning to make a multimedia enabled website, make sure to buy more space and bandwidth from your hosting provider as compared to other conventional websites. Multimedia files are larger files, thus they require more bandwidth for downloading or transferring.
Create Accessible Multimedia
Uploading inaccessible multimedia files are of no use for the visitors as well as you. It is advisable to create closed-captions or provide transcripts for the video, audio or animation you upload. Following this practice will make your multimedia uploads accessible to the people having hearing or vision problems and also to those who cannot upload multimedia due to bandwidth limitations.
Take Help from Online Services for Hosting Video
Internet has numerous options that will ease your task of uploading video on your webpage and they are great support for embedding your video on the webpage. Taking their services will also assist you in avoiding bandwidth or space issues and will also make your videos more visitor friendly. Make sure to understand the terms and conditions need to be considered before using any website for sharing.
If you keep these simple and basic things in mind, you can grab the attention of the visitors and make them appreciate your multimedia uploads. Keeping these factors in consideration before getting started will surely yield positive outcomes.
Posted in Multimedia Website | Tagged: Multimedia Website | Leave a Comment »
Posted by weblinkindia on August 5, 2010
Web Design India
Today, Internet is the most important source of gathering and providing information to us as users of this technology. Internet includes websites, which further includes useful webpages embedded in those websites. Millions of users worldwide are using the internet and millions of servers are being accessed making the speed of websites sluggish and thus reducing its performance scale. There are various different means and ways in which you can increase the speed of your websites. You want to know how?…Keep reading then….
Tips that will help enhance the loading speed of your website:
- Most of our time is spent in the loading of components in webpages like different images, style sheets, script and flash. If these components are reduced, then the speed of the websites become faster as the number of HTTP requests required to render the pages is reduced.
- Simplifying the page design also helps in speeding up of the website but simplifying the page may reduce its appeal. A way to combat this problem would be to make combined files like combining all the scripts into a single script and combining all the Cascading Style Sheets into a single style sheet. Combining multiple images into a single image also helps.
- Using a content delivery network, which is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more proficiently to the users, will help in the speeding up of the websites. In CDN, the server which is used to distribute content to the users is based on the degree of network proximity. In CDN, when a user wants to access some content, the server with few network stages or the quickest response time is chosen. There are various CDN provider companies, which offer services to Internet Companies.
- Always put the style sheets at the top or at the HEAD of the document as it speeds up the websites.
- Scripts in websites sometimes block parallel downloads. It is always advisable to put the scripts at the bottom of a document though it is not an easy task. An alternative option is to use deferred scripts. The deferred attribute specifies that the script does not contain document and it helps the browsers to continue rendering information.
- Containing Java Scripts and Cascading Style Sheets in the external files also help in the speeding up of the websites. If Java Script and Cascading Style Sheets are embedded in the HTML document, they get downloaded every time, the HTML document is requested.
- Minifying the Java Scripts and Cascading Style Sheets also aids in the speeding up of the websites. Minifying basically means removing unnecessary characters from the code to reduce its size which helps in load times.
- It reduces the performance of the website if duplicate Java Scripts are embedded in a page. Duplicate Java Scripts reduce performance of the pages by creating unnecessary HTTP requests.
Though there are many other ways to speed up the performance of websites, the above mentioned are some of the most vital ones. It is very important to deliver the information to the users efficiently and quickly to improve the credibility of the website.
Posted in Web Design | Tagged: Web Design, Website Tips, websites | 2 Comments »
Posted by weblinkindia on August 2, 2010
Popularity of social networking in recent years has given a boost to its use as a source of getting more traffic for your website. There are so many social 
networking sites available on the internet that can actually benefit you in attracting more traffic to your website. But the question is which social networking site can serve your purpose in the most efficient manner? The answer to this question is nothing else but your very own Facebook, undoubtedly the most popular one in the internet world.
Through Facebook you can not only stay in touch with your friends, but you can also use it as an effective medium for promoting your website and attracting more traffic to it. But, there are certain tricks that should be followed for getting the desired results and see how Facebook turns into a traffic monster for your website. In this write-up, we are providing you some of the basic tips that will help you in promoting your website through Facebook.
Use your profile as your weapon
Making an interesting profile is the first key to become popular on Facebook. Add enough information about yourself and make your profile public for attracting people who might show interest in visiting your website. Opportunities like posting information about your endeavors, adding pictures, videos, galleries, etc. offered by the Facebook will help you in generating interest among the people.
Be active
Building your own network on Facebook and posting information on regular basis will make you an active Facebook user, thus, it will add to your credibility. Long delays in updates will slow down the pace of traffic on your website, which can actually be really harmful for you. Visit the profiles of people who have joined you, taking part in their groups and showing interest in their activities will generate curiosity among them for gathering more information about you.
Check what Facebook has in store for you
Facebook offers you the flexibility to add social ads, applications, RSS feeds, etc. to your profile for widening your base on the network. Take advantage of these inexpensive features as they can work for you in a great way and will generate lot of traffic for your website. You can directly post apps, ads and RSS feeds on your Facebook profile simply within few minutes.
Start a group
Although, there are already so many groups on the Facebook, there is always a room for creating your own group for attracting a niche audience. People keen to know more about the business you are involved in will surely show interest in your group and will become part of it. This will automatically direct the targeted audience to your website and increase traffic on it.
Facebook keeps on upgrading its structure and functioning, so it’s better to keep yourself updated for targeting the right audience at the right time. We assure that following these simple tips for your Facebook account will surely bring considerable increase in the number of visitors on your website.
Web Design India
Posted in Social Networking | Tagged: Traffic Tips, Facebook Tips, Social Networking | Leave a Comment »
