Monthly Archives: September 2010
Parts of a Web Page
Current age is more or less turning into WEB age. From education to business, everything is conducted online. Internet is now accessible to millions of people who use it to search endless things. Advertizing of business as well online trading is gaining momentum every single day.
A well-designed website is what is needed to achieve success in an online business. By well-design we do not mean that the site should only be attractive but it rather should have various other features in place. Together these parts create a website or webpage that is user-friendly and well-promoted. Here in this write up we will discuss parts of web page that need to be perfected. You must be thinking which are those parts? So let us explore them:
Header or Masthead: Header is the first thing that a visitor to a site comes across. If the header is attractive then the visitors tend to stay more on a site to explore it. So, it becomes absolutely essential to pay attention to the making and placing of the header on the site.
- Use of flash animations and colorful text make the headers all the more alluring.
Content The Main Body: Content is considered to be the lifeline of any site. A well-presented website is not effective if its content is not up to the mark. So, it is important to keep check on the content uploaded on the site.
- Content should be as per the SEO guidelines
- It should be without errors
- Stuffed with relevant keywords
- The content displayed through images should be search engine friendly using alt attribute
Navigation: Easier the navigation on the site more are the chances of visitors staying long on your site. Various internal links are added to a site or web page in order to promote it well. But one has to be careful while placing the links as these can lead visitors to undesired destinations.
- So, it is necessary to keep the navigation of the site in mind while placing links.
Footer for Your Websites: Footer is a must have for a website. Footer content is mostly similar for all websites. SEO professionals are in a lookout for new and creative ways of designing footer. Footer contains links to various pages that ease the visitors.
- So, design and place a well-developed footer with appropriate content.
By now you must have understood the significance of different parts of a web page and how they should be incorporated. Following the tips offered by us will let you have a website that can take you places.
Essential Features Of An Effective Website
Have you ever visited a website that was so uninteresting that you felt like finding the person who has designed it and give him some useful advice? Make sure your website is not the same or else people would be queuing outside your office to give their opinions. An effective and well-designed website grabs the attention of everyone, whether they are the target audience or not. In case you want a website designing in order to promote your company, business, products or services, make sure you assign the task to a professional and highly experienced or your business would close down before you can say the word “sale”. We would acquaint you with some of the essential features that your website must have to make it effective and eye-catching.
Attractive Theme And Colors
The first and foremost thing to keep in mind is that your website should have a theme that is suitable to represent your company’s products and services or suitable to the information you are providing. Using dull colors like white and cream for a website, which is offering wedding flowers would repeal the visitors. Your color scheme should be bright and catchy.
Choosing The Right Font
After your website has been designed, it is time to add the content. The content should be in a font that is easily readable by the visitors. Do not use fonts that are difficult to read and too elaborate. Even the font size should be such that it is easily understood by the visitors.
The Content
The actual content in a website should be highly effective and understandable. Your content should be relevant and free of any grammatical and spelling mistakes. If your content contains too many spelling and grammatical errors and is not apt for the purpose of your website, then it is as same as not having a website. Also, it is essential to update your content frequently so as to avoid redundancy of your website.
Good Internal Navigation And Links
It is important to make your website user-friendly so as to enable easy navigation by users. The internal navigation of your website should be designed effectively. Make links that are visible and readily available. Do not place links on your website that are disabled and cannot be opened. Make sure that all the links on your website are unbroken.
These are the essential features to be added in a website to make it popular and user friendly. A bad website, with bad design and content, would obviously reduce its popularity. Always create a website that effectively carries across the message you are trying to convey to the visitors of your website.
Why Internet Payment System is Beneficial?
Running business online is a tedious task that involves a lot of risk pertaining to the payment system. A reliable internet payment system can solve your problem of getting your payments faster, simpler and in a trusted way. Internet payment systems play an important role as they offer instant payment option to the buyers, where they can easily make payments using their debit card or credit card. Although, there is a pay now link on every website that offers products on sale, which is connected to several internet payment systems, but the most popular internet payment system is PayPal ipn.
Being one of the widely used online payment systems, PayPal ipn eases the whole process of buying and selling products or services on the internet by sending instant payment notifications. In this write-up, you will come across the various benefits of using internet payment systems that simplifies your online business transactions.
You Get Paid in Currency of Your Own Country
Online marketing attracts customers from different parts of the world that is why you are paid for your offerings in the currency of different countries. If you use internet payment system like PayPal then you will receive the payment in the currency of your own country. This eliminates the hassle of getting your money converted in your currency and this system can be used anywhere in the world.
Ensures Speedy Payments
The best part of using internet payment system is that your money arrives in your account in the shortest time frame. You receive payment within minutes after making an online sale and there is no need of waiting for the arrival of cheque through postal order. This enables you to send the product instantly or provide download link to the customer as you receive an instant payment notification from the provider.
Safe and Secure Mode
Every person engaged in online business transactions wishes to make payment with utmost care and safety. Completely safe and secure transactions are assured by internet payment systems like PayPal as they use market leading fraud protection software for making and receiving payments.
Complete Flexibility
Internet payment system offers extreme flexibility to the buyers so that they can choose their own payment method and receive instant payment notification. Buyers can make payments using their debit card, credit card or bank account. The main benefit of internet payment system to the buyers is that they receive their payment within minutes and the transaction fee for above mentioned mode of payments is very low. Besides, sellers also get the access to the customers based in every nook and corner of the world.
The script of internet payment system is very simple and can be installed easily. So don’t wait… simply empower your online business with the rapidly popularizing system called Internet Payment System.
Make Your Website Attractive: Use Flash Animation
Have you ever written a letter with a pen and a paper to your family or friends? No? Well that’s hardly surprising. With the advent of technology and the Internet, the trend to use paper and pen to write a l
etter has become obsolete. Though the use of electronic mail to write a letter does not have the same personal touch as a letter written on a paper, it is nevertheless a faster and more reliable method of getting your message across to the other person. Every person is in a hurry nowadays and therefore, electronic media like emails, television, computers etc. is a more effective means of exchanging information.
Even if you are using the internet to get information, the presentation of the website or webpages should be highly attractive so as to retain your interest. If a website has endless amount of content but no visual images, then the user might just snore away instead of reading your entire content. This is when flash animations come to your website’s rescue. Flash animations are basically flash images, which are made using Adobe Flash and other related software.
The website is generally used to either present some sort of information or to advertise a product or service online. If your website is not supported by interesting images, then it would be impossible to sell your product to customers. In order to catch the visitors’ attention, flash animation can be used effectively.
Flash animation can be used in the following to make them interesting:
- Online presentations of products
- Website
- Internet Animations
- Offline presentations
- Screen savers
- CD ROMs
- Multimedia online movies
- Software applications
- Games
There are several advantages of using Flash Animation. They are as follows:
- Flash Animations make websites more attractive and appealing
- Over 90% websites on the Internet use Flash Animations due to their appeal
- High quality websites with Flash Animations can now be made professionally at nominal charges
- Flash Animations supports your content and give them a visual image
- The Flash Animations can be customized as per the needs and requirements of the website
As you can easily deduce, the use of Flash Animations is highly effective for any website. It is wise to add that extra touch to your website to sell your product or to increase the popularity of your website.
Search Engine Marketing: The Basic Concepts, Key Terms and Glossary
Search Engine Marketing is
the newest and the most popular form of marketing. To understand it fully, let us define the term. According to the Wikipedia Online Dictionary, Search Engine Marketing “is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion”. To do search engine marketing more effectively, you need to know the basic concepts, key words and glossary associated with it. Here is all what you need to know.
- Algorithm- the algorithm of a search engine determines the ranking of a page. One particular topic can be found on many pages. It is the algorithm that decides which one is more applicable for the term.
- Browser- a web browser is the most important tool for accessing the internet. Some of the most popular web browsers are Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, etc.
- Index- a database containing content for specific keywords, which are created by the search engine, is called an index.
- Keywords- keywords are those words which actually define your search. Keywords are very important in a website and webpage. These are the words or sentences, which are used by a searcher on a search engine to look for a specific topic. These are helpful in guiding the user towards the most relevant webpage.
- Pay Per Click- pay per click, also known as PPC, are advertisements on search engines. The advertiser pays only for the clicks that have been made on their ads.
- Ranking- the web pages are ranked according to their relative position on the Search Engine Result Pages. This process is called tanking.
- Search Engine Optimization- Search Engine Optimization can be defined as a technique, the main purpose of which is to improve the ranking of a website in the search engines.
- Search Engine Results Page- Search Engine Results Page displays the results of a search term.
- Spider- a spider is an application that scans different web pages from websites all over the world. It is useful in gathering information for search engines so as to be able to index them better.
These are the basic terms associated with Search Engine Marketing. This will help you understand the concept better and will also familiarize you with the process behind Search Engine Marketing.
Dedicated Hosting And Its Advantages
Hosting is the process of leasing a server by individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. What, then, is Dedicated Hosting? Dedicated hosting occurs when an organization or company leases the entire server, which is not shared with others. Having a server which is entirely dedicated to your website is an expensive task but it offers a unique identity to the website. Dedicated hosting is used to host sites that receive innumerable visitors per month. Let us discuss the various advantages of dedicated web hosting.
- Unique IP Address- if you go for dedicated server for your website then you are safe from scammers. In case of shared web hosting, all webmasters share the same IP address due to which various scammers can upload illegal sites to the server, which can affect your website as well. If you have your server, then other webmasters or scammers cannot upload any illegal sites to your server.
- Full Control- if you have a dedicated server, then you have full control over all the aspects of your website whether it’s the server or domain. You do not have to share your domain name with other webmasters and can have a unique identity for your website.
- No Overloading- sharing a server is the same as sharing a room or house with someone. Due to too many belongings, yours and your roommates’, the room tends to get packed or overloaded. Then it becomes harder to find your own things. The same thing happens with a server. If you are sharing a server with other webmasters, then the sever will get overloaded and users may not be able to access your website, which will diminish the popularity of your website. Having a dedicated hosting offers an increased bandwidth that is essential if you have a large website. Increased bandwidth will allow more visitors to your website without any overloading.
- Increased Disk Space- if you want a larger disk space for your website then it is essential that you go for dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting offers a huge disk space and helps your videos and podcasts run faster, if you have any, by creating less buffering problems.
The above mentioned advantages are enough to tempt you into having your own dedicated server. It will help your website in many ways and increase its popularity as well.
Social Media…. Let’s know the basics
You must have heard a lot about Social Media but are still in a quest of understanding, what it actually means? If yes, then this write up is there to help you learn about social media completely. Social Media is constituted by two words, one is Social and other is Media. Media is an instrument or a vehicle of communication like radio, newspaper, etc. And, social means society. So, Social Media stands as a social instrument of communication. Social media is a very powerful tool that not just gives you information, but also interacts with you. Unlike regular media, which can also be referred as one way street where one cannot give a feedback, Social Media gives a person liberty to share his views & opinions.
What are Social Media Websites?
A Social media website offers a common platform to the users where they can share their views, opinions and can directly communicate with each other. One can also be overwhelmed with the availability of plethora of social networking sites available these days. Some of the social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.
What Does Social Media Comprises Of?
- Online forums (e.g., DigitalPoint)
- Social networking sites (e.g., Twitter)
- Blogs (e.g., WordPress)
- Social bookmarking sites (e.g., Digg)
- Photo sharing sites (e.g. Flickr)
- User reviews (e.g., Amazon)
- Content aggregators (e.g., FriendFeed)
- Video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube)
- Streaming sites (e.g., Ustream)
- Crowd sourcing (e.g., Wikipedia)
The Main Factors For Using Social Media Websites Are:
√ Web traffic
√ Regular readers
√ Subscribers
√ Money
√ Links and exposure
How To Maximize Social Media Impact?
Large organizations appoint social media specialists for maintaining their company’s social media presence online. The best ways in which one can capitalize social media impact in minimum investment are:
- Focusing on not more than three social media sites at a time
- Scheduling timely interactions for each social media everyday
- Don’t advertise your business, rather interact with target audience
- Efficiently manage your social media tool
Downfalls of Social Media:
- Availability of too many options
- Scarcity of time
- Too many users
Today, every big and small firm is rushing towards establishing its identity on the social media platform. The only thing that the companies need is, to set manageable and measureable goals. Start with the targets that are likely to be achieved by your company. Your ultimate aim is to build customer trust and loyalty.
So, social media is basically the user generated content and a compilation of websites, which allows people to interact and communicate online. Hope this article has helped you in drawing a clearer picture of what actually social media is all about.
Main Factors for SEO Ranking
What is SEO Ranking? Have you ever wondered why SEO Ranking is so important for your website? If you don’t know, then read the write up to determine the significance of SEO Ranking for your website.
Every website owner wishes his website to rank on the first page of a search engine like Google, AOL, MSN, etc. A website’s fate e.g. it’s ranking in Google Search Engine is not determined by a single factor. There are many important factors that collectively decide ranking of a website on the search engine. If you have been thinking for a long time why your website doesn’t rank well on a search engine then after reading this article, you can surely get answer to your queries.
Most important SEO Ranking Factors are:
- Keywords Preference:
The urge of a website owner of getting his website listed on the first few pages of search engine can get fulfilled by the use of appropriate keywords in the title tag. Every web user searches information with the help of certain keywords. And due to time constraint, the users browse through only the first three pages of the results displayed by search engine. So, optimize your website by using adequate keywords in content of each page. - Link Popularity of a Website:
One of the most important factors that can affect the visibility of a website on the search engine is link popularity of the linking page. This means that the websites to which you link should be 100% relevant to your business and industry. Suppose, if you are dealing in cosmetics and you are linking to a site that deals in toys, then of course it will have impact on your rankings. - Diversifying the Link Sources for Search Engine Spiders:
Half of the ranking game is won if the website is easily indexable by the search engine spiders. Suppose, there are 5000 pages in your website and 4000 of them are near replicas, then search engines in order to reduce the clutter can de-index these pages, thereby affecting the ranking of the site. Therefore, to reduce attrition and increase ranking of your site on search engine, use sitemaps, strong primary and secondary navigations, hub pages and images with alt attributes. - Domain’s Age:
Age of the site plays vital role in determining the ranking of website on search engine. It is ascertained that the business is established, if the website has online presence of several years. This age factor also helps in building trust. - Uniqueness of Content
To differentiate from other pages and flourish the business in this competitive scenario, it is requisite to incorporate unique content on each page of the site. For standing as a relevant landing page, it is mandatory to shape up the website with different and exclusive content, not by just creating replicas of already running text.
Factors Influencing the Websites Ranking on Search Engines are:
- Spam sites/pages
- Copied content that is already running on other websites
- Frequent downtime or Inaccessible of server to the bots
- Cloaking by users
- Link acquisition from unknown links
So, in order to rank on the top pages of the search engines, it is necessary for a website to excel in the above mentioned steps. Your time, energy & little efforts can surely make your website, a top ranking site on the search engine.
CSS Optimization for a Faster Website
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!
