Infinite Path » Web Design

A cautionary website story from the Sun

admin — Fri, 13 May 2011 12:49:46 +0000

Britain’s newspapers still haven’t successfully embraced the digital world to its full extent, if a new study is to be believed.

Webcredible looked at publications across a range of platforms including their internet and mobile sites, and version for the iPhone and iPad. The Sun, Britain’s biggest selling daily, fared worse with its mobile site and iPad app coming in for particular criticism.

However, even the massively popular Daily Mail was found wanting, with the report highlighting the website’s “confusing” home page.

The Guardian was top of the tree, although none of the ten publications looked at managed to score more than 3.9 out of a possible 5.

Equally as worrying was the revelation that publishers are failing to integrate their efforts across the various platforms, meaning they are missing out on offering visitors an improved experience and that fact the average score across all platforms and newspapers was a distinctly average looking 2.8.

It might be tempting to look at this and conclude good web design isn’t important as these sites continue to attract plenty of visitors, but the newspapers in question are well-established brands and people are viewing their efforts despite the problems.

Many other companies don’t have the luxury of a high-profile and a massive amount of interesting content, meaning that any problems with the look and feel of a site will lead to visitors giving up and logging off, never to return.

There’s no excuse for poor web design. Doing things properly might cost money, but a clunky site will cost you customers.

The Future of Web Design: What Next?

Infinite Path — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:00:04 +0000

Web design and web development are two elements which, like most things online, evolve constantly. New ideas and trends emerge on a daily basis, causing thousands of people to post articles such as this one explaining their views on the subject.

In reality, it is impossible to pin down the direction in which web design and web development are going. Many of the designers who were playing with Dreamweaver 10 years ago now no longer design but merely talk about how to do it and contemplate what it will become. This is what makes it a fascinating part of the online industry.

Who’s to say what will happen in the next year, two years or even 10 years? As technology evolves, requirements become far more complex. It is equally fascinating to think that those designers, who once spent days and nights in their bedroom learning code, now do not actually need to work in the traditional sense. Instead, they talk about how they think other people should work.

The most intriguing aspect of web design evolution is the manner in which it often comes about. In many instances, new trends and methods emerge as a direct result of a client requirement. It isn’t necessarily the design focussed, innovative designer; it is the person who could not design to save their life who views html code as a language for aliens.

Web designers sometimes see themselves as visionaries and it can be tempting to dismiss ideas from the simpleton who just doesn’t understand. However, in actual fact, many advances online occur as a result of initial ideas from the most unlikely sources.

So, who will force the change of the next generation of websites? Will it be a designer, a developer or just an average Joe who needs an online presence?

Why Competition and Comparison Aren’t Always Healthy

Six Reasons why Flash should be Avoided at all Costs

Infinite Path — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:31:36 +0000

If you’re designing and running your own website, you will probably have heard people advising you to avoid flash at all costs. This is all well and good but do you really know the reasons why it should be avoided? The truth is that there are far more than six good reasons to avoid using it but the main ones are as follows:

1. If you have a Flash intro on your site, every single visitor will be annoyed. This may be a generalisation but, on the whole, nobody is interested in Flash intros, particularly if they have to view them each and every time they visit your site. With SEO, you want to encourage revisits as much as new visits and Flash intros are likely to contribute to a decreasing revisit rate.

2. Flash files come with timing issues. They take ages (in relative web terms) to load and in this day and age of speed and impatience when it comes to websites, people may click away instead of waiting. People want to find good information on the web but, more importantly, they don’t want to waste time looking for it.

3. Human beings are not the only ones who get annoyed by Flash. Websites that only use Flash are giving the search engines a really hard time. The search engines find it difficult indexing and searching through these websites and this makes the whole process of SEO extremely difficult.

4. Websites which just use Flash may not have unique URLs for each page. This causes problems with regards to indexing individual pages in the search engines, bookmarking, and inbound linking. A good website should have an abundance of internal linking but this will not be possible for Flash websites. Furthermore, if you’re trying to get back-links from other websites, you will only be getting links to your homepage since there are no deeper links to be found. This is tantamount to SEO suicide.

5. These websites have basic issues with usability. Simple actions performed by visitors commonly are impossible on certain sites using Flash. These actions include highlighting text in order to copy and paste it somewhere else or trying to alter the font of the text.

6. Access is a major problem with Flash. Whilst Flash will be installed on most browsers, you cannot guarantee that your visitor will have the latest version installed. Very few people will bother updating their version just to access the content on your website.

A Brief Introduction to Meta Tags

Infinite Path — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:59:45 +0000

Regarded by some as the be all and end all of SEO, meta tags are just one component of a successful online marketing campaign. Most of the time, when people mention meta tags, they are talking about meta description or meta keyword tags, or both. The importance of optimizing your meta tags is debatable (mainly because search engines are aware of how open to manipulation they can be so do not place too much emphasis upon them) but it certainly isn’t worth ignoring them. Having said this, don’t waste too much of your time dwelling over the exact wording of your meta description tag. With regards to your meta keywords tags, pick a couple of keywords which apply to each page. Spend a few minutes doing this before moving on to the description tag.

The reason why the keyword tag should not take long is that it should come as second nature to you. You should know what each of your pages is discussing and should be able to think of relevant variations quickly. This tag is the place to think about popular misspellings of your company name, product, or service. Include a few likely misspellings on each page. If there are any words that sound almost exactly like one of your keywords, think about including them as well. With regards to rankings, doing this is not likely to impact upon search engine rankings in isolation, so make sure you also pay close attention to the words you include in your on-page content.

Some search engines use the content provided in your meta description tag to show a brief description of your site under the title of your website when search results are displayed. This is not always the case and it is common for the search engines to extract a useful excerpt from the actual content on your page instead. However, it is worth spending some time thinking about this tag just in case. Unlike your keyword tag, this tag should not read as if it has been written by a robot for the search engines. It should appeal to real human visitors and should be interesting yet accurate enough to encourage them to click on the link to your site. You should include one or several of your keywords in this tag but not to the extent that it appears unnatural.

Remember that paying close attention to your meta tags will only be worthwhile if you work extremely hard on the other areas of SEO, including link campaigns and content creation. If you neglect these aspects in favour of meta tag optimization, you will be doing yourself no favours at all.