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Why Your Site Needs to be W3C Validated

Written by on March 14, 2012

When you’ve looked in the html of most designs, you’ve probably noticed that there is a little piece of code that is at the top that validates it… but why is this there, and what is it for? When you’re having a site designed you need it to be W3C complaint and validated! The W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium, and they set the web’s best standards and practices for design and code. If your design can pass their standards for compliance, you’ll be able to show up on all modern devices (like tablets, mobile phones and computers for example) and browsers, plus load quickly on most connections.  W3C validation also checks your grammar and spelling too, so you’ll be able to make sure that everything is on the level!

What W3C Validation Does

Every time we turn around there are new updates to CSS, HTML (xml, dhtml, how many more htmls can there be?!) Javascript and more that it’s hard to keep up. A W3C validation check at the beginning of your code helps you know that your site is always valid, and if something becomes outdated you’ll be able to get it fixed quickly.

  • Make Sure Your Site Works with Any Browser: There are about five different browsers that most people use, and dozens out there that may not render things correctly. W3C compliance means you’re going to get the exact same result in every browser, every time. There will be a few quirks that make the pages a little different in some instances, but on the whole you’ll be able to give it a uniform experience.
  • Shrink Down the Size of Your Site: Modern websites can easily become bloated blobs of code, but with W3C validation you’ll be able to cut down the size of your code and keep it fast loading for people even on slow connections! You might think everyone has high speed internet now, but even mobile phones can be a little slow.
  • Reach a Wider Audience: When people can access your site across a wide variety of browsers and platforms, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience. If people can’t get your site to load, they’re not going to come back again and see if it works that time. When it loads, it works; when it works they’ll look to you as a resource!

What W3C Validation Means for You

When you are having your website redesigned or designed for the first time, the designer should check to see if your code is valid. It’s one of the easiest signs for you to know that you are in good hands with a professional designer. They’ll also check their own code for bloat and lag with the validator, so you’ll know you’re getting clean clear code in your new site and it’ll be small enough to load on even the junkiest mobile phone! With W3C validation you’ll be able to sidestep the most esoteric code errors before they end up on your website, and you’ll be able to put a professional face forward.

Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Website Design

How SEO Affects Website Design

Written by on March 10, 2012

Have you ever heard the saying “Design follows copy”? If not, you need to! What content is on your site will dictate design, and you should never have the design of your website done before you have copy! But one of the most important parts of content is SEO, and if your design isn’t good for SEO it’s not going to help you make money online. But, hey, who cares about SEO? Here’s why you should:

There are two sites online that are selling personal security products like hidden cameras. One retailer has opted for a CMS called OpenCart but never bothered to implement even basic SEO on his website design; the second retailer is using WordPress with an SEO suite that makes sure all of his pages are tagged correctly, that his keyword appears 3-4% of the time on every page, and that high PR websites get pinged from time to time. The first retailer fails and never gets customers to his site because no one knows he’s even there. The second retailer who paid attention to SEO and worked hard to get in the good graces of the search engines like Google and Bing is highly successful.

When you pay attention to SEO, you’ll be able to be successful online. But how do you know what you’re doing is right, and what is SEO anyway?

What is SEO?

SEO is a set of different methods that get you link love from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines! When you play by their rules, you’ll start showing up for your keywords and get much more traffic than if you just handed out business cards and hoped that people just come to your site on their own.

What do SEO and Design Have to do with Each Other?

Web Design and SEO seem like their worlds apart,  but they’re not! Design is the visual representation of your site, but design alone can’t drive sales and signups. SEO pushes people to your website, but if your site looks cheap no one is going to buy anything. These two things work together in tandem so you’ll be able to get the results you need to be successful online. You can’t be successful with a pretty site and no SEO, and you won’t be able to drive sales with great SEO and an ugly site. You’ll want to make sure both of these are taken care of before you launch your website.

What is Good Design?

Now that you know what good SEO is, you need to know what good design is:

  • Appealing to your audience
  • Good navigation and clean coding (loads quickly and people can find their way around)
  • SEO optimised content
  • Images that are tagged and relevant to the website
  • Prominent logo and contact information

Your design should put your potential buyers at ease. With great web design, great SEO and all the information they need about your product at their fingertips, they have no excuse not to buy!

Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Website Design

WordPress: Blogging Made Easy

Written by on March 9, 2012

Blogging is a fact of life if you want your business to be successful online, but getting started blogging can be just plain hard. When you use WordPress all the hard stuff is taken care of for you, and all you have to do is come up with stuff to write about! If you’re tired of struggling with complicated website software, hiring programmers and designers to constantly update your design and site, you need a WordPress website design. The best thing about WordPress is that it’s FREE; you won’t have to spend a dime on upgrades (but once in awhile you may have to update your design to work with new features).

What is WordPress?

If you’ve never used WordPress before, you are missing out! This CMS (content management system) allows you to publish your content fast and easy, and it has all the SEO tools you could ever need to leapfrog ahead of your competition. It’s built around the idea of “push button publishing”, meaning you shouldn’t have to do anything more than press a button to edit or publish your content. So if you’re tired of trying to get a blog that works, you need WordPress!

What You Need for WordPress

You’ll need a few things for a WordPress blog before you start setting it up. You’ll need hosting and a domain, and you can get these through HostGator, 1and1 and a whole host of other different web hosts. You can check around and find coupons (especially for GoDaddy and HostGator in particular) to bump down the price of your hosting and domain. Whatever host you go with, make sure it comes with databases and supports PHP5 (PHP 4 at the least).

Getting Started with WordPress

After you have a good host and a domain name, you’ll want to install WordPress. You can get the latest version of WordPress here, and you’ll save the zip to your computer. You’ll extract the zip and place the folder on your server with FTP (if you don’t know how to do this, check out the install guide for WordPress here) and you can start installing it. Make sure you read the install guide; it’s not that hard to get it up and running.

Once WordPress is installed, you’re going to want to make your first post! You’ll want to click on the “Posts” tab in the admin panel, and then you can fill out the title box (this is where the title of your post goes) and then you fill out the content box. When you’re done, you hit publish and you’re ready to go! If you ever want to edit or delete a post it’s just as easy as making one, all you have to do is pick the option and go.

Using WordPress to start blogging is the best way to get your website out there. While there are a lot of other CMSs, none do the job that WordPress does. Check it out today and see what it can do for you!

Categories: Website Design

WordPress Web Design for Small Business

Written by on March 7, 2012

If your small business website is using WordPress to spread the good news about your products and services, great! You’re halfway towards finally being successful online; but one of the mistakes many small businesspersons make is using a generic template to power their website. You just can’t use a cookie cutter WordPress theme if you want to leapfrog ahead of your competition, and you’re going to have to have a design that’s as unique and interesting as your business! Here we’re going to talk about what you need to look for when choosing a WordPress designer, and how you can really set yourself apart!

You Can do it Yourself with WordPress

You can do your own design with WordPress, but you’re going to need a lot of time to dedicate to learning it; the learning curve can be really steep, but you can do it! The first place to check out how to design your own small business WordPress site is the WordPress codex (learning depot). Here you’ll be able to learn all about themes (child and parent), how WordPress works and you can even learn a little PHP along the way. You don’t have to leave it all in the hands of a designer when you can do it yourself. Even if you end up hiring a web designer, you should learn a bit about it so you don’t have to sweat the small stuff and fix small problems that can cost you big money on your own.

Premium Themes

If you’re going to use a premade them, you’re going to want to choose a premium theme. These cost money, but there are price ranges that can go anywhere from $15-$200 (most won’t go this high, but it depends on what you’re going to be using your theme for). If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering “Why should I pay for themes when I can get them for free?” Free themes can be GREAT, but you have to keep in mind that there are tons of other people out there who have the same exact theme. When you’re running a business, you have to keep in mind that you need to stand out from your competition and have a design that reflects you as a company.

WordPress Saves You Money

WordPress saves you money, plain and simple. You shouldn’t have to worry about spending thousands of dollars to get a great small business site, but you should make sure it’s up to the quality and standards of your business. When you choose WordPress, you’re going to be able to get a fantastic website custom built just for you, but in half the time and without having to spend that “from scratch” price tag.

With WordPress you get all the perks your small business site needs to survive and thrive, but you can do it on a small business budget and really get a design that suits you as a company!

Categories: Website Design

Everything You Need to Know about Web 2.0

Written by on March 3, 2012

Web 2.0 is one of the biggest buzzwords online… but what exactly is it? Web 2.0 web design is all about making the internet more interactive; if you used the internet 10 years ago you know it was all about reading content other people created and sifting through information. With the social web, we can interact, meet, discuss and more, all from the comfort of whatever web device you want to use. It’s all about choices, but when you’re a business owner your choices can get a little crazy! Here we’re going to go over everything you need to know about web 2.0 and how you can get the benefits of the social web and reap profits from places you didn’t even know existed! 

Why is Web 2.0 Important?

Like mentioned earlier, you have to realise that before web 2.0 came along the internet was like a book everyone could write in. With the rise of social media, we are all able to take part in the internet, no matter what our level of tech savvy is! It democratised the internet in ways that were never imagined before. If you want your website to shoot to the top of the search engines, you’re going to have to give your website a web 2.0 makeover. But what makes a site web 2.0, and what makes it a step in the wrong direction?

What Web 2.0 Design Is

Web 2.0 design is all about being social. You’ll want to have a website that gives the users a chance to interact with you. Widgets that allow people to share your content on Facebook and Reddit, Google+ buttons that help Google look at you that much more favorably; all these things help you have a great handle on the sharing aspect of web 2.0.

Web 2.0 web design doesn’t stop there though! You’re going to also want to look at multimedia experiences; if you have a blog, start incorporating video blogs so people can have a whole other level of dimensionality with their user experience. You want to create more and more layers to the user experience so you can get your readers and visitors really involved with your products and services.

People want to participate, so make sure you sign up and plug your website into social media. Have a Facebook fan page where people can sound off on your products and services, and have twitter accounts so you can share news about your products with the people who actually want to buy your products and services!

Going Web 2.0

If you want to go web 2.0 with your site, you’re going to want a dynamic solution like WordPress to make sure you’re taking full advantage of all the social web options that can help you get a jump start on your competition! We all know that business can be slow to change, and if you can beat them to the punch you’ll have the loyal user base to get ahead!

Categories: Website Design

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