Backlinks what are they and what they can do for your website?
Backlinks are simply links from other websites back to yours, or another site, they are also known as Inbound Links (IBLs). These links are basically the placing of your web address on another’s page, linking to your site and allowing others to easily click and get to your website.
How to know when your website needs a redesign?
How to Know When your Website Needs Redesign
Redesign of a website is often dreaded by many; however, there are generally a number of signs that show you when such a reshape is necessary.
Metrics
If it looks like your metrics (also known as web analytics) are down, then a redesign may be part of your rethink of where everything is going. Now, of course this could also be a product issue, but websites are often to blame. Reducing trends in conversions, sales and participation can be something to do with your sites current design aging. It is essentially your audience getting tired with your current design. The biggest factor if this happens to be understanding what went wrong and where it’s gone wrong. Just adjusting your page, or the conversion flow can have significant effects, and you can save time by doing so.
Users
Contact your users, send them out surveys and ask them what’s wrong, this can often result in you getting to the core of the problem. Usability tests are especially important and conversations on a person-to-person basis allow you to delve deeper than a survey ever could. These can allow you to see undertones, you wouldn’t with surveys. If your brand is considered in a negative light, then look for a redesign – this can all be seen in depth by talking to customers directly.
Tech/ UX Debt
Over a lifetime of a website, you accrue tech/UX debt. This is created during shortcuts around the site, from the initial build over a lifetime of short cuts and corner cutting. Over time these all add up to create a Tech /UX Debt that is a greater cost than the size of continuing to upgrade the site, and you are better off starting from scratch and building a new, clean site. Fixing all the elements can cost more than a new site, and so a rebuild is necessary.
Old Looking
Some sites just age with time and they need a rethink every so often. Sites date. Aesthetics changed, and politicians were honourable when you were young. Keep with the times with a new and updated site. This will aid declining metrics and ensure you are up to date with the competition. Look at brands who are performing well and then assess your site in relation to them. Make sure to look objectively, but also fairly as looking at your own site day in day out can make you feel it is older before its time. Do a cross-section of options to get an accurate reflection, before making rapid changes.
12 Month Rule
More than 12 months can make a significant difference in your site and should be looked at. This refreshes the experience for customers and also breathes fresh air into the site. This will impress customers, the press, other design companies and others and ensure your site looks fresh and attractive.
Following these factors ensures that your site is up to date, but isn’t exhaustive in its width. Access each factor and try and maintain a fresh face to the world.
The Difference between Web Designers and Web Developers
Though often confused, there are as many disparities between the work of a web designer and a web developer as there is between a policeman and a traffic warden.
Both work on websites, and the two jobs are often considered as interchangeable by many without a deeper grasp of website creation. Essentially, web designers are the artists of the site; whose main job is to make the website look attractive.
Designers
They use a number of tools to create the visual aspects of the site, including Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Talking to them about Base64 encoding, Soap requests and other development, or programming lingo may generally draw a blank face. Many of these designers are trained in typefaces, layouts and usability and try and get inside the companies head and understand their vision and what they require.
Developers
Unlike designers, who is generally a stylish bunch, web developers work on the site mechanics. They design everything from the backend to the way the site works.
They use a number of programming languages, including Java, CSS, HTML and SQL. They will also use a text editor or IDE, a number of browsers and development plug ins.
The Site
Without developed the site may look beautiful, but won’t function well. Badly developed sites are slow, break quite often and are a general hindrance to your business. On the opposite side of the coin, badly designed sites also mean a number of issues.
Website design not only makes sites more attractive, but also means more engagement with customers, better placement of aspects of the site that encourage selling and higher conversion rates. Good designers know where to place items for maximum effect and so are equally worth their weight in gold.
However, due to lack of knowledge of the industry, monetary problems and a range of other issues it is all too common to find one or the other of these people doing both jobs. This is often the reason why web projects fail miserably. Unattractive looking, or feeling pages mean people feel confused, bored, or wary and so avoid them and go to other sites.
How to Get the Best
Defining a clear boundary between both is the best way to get the most from both individuals in these positions and get the top site you can afford.
The best way to choose one or the other is defining what you require for the job. Some of these professionals will have picked up some of the other’s skills along the way. If you’re looking for someone to do a job that is a vast percentage development, with a tiny amount of design you may be able to get away with a developer only, and vice-versa for a designer. However, it is recommended to choose both for any job that involves a reasonable amount of both.
WordPress
WordPress CMS
WordPress is an open source CMS and the core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and can be extended with thousands of plugins to cover most requirements.
Magento
Magento eCommerce
Magento eCommerce platform is a versatile feature-reach and flexible open source shopping cart. When it comes to flexibility, design and development nothing else are comparable to Magento.
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine CMS
Expression Engine is one of the most powerful content management systems that exists and is the perfect tool to manage entire websites and build an engaged community of readers and customers.
Understanding SEO to improve your Website rankings
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of undertaking a number of measures to ensure that your web pages offers you the best, or most optimised chance of getting as high of Google ranking as possible.
With business’s increasingly going online, SEO offers websites, the chance to get as high of ranking as possible. A high ranking will significantly increase visibility and so views and clicks on your page. This in turn creates the chance for more revenue, conversions and is overall better for your business.
Common Mistakes in SEO Strategy
Common Mistakes in SEO Strategy
SEO strategies fail all the time and there are increasingly hundreds of things to do to optimise a page for SEO. However, of those dozens of things, there are some things more common and easier dealt with than most, which allow you to increase page rankings.
Keywords
Of course optimising your pages for the wrong keywords means you end up failing miserably. Using very generic keywords, or ones that don’t describe the exact page can lead to SEO failure. Each page should have a set of its own keywords for the best effect. To get the most from this write text around keywords, not the other way around.
Furthermore, ensure you try and rank competitive for broad keywords means you won’t really. So use targeted keywords that bring targeted traffic.
Low Optimisation
Optimising your page for loads of keywords will result in a lot of issues as regards SEO. Make sure keywords are closely related to each other and key the keywords low, using only the important ones.
Avoid stuffing with keywords as this will not only have no effect, but maybe even a negative one. Using a keyword analyser, or keeping them within certain limits will mean you have a significantly better chance of succeeding.
MetaTags and HTML Tags
Without these tags and poor usage of these tags, you will suffer SEO issues. Wrong use of the meta robot values can lead to noindex and nofollow and a disaster. Make sure landing pages can be optimised, and links are followed to make sure you get the best SEO.
Furthermore, ensure your SEO rankings and HTML code is proper as this will have effects on SEO. Ensuing all pages can be parsed by search engines is a good practice that wields positive results.
Duplicate Copy
Duplicate pages don’t come available to search engines and aren’t returned in searches. They are indexed but consume Page Rank juice, which can be used elsewhere.
Using 301 redirections you can reorganise and sort out your link’s structure. Though remember that some parts of pages are meant to be the same – menus, footer, header. This structure should be maintained across your site. However, do avoid news and other text across your site as it will hit the similarity percentage and should be avoided. Using duplicate content tools will prevent this and show you how much similarity there is. 30-35 per cent is okay, though it is best to keep it well below this for safety’s sake.
Multiple Pages with the same keywords
If you have this problem, you will have internal competition in your site for the same keywords among different pages. This affects your overall site ranking. Avoid this from happening by optimising for a small number of keywords on each page. This should help you avoid any such situations, which will bring down your search engine optimisation ranking.
Following these rules should go a long way to sorting out the larger problems in SEO and increasing page ranking.
Perfect Text for your website
Perfect Text for your website.
With Google’s continuing orientation towards content ever increasing and Google training its bots to check article quality, content has never been as important to the web. This factor alongside the book like handiness of tablets and smart-phones has led to the perfect text being a powerful and effective part of sites.
So how do we get the perfect paragraph?
Set out to wow the reader. Ensure the paragraph has the content to wow and the typography to gather on invisibility. Unassuming, crafted text is a thing of beauty and harder to do than is thought, at its best it provides a vague beautiful distraction, though should ideally allow for comfortable, flowing reading.
Arranging type is an old art and one lost by many as they battle with frameworks and protocol. Though, typesetting is an age-old discipline and should be adhered to.
The Typeface
Conventional wisdom states that only sans-serif fonts are to be used for body text during a web design. Though these fonts may seem a little less effective in smaller sizes, they do offer a number of advantages. Small x heights impair readability, though not all serif fonts impair readability. Georgia is a fine example of a font that offers great body text if set properly.
Look to see if the font has all the bold and italics and even the semi bolds and italics necessary. Headings need one style, but paragraphs need variation. Using the variation can make the style of a font more attractive, readable and clearer.
Rendering is also important. Some fonts are great for heading and some for bodies; it depends on the size most suited to the specific area.
Font and Measure
Below 16 pixels for text, and readability is compromised. This is because browsers render text at this size. If you wish for it to be larger, change in inclines of whole pixels.
The measure of text is the number of characters in the line of text. Comfortable measures are important for usability. This is because lines that are too long are awkward to scan. A good measure is between 45-75 characters per line, which is much less than most sites. The average in some studies is put at 88.74.
Leading and Vertical Rhythm
Leading is the space in between lines and is similar in terms of creating readability to measure. Leading divides letters and words, but should be judged to do so to prevent making letters and words appear fragmented.
Line height is the vertical measure of the space between lines. Line height should be set by equal font sizes. This is because these lines will be increased by 1.5 times when all is taken into account so a font of size 18 allows for size 9 of empty space and an overall size of 27; Whereas an uneven number won’t result in a whole number and causes issues.
Word Spacing
Paragraph text on web pages is set ragged right on HTML. The issue with hyphenation is also significant in HTML5. This is because to insert a hyphen in text (¬)must be included. This means ¬ must be included between words, which is also an irritation. Though Firefox and Safari support CSS3′s text justify properties, which give more control over text align: justify, which eases problems such as this with characters.
Finishing touches
Having considered the aforementioned factors, there are also other factors such as indentation, punctuation – which are both parts of rhythm. These and other factors make documents flow and create an attractive style making text more powerful and effective.
