We're almost three months into 2008 and we've launched 3 new websites already with a fourth coming within the next week! The
dotServing | Creative team has been pretty busy releasing new sites! Check em out and let us know what you think!
dotServing | Creative event has a ticker to help you keep track of our new releases!
I've been watching a couple new online websites developed by some other local Island companies. One of which has been online for 3 months now. I can never remember the exact URL of this particular site however often type it in at Google to search for it. Each time I type it in, I am astonished that it never shows up and must reference another site to find it.
When placing a new website online, it is extremely important that your website can be found by people searching for it online and not only by getting your domain name from your business card. Especially when people type in your exact domain name.
For example, tonight I was searching say sun dried tomatoes. If nothing else, I would expect sundriedtomatoes.com to come out, however the particular site I was looking for did not.
This is clearly a sign that someone did not complete the work of this particular site and is rather disappointing.
However, the idea behind it was not so smart either. The owner of the site was looking for a very low cost solution and now, no one can find their site. Whats the point of having a website no on can find? Especially when they type in your exact domain name!
There are multiple reasons why we build websites. My two favorite are the looks of amazement that our client gives us after we show them the finished product and the emails/conversations we have down the road.
On a recent (Friday Feb 1st to Sunday Feb 3rd) road trip to Halifax, NS a client was astonished with the return their website had brought them. Within a few days of launching their site, the website paid for itself! The site was an instant hit and now, every time I see this client, the owner is informing me of a new big multi-thousand dollar sale that they just received through their website! While some may not view this as much, for this particular client it was more then they expected. They used to receive 3-4 sales per year on their site before we built them their new website, now they are receiving more sales in a week then they had in a entire year! Due to the increased growth in web sales, they are going to be expanding their production to keep up!
After returning from Halifax, another local client ended up sending myself an email reporting their website had paid for itself as well! While their site was launched about two weeks ago, they were majorly excited with the increase in sales in their business.
While these messages from our clients are becoming more frequent, I always enjoy listening to the success that our
development team is bringing our clients.
Hearing about the major success of their site is the second best reason for developing websites! (Of course, the first is seeing the happiness we bring our clients after showing them their completed website for the first time.)
When designing a website, you must always have user friendlyness in mind no matter what. Forcing the user to do things one way is not the best approach as everyone is different and people like to do things their own way.
A benefit of using frames or iframes is it allows you to improve the ease of use for your website, if done right.
Done wrong is when the viewer can obviously see the scroll bar of the iframe. I have yet to see a webpage with two scroll bars (besides an input text box) that looks good.
Before, iframes weren't such a bad thing if they were placed properly and not viewable as iframes. Now, that more and more people are catching onto
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the use of iframes has diminished. With frames, you could run the function or query within the browser and now with AJAX you can do the same thing.
Optimizing your website for search engines is a key ingredient to helping your website get the most bang for its buck.
A couple months ago, I wrote one tip (
using ALT tags) on search engine optimization.
It said, use "alt" tags within your "img" tags. The reason behind this was because the "alt" stands for alternative text. People usually use description words of the image within the "alt" tag. Therefore, the alt tag usually specifies a description of the image. Too google, this is a great way to determine what text on on a website!
Another important tip is to put as much relevant content as you can on your website. Ten years ago, a freebee website owner told me the saying, "content is king". Truer words have never been spoken. With your website, the more content you have the better. While you may feel it has little to no value on your website, it is a huge boost when the search engines come knocking on your door.
Another tip is to have dynamically changing content on your site, much like a blog! In fact, our blog is heavily visited by Google because Google is aware that content on this page changes more frequently then the other pages. Therefore, Google likes to keep up to date with new content and will come back to your site to visit it.
Another example of dynamic content is
PEIinfo. When you visit the main page you will notice 2 RSS feeds. The Guardian news & CBC news. By listing both news outlets on the website, they are in a sense updating the site for me! This requires no work, and google will notice the new content!
Thanks to both news outlets, google visits the site thousands of times a day. This also allows me to manipulate google into reading new websites and getting them listed sooner.
