"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code." - Blogging RockStar
Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category
404 – It’s all about Error Handling and User Experience
September 10th, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star
For those not in the know, a “404″ error is also known as a “page not found” error.
When a 404 page is encountered, many people will not make an effort to find the missing page.
While some people might hit the Back button and try again, some might just leave and move on to another website.
In other words, every 404 error is a potentially lost visitor and loss of opportunity.
But there is no reason to allow visitors to leave disappointed, so why not create a custom “404 page” that can help visitors find what they thought they’d find on your website and keep their stay on your website longer?
When creating a custom 404 page, here are some things to keep in mind: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in HTML + Technology + Tips & Tricks + Web Design | 
No Comments »
Get Your Tabbed Design Right
August 24th, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star
Since the time Amazon made a tabbed interface popular, web designers have been talking about the design pattern. Are tabs good? Are they bad? How do you make them?
Amazon has since removed tabs from their site, but it’s still a useful metaphor when done right. So what’s right and wrong? The Usability Post shares 5 tips for tabbed navigation:
- Connect the active tab to the content
- Make other tabs a different color
- Change the font color on the active tab
- Have the link area span the whole size of the tab
- Make sure the landing page has its own active tab
Each step is illustrated with the right and wrong way, and explained. That’s helpful. Now you can include tabs on your website without the wrath of the entire design community (you’ll never avoid all the wrath, no matter what you do). Just don’t look like Amazon in 2000:
If you’d like to implement tabs and don’t know how to do them, you can’t miss with this classic A List Apart tutorial.
Originally posted on PlanetSean.com
Posted in HTML + Web Design | No Comments »
Adobe’s Flash Videos now Searchable through Google
July 1st, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star
Talk to most website designers and most will tell you to be weary of Flash contents when building your site.
While the temptation is great to use Flash to deliver an impressive and flawless presentation to your clients, such usage may also bring about other problematic issues.
Perhaps the most pressing one of them all is the fact that search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, are not able to crawl through the dynamic contents in a flash set up.
This makes it impossible for search engines to rank these web pages and link users to them.
However, times have changed and technology is starting to catch up.
Adobe System Inc. has just announced that they are releasing a customized version of its Flash Player software, which enables search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, to “see” the elements of the web pages embedded in the Flash files. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Google + SEO + Web Design | No Comments »
Are META and ALT tags still important?
May 28th, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star
If you’ve ever wanted to rank higher on the search engines, you’ve likely stumbled on many guides on Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
In general, most of the SEO guides will include a “good SEO” checklist:
- Links
- Content is King
- Sitemaps
- Keywords in your URL
- H1 instead of H2
And you’re probably wondering what about META tags.
Background Information:
The META tag was a way to insert text into an HTML page that is only visible to search engines crawlers. Four of the seven major crawlers in the mid-1990s supported the META tag.
Unfortunately, the tag was widely abused and many of the early crawlers dropped the tag from their ranking equation.
Many people also believe that newer search engines never even considered meta keyword tags in their ranking logarithm.
So, is META tags really not worth the trouble or time anymore?
What Google has to say:
As Google is the dominant search engine, we want to see what Google has to say about META tags.
Here are some articles found on the official Google Blog:
- Answer more popular picks: meta tags and web search
- Webmaster tips for creating accessible, crawlable sites
- The anatomy of a search result
So, now we know Google does consider the Title and META description tags.
<meta name=”description” content=”A description of the page”>
This tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations the META description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results.
For more reading:
- Improve snippets with a meta description makeover
- Meta Descriptions still very important for SEO
- SEO those meta descriptions for more Google Visitors
<title>The title of the page</title>
Although the <title> tag is not technically a meta tag, it is often used with the description tag. The contents of this tag are generally shown as the title in search results and in the user’s browser when visiting the page or viewing bookmarks.
For more reading:
What about ALT attributes?
ALT tags are “alternative information” source for images on your website. Not all intended audience see the images on your website: people who have chosen to disable images in their browsers, people using text-to-speech browsers, and search engine crawlers.
The Google crawler, or Googlebot, does not see your images but rather it looks at the ALT attribute for a text equivalent of the image to determine what it is about. Thus having an ALT attribute is useful especially for Google Images ranking.
For more reading:
Even though META tags and ALT attributes do not play a big part in your search engine ranking, it’s always better to have proper tags than no tags at all.
Posted in SEO + Web Design | No Comments »
Find out what visitors are doing on your website
May 15th, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star
A hit counter can tell you the number of hits (or visits) to your website, but if you want to learn about your website traffic and what visitors are doing on your website, you will need to use an analytics application or tool.
Well, here are some website statistics applications and tools you can try:
1. Crazy Egg – http://crazyegg.com
Crazy Egg is a web traffic visualization tool. By pasting a line of JavaScript on your web page, you can learn what visitors are doing on your website. Crazy Egg gives you reports on where visitor click on your website. This helps you figure out your visitors usage pattern and the hotspots on your website.
2. Compete – http://www.compete.com
Want to see how your website measures up to the competition? Compare competitors’ websites on Compete.com.
3. Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics
Learn about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your website. All you have to do is copy and paste the Google Analytics tracking code into each of your website pages and tracking begins immediately.
4. SiteCounter – http://www.statcounter.com
Similar to Google Analytics, all you need to do is copy and paste a simple code on your web page to get reports on visits, page views, and referring source to your website.
5. Clicky Web Analytics – http://getclicky.com
You are given two lines of HTML code to place on your website. The code then lets Clicky monitor all your site traffic, including each individual visitor’s usage and action. You can get your stats via the account dashboard or have Clicky send them to you via RSS feeds.
These are just a few of the website statistic tools and programs out there that I have personally tried. If you have tried other ones, let me know in the comments.
Posted in Web Design | No Comments »
