waltdesign.com » Web Design

Monks Get Broadband

Walter Wimberly — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:00:59 +0000

“Patience is one of the characteristics of monastic life, but even the patience of the brothers was being tested by our slow Internet.”

FATHER DANIEL VAN SANTVOORT, Cistercian monk, on his Welsh island community’s decision to get broadband. Source

I’ve written several times about the need to have an efficient website, which can run fast enough for everyone to use. However, I guess some people didn’t get the message, and have caused the Monks to run out of patience.

Optimize your pages for better Pay-Per-Click placement

Walter Wimberly — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:46:31 +0000

I’ve written about optimizing your site before, but it was in regards on how to optimize your site based upon your usage.

Now there are other reasons to optimize your site, especially if you use Google’s Ad Words to advertise your business.

A little history

Google Ad Words was one of the first ways which small business owners could advertise on the web. It allowed you to create small ads based upon keywords which people typed into Google. Users could bid on key words to modify the placement of their ad.

If someone typed in a key word you requested, and you bid high enough, your ad was seen.

Enter the Quality Score

Unfortunately, many times the ads shown had only a little to do with the key word entered by the user. So Google added a quality score. The quality score, in combination with your bid, would drive the ads position.

The quality score looks at a variety of factors, such as:

landing page (the page which the ad leads to) optimized (or about) the key words that were bid on,
how often is the ad clicked (called the Click Through Rate),
does the page convert visitors into buyers (this is a minor factor only checked if few clicks are produced)
and other things.

Just like Google doesn’t tell us everything that goes into their Search Engine rankings, they don’t tell us everything that goes into setting their quality score, but the do sometimes give us some hints.

Page Optimization

The latest hint they gave us deals with page optimization. (learn more here at SEO Round Table) Interestingly, a poor load time for your page will negatively effect your quality score, but a good load time will not improve it.

Google recommends:

Use fewer redirects.
Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
Do not use interstitial pages.
Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.
Contact your webmaster or web hosting provider to discuss other ways of improving your web site’s load time.

So if noticed a recent drop in your visitors due to lower ad word placement, you might want to consider optimizing your site.

I personally see before too long, page load times affecting the regular ranking of pages as well.

Dayspring Community Church Web Site Update

Walter Wimberly — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:30:51 +0000

I am proud to announce the updates for Dayspring Community Church‘s website. As they just merged with Plymouth Church, it is fitting that they should have updated the UI for their site.

Updates include:

Restructuring the menu to be easier to read
Improving the Search Engine Friendliness of the site
Modification of the page layout
Optimizing the web pages to load faster
Adding a Web 2.0 style picture gallery

How to reduce your bounce rate

Walter Wimberly — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:09:41 +0000

In our last post, Why People Leave Your Web Site, we referenced the Bounce Rate, and why its not something you want your site to have much of.

In order to understand how to reduce your bounce rate you need to know why it is happening. Here are some unacceptable reasons why you might have a bounce, and what you can do to fix it:

Your site takes too long to load. This could mean you need more bandwidth/better server or, more likely, you need to optimize your site.
Your presentation is too simple/complicated. We could call this the ugly factor. While it might be unfair, people do judge a book by its cover. How your site looks will influence people’s decision to stay or leave.
You provide too much information. Long paragraphs, longer pages, no headlines, etc. make your text difficult to read. People want fast information, and if they can’t find it, they’ll go somewhere where they can.

However, you might have some reasonable “bounces”. Here are some acceptable reasons:

The user found the information right away – they were looking for your address and found it, wanted to know the price of X and now they do, etc. – no need to keep looking.
The user clicked on the wrong link/typed in the wrong address, noticed, and left right away. I’m looking for ABC, you’re CBA, and I figured it out. – This is a bummer, but it happens. The site address could have changed, a spelling error occurs, etc., but then you get the incorrect user, who may not even be looking for what you have to offer.

Because of things like this, you will usually have some bounce.

So what is an acceptable bounce rate?

This will often vary depending upon what type of site you offer. Just as sometimes you will walk into a store and leave, your users will not always purchase or even stay very long. This may be your site, it may be them.

The more niche your site, the less accidental users you will get. An Intranet site will be about as pure as you can get. One Intranet site I watch actually has a bounce rate of less than 7.75%. People generally only go there if they need to.

I oversee a niche site, that while they only get about 140 visits a day, their bounce rate hovers around 15-18%. This means very few people leave when they see the site, and they can convert more users. They also get a lot of links for authority sites, and word-of-mouth advertising. Their off-line marketing of their website helps them immensely.

For a more general website, what you will hear varies. Anywhere from 40-55% is considered common and acceptable. I like to find what I have, and work on reducing it from there.

5 Questions to Ask before integrating an existing Component into your Web Site

Walter Wimberly — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:15:27 +0000

I get people asking me about any of the 1000s of free website components and tools that exist all of the time. Sometimes these tools (shopping cart, ad rotator, content management system, etc.) might only provide 85% to 90% of what they need. Other times there might be a fee associated with it, and that is fine too – because when used properly a component can reduce the development time (and potentially cost) of your site.

In a perfect world, these components can be dropped them and work with your existing system. Well rarely is it that easy.

So before you rush in to use this new free tool, here is a list of 5 questions to ask before you choose a software component to add to your web site.

1) Will this tool provide the solution that you need? I have recently started integrating Word Press into some of my clients sites because it provides a robust solution to allowing someone to write, update, and add their own content (with in reason). While it is not the only solution, or a solution without faults, it does a good enough job in most circumstances.

2) What type of support do you have with this tool? One of the reasons I went with Word Press was because it is still being developed and made better. The developers are actively developing it, and there are other developers who provide add-on plug-ins to provide functionality in a timely manner or with something that might not make it into the main stream product. If your tool is being given away, it may not be developed as the developer looses interest or has to take paying work. Likewise, there is an active community of people who can help new users get the system up and running.

3) Can the tool be easily modified? This is important, especially if it only provides 85-90% of the functionality you need. If you need that extra 15%, will you be able to get it, or can you live without it? I’ve looked at different tools in the past that were too difficult to “fix” to the clients needs. In some cases, I’ve rewritten entire systems because it was faster to do it that way than figure out the problems with the old system and fix it the hard way. Again, with Word Press, I can make modifications to the way it looks (the theme) as well as some of the underlying functioning if need be. This was a huge advantage to going with this tool.

4) Are their any security concerns? No one wants to admit it, but there is always a risk of your site being hacked. Some of the biggest complaints about Word Press is the level of security is provides. It does well in some areas, but not as well in others. This can cause obvious problems – but other’s have provided tips on how to reduce the chances of their being a catastrophic issue.

5) Will it integrate into your existing site? Many components are just that, components. If they look like they stand out – then there is a problem. How many times have you been to a site where the wiki or the forums look just different from the rest of the site? (These are the worst culprits in my opinion.) This is the integration problem. Your uses should not notice when they move from one section of your website to another. It should be smooth and seamless. Being able to control the theme for Word Press has allowed me to change navigation structures, colors, and other look and feel opportunities. In many cases, the switch from the Word Press portion of the web site to the non-Word Press portion of the site has been completely seamless.

The three things that make up a website – Part II

Walter Wimberly — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:15:14 +0000

In our last posting, three things that make up a website, we mentioned the three things that you need to have a website, your domain name, your host, and your files.

We also talked about picking and getting your domain name. Remember to talk to your web designer/company, they should be able to help you come up with some good names. If not, you might need to consider a different web design company.

Get some web server space

This is the next item that needs to be taken care of. Your website, while a virtual thing out on Internet, has to reside on a physical server some place. When you request a web page, a computer will send the page and accompanying files that are requested. Most modern servers will also handle databases, sending e-mail, and e-commerce activities.

Web hosting will vary in cost from $4/month on up to tens of thousands of dollars a month. The reason for this difference is the levels of service that are provided such as:

Number of tech calls
Applications loaded on the server
Number of servers
Type of server
Etc.

Most web servers have multiple sites on the same server. The cheaper the cost of the server, the more sites they have to put on each server, which can cause the performance of your web server to degrade as more and more additional websites are loaded on the server.

In my experience with different hosts, working with different companies, I have found that host charging less than $7 or $8 a month are not worth having if you are going to host your company on it. This does not mean that more expensive is better; it is just a general rule to follow. Cheaper hosts may work wonderfully for a little while, or be fine for personal websites, but I generally do not trust them for a professional website.

I usually recommend this to be second, because until you have a host, the company that you register your domain name through will put up a “parking page”. What this means is that you will see a page that looks like the image on the left. This is allowing the domain registration company to earn money until you have web server space of your own, and update the DNS servers. (Your registration company should be able to tell you how to do that.)

You can always have a “temporary page” what is displayed while you have your main site being developed. This is something I commonly do for companies, that way we can express some information, while allowing your company to build a brand for itself on-line.

Depending on the type of site, as well as your host, you might have the choice between several different hosting “packages”. Each will provide you with different options for different prices. The two biggest line items to change will be your storage space and your transfer amount. You will probably want to find a host that will allow you to upgrade your hosting package easily, if you need the extra space/transfer allowance, as your website grows. This will allow you to save some money while your site is young and not as popular, and then expand as your on-line needs grow and you can afford the changes.

Publish the website file(s)

This is the only step that many people think is required. However, while it is important, without the previous two steps, it is for naught.

This is where you go and hire a web designer, or do it yourself, to generate and create a website. Now you upload the files that make up a website to the server space that you acquired in step two. Now when someone accesses your domain name (acquired in step one), they will see your website.

The three things that make up a website

Walter Wimberly — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 18:50:56 +0000

As someone who works with getting companies on the web, often for the first time, this is a question I am asked all of the time. While it may seem straightforward “Make a web page”, there is a little more to it than that, although not a lot.

There are three things that go into getting a website published, beyond all of the details like, how to make it, what to put on it, etc.

Have a domain name
Get some web server space
Publish the website file(s)

Let’s take a quick look at each piece to determine what this means. You will want to go in this order as well, but you don’t have to. As we go along, I’ll explain why I recommend following this order.

This will be a simple two part post, with part two coming shortly afterward.

Have a domain name

A domain name is what is typed into the web browser that lets you go where you want to go, such as <>.

Because only one person/company can own a specific domain name in the entire world, you may or may not be able to get the name you want. If you try to request a domain name, and you cannot get one, then you have two options.

Attempt to purchase the domain name from the existing owner. This is fairly common and depending upon the name, and its value, you may be able to get the name for anywhere from $50 on up to several million dollars. Only you can determine if you want to purchase the domain for that price.

Choose a different name. If money is tight, or the owner doesn’t want to relinquish the name (and there is little that can be done then) this is another viable option. I did this for a church not that long ago. The church’s name was Dayspring Community Church; however, DayspringCommunityChurch.Com was taken by another church with the same name in a different state. We tried numerous variations of the name and it never worked. We ended up using DayspringOrlando.com because it incorporated the location of the church in the domain name.

You should be able to purchase a .com domain name for under $10. Some times the specialized Top Level Domains (TLDs) (the end of the domain name such as .com, .org, etc) will cost more. .tv for example costs usually about $35.

If you go to purchase a .com name, and they want more than $10, you need to check what you are getting for that price. I’ve seen people swindled at over $100 a year. Always check with a third party, like your designer if you are not purchasing the domain from them, if you can. You can usually save yourself a decent amount of money this way.

You “purchase” a domain name’s rights a year at a time. At the end of the year, you can renew your rights to that domain name if you like, or walk away. As the current owner, you have the first dibs. To make some things easier, you can usually purchase several years at once, usually 2, 5, or 10 years. You may even receive a discount if you purchase several years at once.

Because only one person can have a domain name at a time, I recommend that you purchase this as soon as you have a name you like. It is quite possible for a name to be available one day, and not the next.

You should always note that your web designer, be a firm or an individual, should be able to help you pick the right name. The name doesn’t have to be part of your company name, but it should be easy to use/say, and it should help describe your business it’s not your name. This will help convey what you do to your customers, and help your search engine efforts as well.

In the next part we’ll look at the server space you need, what it should cost, etc, and then also the files you need for your site.

Are you over reacting on your website

Walter Wimberly — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 04:40:31 +0000

Let’s talk college football (American style) briefly. Michigan recently lost to an unranked team by two points. The going into the game they were ranked 5th in the nation, after the game, they were scored to be out of the top 25. This is something that hasn’t happened before, (falling so far so fast), which led me to ask some questions. Basically I came up with two scenarios.

Michigan should have never have been ranked #5 to begin with and was just riding their past history, or
Their opponent (Appalachian State) was better than thought, and should have been ranked (they can’t because of other conference rules), or
Dropping them out of the top 25 was an over reaction, and will be corrected over time.

I don’t follow college football. So if I were to guess, it would be foolhardy. It is hard for me to say which is more accurate because I don’t know the bigger picture and understand what losing by 2 points means when its to an unranked team. Yet I see this happen with my clients occasionally.

It usually starts with everything is fine, then something happens (traffic to the site falls for one day, someone else enters “their” market, etc.). Next thing I know, 10 minutes later, I’m getting calls wanting to know what we are doing about it, what has to change, and why we’re not already doing it right now.

Just like with a normal “brick and mortar” store, it is important to remember that your website will go through phases and cycles in its business. Last week you might have had stellar numbers, however you ran a 25% discount last week, and this week you are not. Last Monday you ran a e-mail blast to your previous customers on your mailing list, this Monday you didn’t. (It’s not Christmas this month like it was last month…I could go on, but you get the point.) Events like this can cause numbers to skew high (like Michigan’s initial ranking), then cause later performance to look foolish.

Don’t take the initial numbers at face value without understanding them first. Does this mean ignore the numbers, NO! But understand their context.

There are two things that you should do in a case like this.

First, work with your web master to know what this change means. Is it a hiccup, such as a holiday weekend when people were at the beach/lost electricity while being snowed in, or the start of a trend. If its a trend, look to what it will take to fix the problem, in the long run. Don’t create a knee-jerk reaction which will “over correct” and have to be corrected itself later on.

Second, always be working on the site. Small steady improvements to your website will help make its content fresh, it will help fend off the sudden upstart, and it will keep downward trends at bay.

Writing for everyone is harder than it appears

Walter Wimberly — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 12:41:18 +0000

Writing posts that is. I’ve been working on several series of topics, such as the
How the Web is like High School, and others. It has taken longer than expected to write what would seem like a simple post, the type of post that shouldn’t require a PhD from MIT to understand. Yet writing about something semi-technical to a non-technical person is not always the easiest thing to do.

While it seems obvious to me, because I am technical, it won’t be to most people.

Yet people fail to keep this in mind all of the time. They write as if they are writing to/for themselves. Never underestimate the worth of a good writer to make your text clear of every day users of your website, not just those who are already familiar with you.

It doesn’t matter what your topic is, as a master of it, you can easily move into using non-standard acronyms, jargon, etc. This will alienate your readers/users and make it less likely for them to buy.

So keep your text clean and simple so that everyone can understand. Then, I always recommend, have someone else who doesn’t understand what you do (friends, family members, people passing by your office, etc.) read it and see if they understand. If they do, then send it on to your web designer.

Why Ajax doesn’t need Dreamweaver

Walter Wimberly — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 04:18:40 +0000

There have been several discussions recently on if Ajax developers need Dreamweaver or not. Dreamweaver is a good tool, but it is just a tool not a solution.

The more I use Dreamweaver, the more I can see both its strengths and weaknesses. Let’s look from both points of view to determine if Ajax really needs Dreamweaver. As someone who doesn’t work for Adobe, but has used Dreamweaver for over six (6) years, I am a little bit more objective than some of the voices that have spoken.

Why using Dreamweaver makes sense:

Dreamweaver is sold (basically) as a WYSIWYG editor. And it does more or less a good job at approximating what you see on the screen.
The ability to synchronize files is probably the number one reason for me to use Dreamweaver, especially on websites with several hundred pages.
Dreamweaver makes it easy to import/export site settings so you can move between machines/users.
HTML code completion and attribute assistance in code and split view.
Server side code completion – if you hold CTRL + Space button in code and split view. (Why do I have to have a key code combination for this?)

Why using Dreamweaver doesn’t make sense(in respect to Ajax):

No code completion for JavaScript, even when working with an external JavaScript file.
Not all attributes can be edited in Design view through the property inspector.
No support for external (non-Adobe) established frameworks. Many established and effective frameworks (jQuery, prototype, yui, etc.) exist; yet Dreamweaver does not directly support them.
As CSS gets more complex, the rendering of it becomes slower and less accurate for the screen display, causing pages to take sometimes in excess of 20-30 seconds to load and render in design/split mode.
Code collapse requires that you highlight the code section to collapse. Other editors recognize function and tag blocks and allow you to quickly collapse/expand your code block.
No built-in Debugger

When I started at my current employer I wondered how I was going to work because they didn’t have Dreamweaver. However, I didn’t really have a problem. I’ve recently started using Visual Studio Web Developer Express for the server side ASP programming and Aptana for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and for the Server Side programming. These free tools have allowed me to do almost everything that I can do with Dreamweaver. (I miss syncing files.) I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Aptana in many areas, including code completion of external JavaScript files, reading JavaDoc comments for external files, and having an excellent preview pane. I wish it could perform rich text copy/paste and (mostly) WYSIWYG editing like Dreamweaver, but it is not a complete version yet, and it is free.

The fact of the matter is, for a designer, who doesn’t want to write any code; Dreamweaver will do almost everything they need. However, if you need to use something that doesn’t come out of the box, or perform “real” programming for the web, you will find that Dreamweaver may not be the best tool for you.

The design of your website doesn’t matter!?

Walter Wimberly — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 02:27:21 +0000

In a previous article, I asked, does your website look good? And if it (your website looking good) actually mattered?

Pop Quiz – did anyone go out an try to find a “pretty” website? Just curious.

If I had asked you to think of an ugly site, you could have probably come up with several examples easily. You might not be able to explain why they were ugly, but you could come up with them. People find it easier to remember bad things than good things.

Your site’s design shouldn’t be recognizable.

The fact of the matter is, if you easily recognized a website as being attractive, it actually broke one of the most important rules of design. The underlying rule is that design shouldn’t get in the way! Call it the form-over-function/function-over-form argument.

If someone is ewwing and awwwing over how your website looks, are they really paying attention to your website and what you are trying to do (sell, inform, etc.) with it? The design of your site should help perform the task of your site. Whether this be to get a user to purchase something, or get a user to learn more about a given topic important to you. Regardless, the site design purpose should be to make the website easier to use. Fancy animated banners, complex backgrounds, and vast colors, often make the site more difficult to actually use.

When you recognize an ugly site, it may be just a guilty of getting in the way of the user. However, I only say that it may be just as guilty, because the website might actually be a successful, profitable website.

Where does your site design matter?

Your website’s design does matter, in some areas. Now that you’ve done a gut check to see if your website it looking pretty, let’s check on the usefulness.

Can people get to where they need to go? Can they get there in 3 clicks or less? Your site shouldn’t be confusing.Ever used a website, and went to buy something, only to not figure out how to check out? How easy is it to find your phone number on your website? Users not finding the information they need on a website, is the most common reason for people to leave.
Can your website be easily read in multiple browsers, on multiple computers? Is the text too big or too small? Is there two much text to read?
Are you asking too little or too much from your users when they check out/download your information?

These three things are simplified of course, but this is where your site really matters – can your site be used. That is what will make it successful.

Successful Websites

Here is another question I asked my students: List 3 “successful” websites. As with all things, being successful is a somewhat subjective. So we defined successful to be an established website (no flash-in-the-pan or fly-by-night I was successful for a day websites), and profitable. The profits did not have to be sky-high, but basically it needed to make more money than it cost. See if your answers would match any of their common answers:

Now I’m sure most of you have viewed at least one of these sites. How many of them would win a design award for how they looked? I’d say none! Then why were they constantly on the list? We’ll look at that in the next article.

PS – Want to see what the list of the top 500 popular website’s for United States viewers are? Alexa has a list – which one’s do you consider attractive?

Does your website look good? Does it Matter?

Walter Wimberly — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 01:08:17 +0000

I read a recent article asking if anyone really cares about the design of a website. The basic premise was that the design should not get in the way of the site. This is correct, but I’ll take it a step further.

Consider the last site that you found yourself amazed at how good it looked. Go ahead – think hard about the site…what you can’t? No pretty sites coming to mind? Don’t worry – you’re perfectly normal. Designers, especially those fresh from college, will try to tell you how important the design of your site is – and they’re wrong. (Their professors who told them that pretty sites are important are wrong too.)

When I taught college classes on website development, I’d ask the same question to my students. Rarely could these students who were studying design, come up with a “good” site off the top of their head. Most could go out to the Internet and search for a pretty website and find something – but we don’t recognize these things we we stumble upon them.

How good a site does has little to do with how “good” it looks. How good your site performs is based on two different aspects that I will look at separately in two different articles. First, the design of your website should not get in the way. The second is that your website needs to perform a useful task.

I’ll explain more in each of the follow up articles as to what I mean, and how I define a successful website.

Validator – JavaScript Form Validator

Walter Wimberly — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 03:54:13 +0000

OK so I said I would be releasing some of the tools I’ve developed over time to the general public. Well here is the first one: Validator.

It is a JavaScript (not that you’ll have to write hardly any of it) form validator. With just a one line of code to initialize it, and a couple of easy attributes to add to your form elements, you can have access to 23 (yes count them 23 – actually do count them I’m afraid of missing one or two) different types of validation for your form inputs.

I wrote Validator after not finding something that worked for me and what I was wanting. I found some that required specific server side languages to be used (not portable), others required complicated JavaScript initialization, or limited you to only specific browsers. I wanted something that just worked, and worked where ever I took it, regardless of the server or the clien’s browser. With that in mind, I developed a portable, customizable Form Validation Library that meets each of these goals, and then some. There are some advantages to using Validator over other methods:

Do not have to know JavaScript
Validates for many different types of input values
Validates different types of input forms, not just text fields.
Maintains separation of content (xhtml/html), display/style (CSS), and interaction (JavaScript) on the web page.
External JavaScript file so it can be cached and used on multiple pages efficiently.
Tested and works on Firefox 2, IE 6, and IE7. (Should work on others as well.)
Fully customizable error messages by setting attributes.
Fully customizable error styles by using CSS styles.
Good documentation on how to use it, and sample pages.

Feel free to check out the Validator Library and post comments and suggestions.

Note: As this is client side validation, it is possible for someone to skip the validation process entirely – so never rely solely on client side validation, always back-up your efforts with server side validation if possible. The client side simply keeps from having to perform too many round trip efforts in the validation process.