Optimizing Mobile Websites

Posted: Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,
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Welcome back to our series on web marketing for mobile phones/smartphones. Today, we’ll discuss more ways to optimize your mobile site.

As mentioned in our previous post, it takes a mobile user longer to enter the same number of keywords as a desktop user. For this reason, mobile queries are often much shorter, and search engines like Google try to compensate for this brevity by providing predictive phrase/query suggestions, which from an SEO standpoint, would be great in helping to determine what keywords your business should try to rank for.

An important aspect of mobile SEO is location. In order to enhance the user experience, mobile search engines present results in a different manner than desktop search engines. As mentioned before, mobile users often tend to be on the go, and their needs tend to not only be location/task specific but also immediate. As a comparison, you would not be able to do a comprehensive research report on a mobile phone the way you would on a desktop. The experiences are completely different.

To get the most out of mobile SEO, you need to gain a better understanding of how the mobile experience differs from the desktop experience. Read more …

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Picking an SEO-friendly Web Designer

Posted: Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,

SEO and web design aren’t always implemented together, but the most successful internet presence are results of SEO web design. SEO (search engine optimization) is the idea of enhancing a website (with keywords, content, important on-page tactics and more) to rank highly in search engines. Web design, overall, is creating an online presence with a website. But it doesn’t stop there.

When companies use separate web designers and SEO companies, it’s common to see redundancies and repetition in the work, which ultimately costs more to the company. A better approach to SEO and web design is to find a company that is experienced in both services. Both SEO and web design take time and effort. Web design should be created with SEO in mind and SEO should be implemented around the web design, they go hand in hand.

A web designer may be focused primarily on the website architecture, sitemap and photograph placement on your website, strictly layout and creative features. Without SEO in mind, eventually a company will have to backtrack and edit specific design features to incorporate SEO. Someone who builds a creative website with SEO features can help your website become optimized in search results. For example, things like title tags, content and calls to action should all be SEO friendly and a website designer isn’t concerned about these things.

It’s important and beneficial to your company to consider SEO and web design as one. A company that offers both services will show you excellent results (and be more cost-effective). The internet is about usability and your website should help users find information. Many times, for users to find the information, and SEO program needs to be in place. Once a user finds your website, you want to be sure the best design features are in place so your potential customer can find what they are looking for and hopefully take action.

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Website Design: Why Wireframes Are Helpful

Posted: Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,
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After your web designing company works with you on developing a sitemap, the next step in the web design process in creating the wireframes. Since you now have an organized page with the content you will be incorporating into your website, it’s important to lay it all out. Wireframes help arrange the content and give you a skeletal framework for your website design.

Wireframes

Wireframes

Wireframes give you a structure and help you specify your pages. They are simple, black and white ‘frames’ to help identify placement of content, features and navigation for your website. A masthead section is usually for your logo and below that you should have enough room for a core messaging area and a photograph. These three important areas are crucial to place above “the fold.” Similar to a newspaper’s “above the fold,” a website’s fold would be what you see before you have to start scrolling. You can insert placeholders for photos, videos or other features you want to include in your wireframes, but be sure you have your company logo, minimal copy to tell what your company does and some image to portray it. You want to have enough above the fold to draw the reader in. Read more …

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SEO and Flash

Posted: Monday, October 17th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,

Last time we discussed how implementing descriptive title tags can improve your website’s navigation and internet marketing. Today we tackle the next bullet point:

3) Are you minimizing your reliance on Flash?

One of the worst feelings a business owner can experience is finding out that the gorgeous website he invested so much money in is actually hindering his search engine optimization efforts.  Flash animations can certainly add a nice aesthetic touch to a website, but the bottom-line is that most search engines can’t read them, and if search engines can’t read what’s on your site, then it’s as if your site does not exist. For this reason, if you are serious about improving your search engine ranking, then it is absolutely crucial for you to make sure that if you choose to use Flash, that you still have enough content to flesh out your site and make it searchable for crawlers. This leads to our last checkpoint:

4) Are you optimizing your homepage for web marketing purposes? Read more …

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HTML5 Website Design

Posted: Saturday, September 10th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,

Any web designer or web developer should have heard about the latest HTML updates, HTML5. HTML5 is the latest form of HTML and will be used across Internet browsers to turn WebPages into readable WebPages for the end user. HTML is constantly being updated to format the latest technology, but HTML5 will be the latest form to created HTML code in. Although it won’t be finalized for years, web designers have already started creating new code from it.

Although HTML5 isn’t finalized and will continue to change before it’s official, many web designers are wondering is they really need to care (or even learn) about HTML5. The answer is yes. HTML5 promises a better web experience across all devices: Smartphones (Android, iPhone), computers and the latest tablets and netbooks. Smartphones have been growing in the number of users accessing the internet and it’s important that devices are able to display WebPages of choice.

Many earlier versions of HTML have limitations for multimedia content. HTML5 will provide an alternative to plugins (such as Flash) in order to add music, video and other multimedia content to websites. Since top web browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera will support (some already do) the latest features of HTML5, it’s inevitable it will takeover HTML4. Read more …

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What is HTML5?

Posted: Tuesday, September 6th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,

Just as you probably guessed, HTML5 is the next evolution of HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language. Most websites are designed and are created using HTML code, which turns plain text into readable WebPages you can navigate through. The last form of HTML, which was HTML4 was released in 1997 and has been tweaked here and there with the upgrades of the Internet overall. The goal of HTML5 is to improve the code to be able to support the latest multimedia, but still following the code for technology devices to read and understand. Web designers and web developers should learn about the new HTML because it will soon take over the current HTML4.

HTML5 will add a number of features to the functionality of HTML that HTML4 is not compatible with. Many platforms require plugin functionality that HTML4 cannot support, such as Flash. The iPhone and iPad don’t support Flash right now, which becomes problematic for users.

Two major features of HTML5 are media playback and storage offline. It’s common that web designers have to look to Flash for showing videos or playing music. HTML5 will allow sites to embed codes with simple tags that will automatically play the media your website needs. You can now insert images; audio and video directly into any document and easily manipulate them through the coding. The second aspect and new addition to HTML is the idea of being able to create files or draft emails without Internet connection and have them automatically sync next time you’re connected to the Internet. Read more …

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Designing Simple Websites for Clients

Posted: Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,

Now that we’ve covered basic website design features and SEO friendly WebPages, Premiere moves into the navigation of your website. We employ HTML text as navigation rather than using graphics of Flash. This limits the choice of fonts we can use but search engines can catalog and follow the links more easily and our clients can add or remove pages using a content management system (CMS) rather than having to rely on a web designer to change graphical elements every time a page changes on the site. At Premiere, we can include a CMS in your quote, but the benefits of having one are priceless.

While it may be “creative” to design a website and your homepage (and navigation) with no text and a single small photograph, visitors may have a hard time finding the page through search engines. It’s important to think about your web design because the simplest things may be the most beneficial. Our clients are businesses who spend a fair amount of money to establish a presence on the Web and an important component of our business is to make sure they’re getting a good return on their investment.

That said, we never design a website in a vacuum. We present options to our clients for them to choose the direction they think represents their company best. We will weigh the pros and cons of each design as to their merits of communication, SEO and practicality, but ultimately the choice is the client’s. If a client would be best served with a more “blog-like” layout (long page, many articles), a minimalistic design (little or no text), a magazine or newspaper-like design (multiple columns, many articles synopses on the homepage) or some other design, we will propose it. In addition, if we think that the opportunity to do something more unique would be best on a separate microsite or landing page, we will propose that option as well. We are a web design company that listens to your needs. Because our clients are making investments in their sites, their main concerns are driving customers to do business with them and you can’t argue with our results on that front.

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Web usability tips, Part IV

Posted: Monday, July 4th, 2011 by | Filed under: , , , , , , , , ,
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Below is the final portion of our study on Studio Diatribe’s web usability.

Looking at the main navigation, there are two links that are confusing to me. First, the term “Investment.” Does that mean that they are looking for investors in the company? The title could mean that. No, the page is about Pricing. Why not just call it that? That’s a universally understood term. If they think that “pricing” on a main navigation is too up-front, then I’d suggest moving it under “info” where it is still available through the drop-down. I’d also suggest “About Us” is a more friendly term for “info”. Since most people come to the site wanting to see the work, I’d suggest that the “Imagery” be broken into categories in a main navigation. I don’t have a recommendation as to how at this point but since the images are key, the visitor should have more options of navigating them other than the one “imagery” link.

Pref. Vendors? I’m sure these are reciprocal links but a main navigational item devoted to offsite links isn’t a great idea. Better to have this a sub-navigation under “about us” or a footer link. Also, the page should have some descriptive text to explain why these are important and what use they are. Read more …

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Web usability tips, Part III

Posted: Friday, July 1st, 2011 by | Filed under: , , , , , , , , ,
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Below are some more tips on how to improve Studio Diatribe’s web usability.

Other things that hurt SEO include the lack of search-engine-friendly URLs. Aside from this hurting SEO, it also means that there is no way to give out specific URLs for information on the site. Instead of
http://thestudiophotographers.com/?category_name=addison-park-beautiful-venues
they should be able to tell prospects that want to see photos from Addison Park to go to
thestudiophotographers.com/addison-park <http://thestudiophotographers.com/addison-park>
That is a much better and more convenient URL to give.

The handling of the photos seems to be a bit inconsistent. In some cases, there is a large photo and many thumbnails that open into lightbox images. In other cases, the visitor gets a flat list of large images to scroll through. Ideally, the visitor should be given one user interface for all the galleries so that they’re not guessing about how to interact with the work. But at least the photographs are large and detailed so that the visitor can get a good sense of their quality. Unfortunately, the layout that works for the large photographs is awful for the text on the site. Most pages fill the full width of the site with the text, creating line lengths of 140 characters or so—about double a desirable length. Further, it appears that the CSS contains a call for the font of Century Gothic, which is not a cross-platform compatible font. The 5% of visitors that see the site on the Mac will see it but those on the PC will not. In that case the default font of Arial will load. While not terrible, sites should be designed so that they don’t look considerably different to different visitors. The photographers obviously take great care to make sure that when they photograph an event, the resulting photographs look consistent. They should ask the same of their web designers. Read more …

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Web usability tips, Part II

Posted: Monday, June 27th, 2011 by | Filed under: , , , , , , , , ,
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Today, we will continue to identify ways for Studio Diatribes to improve its web usability.

The server that hosts the site is fast which, at least on my desktop computer, masks how slowly the site loads. I am loading the homepage on my iPhone using a 3G connection and after three minutes the site has not completed loading. This is unbearably slow and while I still see it trying to load the last of the page, I’m going to stop it from trying.

I tried to print the homepage to see if the theme has provided a print-specific CSS file and it has. The print file creates black type with a white background which is more desirable than wasting the visitor’s ink supply by printing large areas of the dark brown. That’s when I saw that the resulting print would be 72 pages. There is no reason a site—particularly a photo blog—should be this length. A text blog would at least load quickly and be relatively small in size but all these photos take up unnecessary download time.

A quick search shows that the site ranks well with a google organic search for Freehold Photographers but I couldn’t find it while searching for Millburn Photographers or Staten Island Photographers. Part of this can be attributed to the lack of keyword-rich text on their home page. What text there is does not describe the company, but rather, describes the events. I believe this is a mistake in that this approach hinders SEO. Also, in the way that the page is set up, they offer the visitor ten offsite links before they show the first photograph of the first event. That’s an invitation to leave the site when they should be trying to get people deeper into it. Read more …

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