Getting links to your pages and sites is important both for getting new customers and for search engine optimization (SEO). But many people go about asking for links in a way that ends up being annoying or even rude. While adding a link is not difficult, you are asking for a favor. Being rude or annoying is not a successful strategy for getting that favor or the link.
The following guidelines should help you get more links to your site and make good connections to other Web developers.
1. If you're proposing an exchange, you should link first. Many developers will write saying "I'll link to you if you link to me." But in this situation, you clearly want the link more than they do. It comes across better if you offer to help them before you ask for something.
2. Don't imply you are doing them a favor by exchanging links. Even if your site is much better placed than theirs, you're asking them for help. Asking someone to do work for you isn't a favor.
3. Your link to them won't improve their ranking. Yes, getting good external links will help search engine ranking. But chances are the site you're trying to get a link from is already better placed than yours. So linking to you helps you, but you linking to them doesn't improve their ranks significantly.
4. Do your homework. If you're going to request a link, find out if they post external links. Do they post links to sites like yours? Do they have link request guidelines? On my site, if you want to link your Web design firm, you need to fill out my Web designers site listing form, otherwise, I won't link to your firm.
5. Link to them first. If your site starts sending them traffic, they'll notice and check out your site. If your site is something useful, they'll link to you - without you even asking.
6. You don't need to notify your link subjects of your links. Sending an email is overkill - as once your site starts sending traffic, the link or links will be obvious.
7. If you must send an email, be polite. Try to put yourself in their shoes - does your email come across demanding or annoying? Remember that you're asking them for a favor. And be direct about what you want.
The Elements of Design
The elements of design are the building blocks of design. These elements are what make up every page you build. And understanding the basic elements you'll be able to put together more powerful Web pages.
There are five basic elements of every design:
Lines and Linework
Lines include borders and rules. They can be horizontal or vertical and help delineate the spaces around elements on Web pages. Linework increases the readability of the design.
Shape
Shapes make up any enclosed contour in the design. Shapes on most Web pages are square or rectangular. But they don't have to be. You can use images to generate other shapes within your designs.
Texture
Texture gives a design a feeling of surface. Texture on Web pages is all visual, but you can use natural textures or artificial to get the effect in your designs.
Color
Color is the one design element that most Web designers are acutely aware of. But remember that color is not a required element of any design. In fact, a good plan in design is to create the design without color first, then add as little color as you can to enhance the design.
Direction
Direction gives your Web designs motion. In most designs there is a sense of movement in a direction across the design. Good designs lead the eye through the design in a deliberate fashion so that the viewer sees what the designer wants.
The Building Blocks of Design
By Jennifer Kyrnin, About.com
Effective Web Navigation
If people cannot navigate through your site, they will quickly leave. Thus, designing effective navigation on your Web site is crucial. But there are some basic things you need to do before you can start worrying about rollovers or links, images or flash.
Before you can even start to plan your navigation, you need to define your site's information architecture. Information architecture is the taxonomy or structure of your Web site.
Some common taxonomy elements on a corporate or business Web page are:
- Products - the products or services the company sells
- About - information about the company
- Investor Relations - information specific to investors
- Support - help for customers
Some common taxonomy elements on a personal Web page are:
- About Me - information about the page author
- Favorite Links - links that the author likes
- Friends and Family - information about the author's friends and family
Organization
Once you've determined your site architecture, you need to decide how to organize it. You might have it all live in one directory, and just link to the major pages from your front page. Or you might have all the sub-pages separated into directories.
When thinking about your organization, you should think about how your customers might wander through it. Flow charts and storyboards can help you map out exactly how you would like to encourage your readers to use the site. You might want to map out several paths for your readers to use.
Navigation Design
Once you have an idea of the architecture and organization, you're ready to think about the design of the navigation. There are several things you should consider in deciding on your navigation design:
- Accessible
The navigation of your site is possibly the most important part of any given page. So it should be as accessible as you can make it. This means avoiding special effects like Flash, Java, or JavaScript as your only navigation method. - Meaningful
Keep your navigation meaningful. Make the links clear - don't try to get cute or use terms that are internal to your organization. Someone who has never been to your site before should know immediately where the link will take them. - Understandable
If you want to use images for your navigation, make sure that there is some text associated with them. " Mystery Meat Navigation" is the use of non-descriptive images as navigation, and it's much more common than you might think. - Prevalent
Your navigation should appear on every page of your site. While you don't need to have identical navigation, the basic structure should be the same throughout the site, with changes used only to indicate location within the hierarchy.
Once you've designed your navigation, then you can begin to use it. Keep in mind that it is really tempting to change your navigation structure while you're in the middle of implementing it. But if you decide to do this, be sure that you're making the change globally and that it fits with the original goals of your taxonomy and information architecture. My recommendation is to implement the original design and wait a week or two. If at that point you still want to change it, and the change will work, then go for it. You might just find that your planning and preparation were ultimately correct and not change it at all.
Is Your Site Cool?
Cool Doesn't Cut It...
Usability on the Web is crucial if you want to have customers continue to return. Jared Spool has found that 42% of Web users find what they need on any given Web page. This means that 58% do not find what they need.
This means that Usability of Web sites, is crucial in order to get sales and make money. If your customers can't find what they want, they won't be buying, and chances are, they won't be coming back. It doesn't matter how new and innovative your site is, the fact is cool doesn't cut it.
The Good News
You can ignore this entire article. While there may be value in any study, you should test your site with your readers. Unless your site was one of the sites tested, the results may not apply to you.
BUT . . . while these suggestions might not apply, they will probably help.
Information retrieval is:
1. Graphics neither help nor hurt information gathering
Many people feel that graphics make the Web site more usable. Another contingent feels that they make sites unusable. Neither group is right. According to this study, the amount of images on a page had no visible effect on the gathering of information, with two exceptions. These are:
a. Animation
Users found it annoying and "several users covered [the animations] up with their hands". In fact, one animated image had the answer to one question in it, but the users simply didn't see the answer there.
b. Download Time
This was not generally an issue, except with a page that had a lot of small images and poor alt text. The image had the answer, but users would navigate away before the image had downloaded.
2. White space makes sites less usable
When searching for information, users wanted information, not fancy, artistic sites. In fact, in direct conflict with an accepted rule of design, this study stated that "the more white space, the more users say the site is complicated, over-detailed, visually confusing, not clear, and not enticing." In fact, users in this study felt that sites with less white space were easier to use and had more information available.What do I think this means?I think that readers who are looking for information want to find it quickly. They don't want to have to navigate through several layers of the site simply because there is a nice design that is visually appealing. The more information that is on the first page they come to, the more likely they are to find what they are looking for.
3. Content and navigation must be handled together
A really common format for sites right now is what Mr. Spool called a "Shell Site". These sites are where the navigation is developed and then the content is shoved into that format or shell. What he found was that when a user is looking for information, shell sites are very hard to use. Because the links are the same on all navigation within the site, they don't add anything new once they have been reviewed. Thus, when a user is looking for information, the navigation shell is usually discarded as an information source immediately.
4. Search engines (on sites) don't work
If a user doesn't click on the Search button, they are 50% more likely to find the information they are looking for than if they do. This is disconcerting until you think about how most search engines handle searches and results:
What can you do?
Usability on the Web is crucial if you want to have customers continue to return. Jared Spool has found that 42% of Web users find what they need on any given Web page. This means that 58% do not find what they need.
This means that Usability of Web sites, is crucial in order to get sales and make money. If your customers can't find what they want, they won't be buying, and chances are, they won't be coming back. It doesn't matter how new and innovative your site is, the fact is cool doesn't cut it.
The Good News
You can ignore this entire article. While there may be value in any study, you should test your site with your readers. Unless your site was one of the sites tested, the results may not apply to you.
BUT . . . while these suggestions might not apply, they will probably help.
Information retrieval is:
- How easily and quickly people find information on a site
- More directed than simply surfing the Web
- Becoming more and more important to the Web as a whole
What People Want from Web Sites
1. Graphics neither help nor hurt information gathering
Many people feel that graphics make the Web site more usable. Another contingent feels that they make sites unusable. Neither group is right. According to this study, the amount of images on a page had no visible effect on the gathering of information, with two exceptions. These are:
a. Animation
Users found it annoying and "several users covered [the animations] up with their hands". In fact, one animated image had the answer to one question in it, but the users simply didn't see the answer there.
b. Download Time
This was not generally an issue, except with a page that had a lot of small images and poor alt text. The image had the answer, but users would navigate away before the image had downloaded.
2. White space makes sites less usable
When searching for information, users wanted information, not fancy, artistic sites. In fact, in direct conflict with an accepted rule of design, this study stated that "the more white space, the more users say the site is complicated, over-detailed, visually confusing, not clear, and not enticing." In fact, users in this study felt that sites with less white space were easier to use and had more information available.What do I think this means?I think that readers who are looking for information want to find it quickly. They don't want to have to navigate through several layers of the site simply because there is a nice design that is visually appealing. The more information that is on the first page they come to, the more likely they are to find what they are looking for.
3. Content and navigation must be handled together
A really common format for sites right now is what Mr. Spool called a "Shell Site". These sites are where the navigation is developed and then the content is shoved into that format or shell. What he found was that when a user is looking for information, shell sites are very hard to use. Because the links are the same on all navigation within the site, they don't add anything new once they have been reviewed. Thus, when a user is looking for information, the navigation shell is usually discarded as an information source immediately.
4. Search engines (on sites) don't work
If a user doesn't click on the Search button, they are 50% more likely to find the information they are looking for than if they do. This is disconcerting until you think about how most search engines handle searches and results:
- Many sites have several different search engines for the Web site.These may be intuitive to the Web designer, but often the user doesn't know what the difference is (or even perceive that there is a difference).
- Users don't know what they are going to get when they search.They may be getting a list of pages on this site, the Web as a whole, a sub-set of this site, or something completely different.
- Results were confusing and hard to understandOften the search results were something apparently unrelated to what the reader searched on. Or, there was no text to clarify the search results, simply the title or file name.
What can you do?
- Test your site's usability with your users. If you do nothing else to improve your site, this would be the best thing.
- Focus on your content.Content will get people to your site and give them the information so they keep coming back.
- Put lots of links on your site so that your readers can navigate as easily as possible.What is intuitive to you might be unclear to me, so give your readers a lot of different ways to get to the information on your site.
- Don't believe everything you read or hear.Just because I've written this article and UIE did their study, doesn't mean that the results will apply to your readers. Find out, from them, what works for your site.
Check Point IPS Protects Against BIND Vulnerability
Monday, August 10, 2009: Check Point Software Technologies has announced that Check Point IPS products protect customers against a newly discovered Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) vulnerability. The exploit affects both commonly used UNIX and Windows based DNS servers and allows a remote attacker to create a denial-of-service condition.
The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) is a popular Domain Name System (DNS) implementation from Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). By sending a specially-crafted dynamic update packet to a BIND 9 server, a hacker can cause a denial of service by causing BIND to crash. The exploit is not limited to servers configured to allow dynamic updates.
The vulnerability affects also all servers that are masters of one or more zones and slave servers that are configured to forward updates to their masters. Check Point integrated IPS solutions protect against the threat by detecting and blocking maliciously crafted DNS packets, claims the company. "BIND is an important building block of the Internet DNS system.
Exploits using vulnerabilities in BIND can lead to down-time, phishing and other attacks," said Oded Gonda, vice president, network security products, Check Point. "Check Point IPS technologies are a critical security layer to traditional firewalls that will help an enterprise stay ahead of threats and vulnerabilities until servers or clients are patched."
http://www.efytimes.com
The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) is a popular Domain Name System (DNS) implementation from Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). By sending a specially-crafted dynamic update packet to a BIND 9 server, a hacker can cause a denial of service by causing BIND to crash. The exploit is not limited to servers configured to allow dynamic updates.
The vulnerability affects also all servers that are masters of one or more zones and slave servers that are configured to forward updates to their masters. Check Point integrated IPS solutions protect against the threat by detecting and blocking maliciously crafted DNS packets, claims the company. "BIND is an important building block of the Internet DNS system.
Exploits using vulnerabilities in BIND can lead to down-time, phishing and other attacks," said Oded Gonda, vice president, network security products, Check Point. "Check Point IPS technologies are a critical security layer to traditional firewalls that will help an enterprise stay ahead of threats and vulnerabilities until servers or clients are patched."
http://www.efytimes.com
ITC Infotech Launches Metatag+
Friday, August 07, 2009: ITC Infotech, a fully owned subsidiary of ITC Ltd, has rolled out a new solution called Metatag+, for the media and entertainment industry, aimed at enhancing the value proposition of companies operating in this space.
Metatag+ is ITC Infotech’s solution and platform independent framework for metadata collaboration across the enterprise. Metatag+ provides a suite of tools to create, organise, search metadata and associate them with related assets in an organisation. ITC Infotech also complements this solution with a diagnostic consulting approach around Information Architecture Modeling to enhance findability of assets and related metadata.
Speaking at the launch, Khem Aithani, vice president, ITC Infotech, said, “Our intuitive and innovative approach to Metadata management can help organisations effectively manage taxonomy, and control vocabulary and schema management across assets.
A comprehensive workflow allows ingestion of metadata into the assets, thereby facilitating a productive search environment and enhanced collaboration across assets and related metadata.” Aithani further added, “We, at ITC Infotech, have tailored solutions and services to help our customers enhance revenue propensity and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), while transitioning to the new media world.”
Metatag+ is ITC Infotech’s solution and platform independent framework for metadata collaboration across the enterprise. Metatag+ provides a suite of tools to create, organise, search metadata and associate them with related assets in an organisation. ITC Infotech also complements this solution with a diagnostic consulting approach around Information Architecture Modeling to enhance findability of assets and related metadata.
Speaking at the launch, Khem Aithani, vice president, ITC Infotech, said, “Our intuitive and innovative approach to Metadata management can help organisations effectively manage taxonomy, and control vocabulary and schema management across assets.
A comprehensive workflow allows ingestion of metadata into the assets, thereby facilitating a productive search environment and enhanced collaboration across assets and related metadata.” Aithani further added, “We, at ITC Infotech, have tailored solutions and services to help our customers enhance revenue propensity and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), while transitioning to the new media world.”
Result on Google
hey guys. im happy that i could see my blog on the Google result. i thought i will never be listed but i was. thanks guys.
if you have any comments or reaction just put it on the comment box.thanks
if you have any comments or reaction just put it on the comment box.thanks
My first web design project:
Here’s my first web design project that thought a lot of experience and knowledge with what you call “web Design” it took me several design to have a simplest design that the customer wants. The earth colors make it more pleasing in the eyes. Like what the customer says “so far the most beautiful design that we have.” Well with those words I can say that they are satisfied with the work.
Thanks for this site it really helps me a lot in developing my skills.
Thanks for this site it really helps me a lot in developing my skills.
Web Design | SEO Friendly Web
World wide web, Everywhere you turn there’s always a new company with the new design and the best web designer that could construct the best web site . the quality of a best cutting edge web designers.
As part of your company’s success it is expected to have a website, it is one ways a client can learn and know more about your business and have a first impression.
A SEO friendly web design, for your new or existing business provides a extremely well round solution to the myriad of service.
Having a SEO friendly web design and a perfect web design is your key in winning and getting those clients.
Website design is so important these days, you can have the best looking website, but if it’s not optimized, then not many people will see the result of all your hard work. And that is why SEO is important , which in its simplest form boils down to two things, On and Off Page Optimization. Search Engines is one of the primary ways that Internet users find web sites.
That's why a website with good Natural Organic Search Engine Listings may see a dramatic increase in web traffic. Helping Google Find you.
Everyday theres is atleast 1 billion people searching on the world’s leading search engine such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! and every one of these is a potential customer looking for a specific product, service or topic. They are already actively searching, unlike many other forms of advertising such as television or radio where this cannot be guaranteed.
As part of your company’s success it is expected to have a website, it is one ways a client can learn and know more about your business and have a first impression.
A SEO friendly web design, for your new or existing business provides a extremely well round solution to the myriad of service.
Having a SEO friendly web design and a perfect web design is your key in winning and getting those clients.
Website design is so important these days, you can have the best looking website, but if it’s not optimized, then not many people will see the result of all your hard work. And that is why SEO is important , which in its simplest form boils down to two things, On and Off Page Optimization. Search Engines is one of the primary ways that Internet users find web sites.
That's why a website with good Natural Organic Search Engine Listings may see a dramatic increase in web traffic. Helping Google Find you.
Everyday theres is atleast 1 billion people searching on the world’s leading search engine such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! and every one of these is a potential customer looking for a specific product, service or topic. They are already actively searching, unlike many other forms of advertising such as television or radio where this cannot be guaranteed.
How to find a best Web Design Company or Web Designer
1. Customer service availabity (Live Support)
It really helps to have someone who is there for you when problem arises. The point there is they can solve the problem instantly. So pick a web design company who got a live support such chat or voice.
2. Impressive Portfolio
Review the websites they had done before. Sample of work’s done is stronger than any fancy and bubbly text found in designer’s website.
3. Able to understand your website needs
It’s useless to design your website in full flash when it can be run smoothly on html, flash is expensive and not Search Engine friendly. If you want to edit your website personally in the future, asks the designer to build it in Content Management System (CMS).
4. Contact handling
Find out if your Web designer will handle your email settings for your Website. Webmail looks much better and more professional rather than Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL.
5. Provide you a 99% uptime guarantee hosting service (If hosting included)
Your website uptime is very much important; would you like to see your website always down? Here are ways how to find a good hosting plan and how to choose a web hosting server.
6. Provide you Pre-optimization
Every website needs to meet the guidelines of major search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) in order to be indexed, I strongly advice to get a designer who has an idea about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Beautiful website is useless if nobody knows it.
More interesting topics: bibokz.com
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