Posts Tagged ‘design’

Listen Now Click right arrow | You may also Download the MP3 | Playtime 09:30 (min./sec.)

Listen now or download the pdf version of this PDF Report on Custom CMS Web Design “Truth Behind CUSTOM CMS Web Design Services”, subtitled: A Report on Real World CMS User Experience. This conversation between Jim and Roger Degerstrom, co-owners of Custom CMS Design, LLC, presents a major revelation about CMS Content Management Systems of web design.

Here’s a rough outline of the report:

• Explanation of Custom CMS Web Design Services
• SEO and Google Search Results Summary
• User Behavior and Content Management Systems
• SEO and Add Original Quality Content Often
• Truth Behind Custom CMS Web Design Services

The majority of owners launch a new cms site and promptly forget it rather than adding pages to their website. Utilizing the power of a CMS means following the advice to add original quality content often.

This truth became apparent after years of experience, and a solution to this weakness offers hope for site owners to maximize CMS performance. Download this custom CMS web design report in pdf, or open it in a new tab and then follow along as you listen.

Finally, consider our marketing tips and advice for your custom CMS web design. Call if any questions about how to maximize your cms website to help generate traffic and new business.

Another published article was syndicated earlier this week and published on several sites. Read the Great First Impression with Email article on eZineArticles.com. The advice is about using a direct email address that matches your domain on your website and web design instead of a free service address.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“When a person selects an email link on your commercial website to make an inquiry, the reply should be from an email address that matches your www domain. Besides having a web design that creates a sense of trust, that matching email shows sophistication, too.”

An example of what can go wrong is given with a real world experience from one of our clients. They used a free email account for all their business correspondence for years without incidence. Read the article to learn what happened to their reputation and credibility when their free email address was stolen in a phishing scam.

A new advice article is available to view online entitled Golden Rule Writing for the Web with an advanced tutorial on web copywriting.

Here’s an excerpt from the article.

Crafting quality business letters is more formal than making an online presentation to convince a website visitor to take a closer look at what you offer. With visitors having 1000′s if not millions of choices in Google search results, you have mere seconds to keep them on your website. This tutorial may help.

Follow the link above to the full article featured earlier today on the home page of EZineArticles.com. You may enjoy the creative methods used to brainstorm new ideas for effective content to keep visitors on your site longer as you learn the secret of the Golden Rule Writing for the Web.

We decided to convert the blogs on our other commercial sites from Blogger to WordPress, and have done nearly 10 conversions including several clients, as well. The experience of exporting Blogger content presents a series of technical challenges getting everything converted and properly imported into WordPress.

The reason for moving from Blogger to WordPress is that our blogs and many for our clients were self hosted and published through Blogger via ftp. Blogger announced earlier this year that ftp publishing support was being discontinued (first date was March but extended to May 1, 2010). To maintain better control our advice was moving to the WordPress platform.

WordPress and Blogger are different. Blogger uses labels instead of categories, plus may truncate file names sometimes dropping words like “the” or “and” in favor of mostly key words from the blog post title. In addition, redirects from the old file names for labels, archives, and some posts were needed for the new WordPress version to avoid page not found errors.

Based on our experience and the desire for maximum control of site content, our first choice for new blogs will continue to be WordPress in the future.

Need stock photos? You may decide it’s better to pay after comparing no fee royalty free stock photographs to premium stock photo options for your web design. The same is true for brochures or other projects when you need artwork for print, as well. When choosing paid premium photos, expect higher license fees for exceptional quality work.

You may find links to over 500,000 free to use photographs in the photo directory on this site. For business use, perhaps 1 in 10 is suitable for commercial applications, yet the search can be even more time consuming when trying to find just the right shot for a given web design project. Reconsider paying if your time looking for truly free pix costs more in wasted time than the license when purchasing premium photos.

Important: Whether using free to use or premium paid stock photographs for your web design, the term royalty free does not mean free without restrictions. Respect copyright to avoid the risk of legal claims or perhaps search engine penalties. Yes, the robotic technology is here and being perfected to identify the origin of online graphics including photographs. This could mean site owners caught using photographs in violation of copyright.

Royalty free photos or other media means you do not pay recurring fees for permission to use them in your web design work. Even free to use photographs may have restrictions for other than personal use like public display or commercial work. Look for details when you shop and read the license. Some photo owners require written permission in advance or notice upon use, and some require publication of their name in credits when using their intellectual property.

Does a photo you want to use for your web design include an identifiable person? If so, you are required to obtain a model release or confirm that the site offering the royalty free photo has the release on file.

When you use royalty free stock photographs in web design or artwork for print including paid premium stock photo options, in most cases the free use is not transferrable. Just because you paid does not give you the unlimited rights to share with others including your clients, so don’t offer copies.

Depending on your budget, you can start with photos that are free to use in your web design or choose premium paid stock photograph options for extra high quality and a more favorable first impression.

While checking traffic stats today and following one referral search, we learned a website hosted on DreamHost servers had scraped 39 pages of content from the blog section of one of our websites. The response time was excellent from DreamHost in reply to the Copyright Claim and DMCA Takedown Request.

Graphics, photographs, and video were hotlinked to files on our hosting account, so the offending party added insult to injury by draining bandwidth as well as copying the xhtml code and blog text verbatim.

DreamHost autoreplied to the request in 3 minutes, and then a person emailed a reply within 2 hours to report the infringed content had been removed from their servers.

A big thank you to DreamHost for their prompt action, and to attorney Carolyn E. Wright who posted her tutorial and advice on Blackstar Rising entitled How to Send a DMCA Takedown Notice.

Fight back if you encounter copyright violations of your intellectual property, yet make sure to fully document facts as outlined in the post linked above. Keep in mind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA, is a United States law, so readers outside the USA may need a different approach to ensure compliance.

The secret to online success is still add original quality content often. You must optimize that content to attract search engines while keeping your focus on writing for your website visitors. The training materials provided with your custom cms web design give you the tools to achieve top rankings, yet the first mistake website owners make is thinking that getting Google page one will be easy.

From experience after reviewing dozens of custom cms web design project launches, 9 out of 10 site owners never add any new content. Custom cms website owners accept an initial launch with X number of pages and then neglect the dynamic potential.

As seen by search engines when left to collect dust, your stale website that never changes is unlikely to ever make top rankings.

Achieving Google page one is a goal without shortcuts. Don’t believe promises that state otherwise, especially for micro-sized small businesses who feel pressured because you cannot delegate the cms website updates.

Site owners get distracted with day to day tasks running their business, and managing their website suddenly takes a back seat. It is easy to drop site updates in favor of familiar activities that generate revenue immediately. Doing what put you in business is always more fun!

Having a CMS website is a good strategy. Letting it sit without adding fresh content is not. Need help? Contact us to learn how a budget for outsourcing site updates may be more affordable than you think.

If you own or manage an older version of a WordPress driven website or blog, the team at WordPress warns you MUST upgrade to the most recent version v2.84 because of a SERIOUS security threat taking place now.

In the announcement WordPress warns readers to upgrade immediately before reading their complete post it is that serious. Consider this comment from the official WordPress post linked above about upgrading:

If you are using a WordPress version after 2.7, the nag screen on the WordPress Administration Panels will alert you to upgrade. If you are using an older version, upgrade now. Don’t know what version you are using? Without a nag screen to tell you to update, you’re using an old version. Checking the Administration Panels footer will help, but don’t waste time looking. Just update now!

For our clients who have a custom WordPress blog designed and managed by us, your blog is not affected! Rest assured your WordPress installation was already at v2.84 before this virus attack began. In addition, we use automatic dBase backups as added security to avoid any recovery problems if needed in the future.

Improve web design performance by checking website visitor statistics for trends on a daily basis. Adjust content to improve your web design by offering what people want but didn’t find on your website. In addition you may want to check site visitors by browser every few months to measure major browser competition and track the winners capturing market share.

Here’s the most recent stats check and site visitors by browser report for one of our older commercial websites. Expect the following visitor data to vary from site to site.

Totals by browser brand with all versions combined:

44.2% Firefox
41.4% Internet Explorer
06.6% Chrome
06.6% Safari
01.2% Opera
—–
100.0% Total

Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) breakdown by version:

12.00% MSIE 8.0
16.80% MSIE 7.0
12.60% MSIE 6.0

The continued decline in users for Internet Explorer 6.0 from 6 months ago is good news for web developers and website owners. IE6 web design code workarounds to meet cross-browser compatibility add cost to the price of web development. Even better news: Those stats show zero visitors using versions older than IE6.

If you don’t know about checking your site in all browsers, or your designer doesn’t care, some visitors may have a bad first impression of your website. Does your web design have a disclaimer “Best viewed in [insert browser name]” on the home page? That means it may look horrible to half your visitors.

Our advice is upgrading to the latest version of whatever brand browser you use, and testing your design to the most recent of all major brands including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

Don’t want to install 5 browsers? Visit this browser simulation online tool at browsershots.org. Their tool allows you to capture screenshots for testing all major brands including Linux, Mac, and older browsers like IE6.

Track your website visitor stats. Learn from them. Adjust content to improve site performance. However, don’t spend hours every day agonizing over short term trends. Stats tracking including site visitors by browser is a long term web design strategy.

After converting a client’s blog from Blogger to WordPress recently an invalid xhtml blog mystery was uncovered. The blog home had 88 xhtml errors due to an invalid reference to class=msonormal in the code when validated to W3C. Two years ago the custom Blogger template and css styling that was created did not have that class defined, so how the code was inserted into the content required a closer look to solve the mystery.

While testing the WordPress blog with all posts imported from Blogger it was discovered the xhtml code errors were the result of the class=msonormal showing up in just two posts that the customer had published. The custom tutorial that was provided for creating and publishing posts in the original design was very specific about writing drafts in plain text with NotePad and using copy/paste to publish in Blogger.

The code errors were introduced in Blogger and imported into WordPress because the client wrote those two out of all their posts in MicroSoft Word. The problem with composing blog posts with word processing software like Word or WordPerfect is they create content in machine code that only looks like plain text. They may retain formats that are hidden and then show up when the post is published.

The solution to the invalid xhtml blog mystery of the class=msonormal code errors was to copy and paste the post from html view into NotePad, and then edit. In addition, the Word format inserted empty paragraphs with opening and closing p tags between paragraphs, so those and the reference to the class=msonormal were removed.

Finally, the last step was using copy/paste of the text from NotePad back into the WordPress post edit screen, and then republish. This easy solution using plain text removed the hidden formatting and the home page tested valid to W3C without any of those 88 xhtml code errors.