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So what does it bring us?

The good

Advanced menu

Now with “Advanced” options you can filter your search results not only by domain and language, but also by country. You can filter by country by using the ‘loc:’ modifier with country code, such as “loc:AR”.

But the nicest thing is that you can now filter the search results by freshness, popularity and relevance. Pretty handy when you are searching for news, a popular article or a specific document (research, paper, etc).

Minor updates

1. If you enter a more or less competitive keyphrase, you’ll see “Related searches” on the right. Pretty useful, I guess.

2. A lonely link to “Espanol” was removed. Sure, having search in more languages is good. But why only Espanol and in such a surprising spot? Gone for good.

3. Links from the footer were removed. Nice, less things for distraction. Simplicity is nice, isn’t it, sometimes?

The bad

1. The search field is now in the middle. Which means people will need to shift their reading area to the center of the screen every time they need to type anything. Pretty inconvenient.

2. The vertical search (images, news, etc) choices are now obvious (below the search field). Controversial whether useful or not for those who don’t use them.

3. Still no option to see 100 results at once. Pretty disappointing at times.

What else you like or don’t like?

Define what exactly you want

First of all, you need to define what you want for yourself. Do you just want to redesign the site, because its old? Do you have some conversion goals in mind? Spend some time thinking about it and writing this down.

Secondly, you need to translate your wishes to the website. Do you want to change the underlying structure? Or you just want to site look a bit more pretty? If so, what are the exact elements that you want to improve and how exactly should they look?

Tell this to the designer

Well, you have determined what you want to do with the site. But does your designer know that? You need to tell what you want to get with the site to the designer. That’s why you needed to translate your wishes to site changes, so that the designer had specific information to base his work on.

Sure, that may seem a lot to ask. But the more detailed your future site description is, the easier it will be for the web designer to work. Here is an example:

“I want to improve my site conversions. To do that, I need you to create a new graphical layout - only necessary to convey the information about the product. I want it to inspire confidence in the site visitors to buy and use the product.

I want to show the maximum possible amount of information on my homepage. Can you structure my homepage so that it has the most important information shown on it?

I’ll be adding a “Benefits” section to my site. Is there anything else that you’d advise to add to the site?

What I specifically want are related pages to the visited one, shown on the right. The number of pages should be three or less.

The banner text should be small enough to fit a single line at the 1024*800 resolution.

The site should display correctly at 800*600, 1024*800 and 1280*1024 resolutions.”

Though the example above is not that precise, it is a good start to develop a good site specification.

The best way to think of is if the designer himself will ask you a set of questions or ask the designer to do so. This will help not only to define the future website, but will make the work easier.

What to expect?

There, you have told the designer what you want. But what to expect? Will the work be the same as you imagined before even looking for a web designer?

The thing is that whatever you told the designer, will be done. But what you haven’t, it will be done according to the designer’s skill, knowledge and choice.

So please, if you haven’t specified something, don’t expect it to look like you wanted - because you didn’t tell this to the designer.

Receiving the site

After a month or two, your designer presents you with a web site template for approval. What to do?

First of all, check that the site works on the abovementioned resolutions. This means that it doesn’t fall apart and displays obviously incorrectly, like some blocks disappearing from the view or text being not formatted properly.

Secondly, make sure the text is readable, the navigation is easy to identify and use.

Thirdly, make sure all your requirements were met.

And lastly, see if you want to change anything in the template. This is the last moment you can make changes to it with the help of the web designer (unless you hire him later again, of course).

Commenting on the template

If you just want to change something, tell this to the designer. If this doesn’t require reworking the template, it probably can be done without additional payment.

But if you want to change your previously agreed requirements or add something else to the site, prepare to pay. Why? Because that’s additional work for the designer.

Be prepared to word your wishes as precisely as possible again. Re-read the expectations paragraph again, if you need to.

The final

Alright, after some changes (or without), you have accepted the template. What to do next?

Don’t forget to pay the web designer, if you didn’t pay 100% up front.

Write a letter, thanking your web designer for your work. And also write a testimonial about your designer’s skill, knowledge and approach to your site. Be as specific as possible, such as:

“Thank you for your excellent work. You created something even better than I imagined.

And here is a testimonial for your site:
‘John provided excellent assistance with my site from the very start to finish. He was very attentive to details and delivered what I wanted him to. I am very grateful for his efforts. If you are seeking for a web designer, try John.’ ”

If possible, send an e-mail in a month or two about how your conversions increased (if they did).

Trust me, a web designer will appreciate your efforts to write the letter and will probably do more work for you later (if you need it) and it’ll be even more quality.

P.S. When you have finished working with the designer, write down what you needed to tell the designer throughout the whole process. This will help you define your requirements for future redesigns.

First of all, why is it called fluid?.

A design is called fluid (or liquid, flexible) when the width and the height of the page layout adapt to screen resolution or browser window.

Pretty simple, right?

Fluid design is achieved by using Cascading Style Sheets for layout and using flexible measurement units (%, em) for specifying block size, paddings, margins, etc.

So what are the benefits of a liquid design?

Flexible site layout has a couple of benefits, such as:

• a visitor is always able to see the entire width of the screen (on small resolutions/browser window)
• the site expands on larger resolutions/windows so there is no extra white space (usually on the left)
• when the site expands in width, scrolling vertically may not be necessary

Generally, it is a good idea to make your site layout fluid.

But there are a couple of buts.

Long lines are harder to read on larger screens when the site expands to full width. So it is wise to use some left and right margins on the main site layout. It won’t affect smaller screens much, but will be helpful on larger ones. Just need to find the balance for that, though.

When using flexible design layout, you or your designer need to work on making the site look equally right on all browsers, while with fixed layout everything works fine in most browsers (except Internet Explorer, probably, though). The designer has more control on how elements will be displayed on the fixed layout.

But the advantages of the liquid design are for the visitors, so it is worthwhile spending some money on developing a site on CSS.

Define site problems

Before doing anything, you need to define the reasons for redesigning your website, such as:

• low amounts of traffic
• low or zero conversion rates
• site structure change

Find solutions

Each of the site issues has its own remedies.

Low traffic can be cured by

• providing precise descriptions of your product or service
• adding more content, relative to your product or service to your website
• adding content, providing unique and valuable information to your visitors

Conversion can be cured by:

• rewriting the site content in simple language
• providing unique, precise descriptions of your product and its benefits
• providing easy navigation
• using clear link labels
• having pages, focused on one subject
• improving text formatting (shorter paragraphs, sentences, subheadings, lists, etc)
• showing your customer testimonials to your visitors

New site structure can be changed by:

• just inserting a new section in the site under the old template (not a redesign, really)
• adding secondary navigation through a Server Side Include
• completely revising the underlying code (PHP, ASP, etc) and the HTML template to accomodate to the new content structure

Do what you need to

Depending on the issues your site has, you’ll need to list what you need to do.

Sometimes, adding more content doesn’t require changing your site structure. However, if you need to add a couple of sections, you may want to analyze which sections of your site are required for your visitors and group them accordingly.

With minor changes, you’ll simply need to adjust the existing files or the Content Management System contents.

With serious adjustments, you’ll need to rewrite the HTML template to change the primary and secondary navigation.

At any rate, if you are adding content, you may consider inserting context links (links from the text) to other related pages to provide necessary information at the visitors’ wish.

When redesigning a site, pay attention to using CSS, semantically correct code, valid HTML and clear language. This will not only ensure your visitors will read and understand what you want to say, but the search engines will value your site a bit more, too.

Feel free to post your questions in the comments if you need advice on redesigning a site.

Since the Dark Ages of the Internet (especially then), site redesigns were so common and yet not every redesign is a complete success? Why would that be? Wouldn’t people learn to redesign their sites to make them successful? Somewhat.

Basically, the reasons to create a new look for the website would include:

• the site aged and required replacement
• someone just had to do something over the website (most probably for the above reason)
• the boss wanted a new website

But the real reasons to redesign a website should be:

• the site doesn’t convert well
• current site structure doesn’t allow adding more content
• current site back-end won’t allow adding new technologies
• numerous visitor complains on site usability and accessibility
• a new, more stable and efficient technology appeared

But what most site owners don’t take into account is how to redesign a website - should it be done at once or gradually?

Certainly, something only has to be done at once, like changing the underlying technologies. But most things should be done gradually, like changing site navigation, page structure or adding more content.

Here is why redesigning a website step by step is useful:
- your repeat visitors will still be familiar with the site and will be able to absorb the new changes easily
- you can track the results of the change (and continue working in the direction or undo the change)
- the site owner can do this (on small business websites anyway)

This doesn’t mean that you should redesign your website completely if it doesn’t convert at all or has low amount of visitors. You simply need to choose whether to redesign step by step or not.

Read more about the iterative process of redesign at Brainsparks.

Update: Read more on what to do when redesigning a site.

I am going on a vacation for two weeks so don’t be surprised if you don’t see a couple of posts in the remaining of August.

If you have joined the blog only recently, you may find something posted a while ago interesting, such as:

• Redesigning a site with CSS to improve business
• Redesigning sites to load faster
• Designing easy to edit websites
• What exactly to invest in when creating a website?
• How to choose a web designer?
• Designing for people with various reading speed
• How accessibility can help improve business

I’ll answer the e-mails and comments in two weeks anyway, so feel free to comment and send e-mails to us if you want.

Column layout is the aftertaste of use of tables for layouts. This technique is gradually being replaced by web developers, who either redesign the sites with CSS or create new sites with CSS altogether. But column layouts are still used with CSS to show as much information as possible, so you may as well see which one you’d rather go with.

1-column layout

One column layout is usually used on sites that have little content or are designed for small screen resolutions. Usually, having a one-column layout is useful for having the widest main reading area so that site visitors don’t scroll much. However, with increasing screen resolutions, one-column layout still has to be narrow enough to keep the lines short enough for convenient reading.

Generally, if you start to think that you may as well make some special offer more prominent but you don’t want to switch to another layout for some reason, you may as well show a link to your offer between your top navigation and the main content area or above the footer. Or both.

2-column layout

Two column layout is generally used when you need to have secondary (left or right) navigation or provide additional links to more content. 2-column layout may be used for sites with about 30-100 pages. While the main column will still be reading area, the second column may be used to point your site visitors to your special offers, related or simply interesting material.

With a 2-column layout, you can have links to pages in the site section the visitor is in as well as to related material in the section all in one secondary column. So, you may not really need to use a three column layout if you have lots of material.

3-column layout

Three column layout may be generally used to have both left and right hand navigation. The 3-column layout may give more insight to your visitors what you have and provide efficient site navigation as well. However, if your content is limited and you don’t need the three columns, you’d rather resort to 1- or 2-column layouts.

3-column layout should rather be used when you have a lot of content and want to make your secondary content more noticeable to your visitors.

Generally, if you are not completely sure which layout to go with, leave this decision to your web designer. But generally, you should know more than the designer about your content and suggest the layout that you think may be more efficient, so that the designer would choose the most suitable one.

A recent research by UIE revealed that users scroll if there is a clue that there is something below the fold.

But should we now forget the ‘above the fold’ rule and format our pages however we want? Probably not.

The thing is that reading without scrolling is still faster than with scrolling, it is important to consider whether or not a single page is enough for the material and whether the design prompts scrolling or not.

Most importantly, however, is that the text should convey the idea with the least possible amount of words to reduce the reading time as well as it should be formatted for the Web (clear headlines, subheadings, lists, short paragraphs, etc).

As one of MyNeatSite is a Microsoft Certified Professional, our company is entitled to be certified for Microsoft Small Business Specialist. This ensures that at least one of us has a total understanding of small business and can apply his knowledge to our clients’ and our clients clients’ needs.

That being said, it doesn’t take a Microsoft certificate to be able to recognize the needs of any small business website. Judging from experience of analyzing websites, such simple things as market, product and website analysis can yield a number of suggestions to improve website performance (usually in terms of SEO, site loading speed and usability). Sometimes a hint or two in the right direction can make a difference.

Surely, such a way exists and it is called “conditional elements”.

The nature of the solution is this: Microsoft created a tag that only Internet Explorer can read - it is enclosed between the comment tags. While other browsers will safely ignore it, Internet Explorer will continue plugging away at whatever is hidden between the IE conditional elements.

While this may be not so useful to include complete block structures there, it is very useful to include a special Internet Explorer only stylesheet there.

Using an IE conditional element has a number of benefits:
- only Internet Explorer can see it (no hacks for other browsers to neglect it is necessary)
- web standards compliant browsers won’t read and then discard the IE-only fix
- other browsers users will not waste their time and resources on loading the IE-only bug, because the browsers won’t read it
- no scripting language is required (you don’t need a browser-detection script to detect IE)

Another benefit of the IE conditional element is that you can filter the IE version the fix is to work for. For instance, you can specify a different stylesheet for IE 5.0, IE 6.0 and IE 7.0 each. It is as awesome as pathetic, really.

So how to create the IE-only layout?

To create the Internet Explorer stylesheet, you’ll need to create a web standards compliant (the ordinary) stylesheet or a set of stylesheets. You append them via the <link> tag.

Then, to the main stylesheet, you begin adding whatever the code is necessary to show everything properly in IE. Though you can use IE hacks for that, it is much safer to specify different values for the Internet Explorer, because IE hacks (bugs) should be fixed (sooner or later, hopefully in this millenium).

So in the end you get a stylesheet that makes IE show whatever you want properly.

Now the actual work begins. You’ll need to use the IE conditional elements:

<!--[if IE 5]>

<![endif]–>

In the above example only IE 5 or higher will render the text, the rest browsers will ignore it.

There is more tweaking to it. You can either specify the IE version or filter some IE versions:

<!–[if IE 5.5]>
Works only for IE 5.5.
<![endif]–>

<!–[if lt IE 6]>
Will work for any IE with version lower than 6.
<![endif]–>

You can put this code in the head of the document and attach the IE-only stylesheet or in any other part of the page to attach any code (or script).

And the lesser known IE conditional element can prevent Internet Explorer from rendering some code:

<![if !IE 5]>

<![endif]>

The code above will be successfully parsed by all browsers except IE or higher. This allows hiding some stuff from IE (whatever that is). Though it is not clear why would one want to hide something from Internet Explorer users, you can do that using the conditional element above.

Here is a full list of variables (from the MSDN website):

• IE: string, the only currently supported feature is the string “IE”, corresponding to Internet Explorer.
• version: number, an integer or floating point numeral, corresponding to the version of the browser.
• operator: !, the NOT operator. This is placed immediately in front of an value or expression or feature and reverses the Boolean value of the operand.
• comparison: feature, returns a Boolean value of true if the feature matches the browser type.
• comparison: feature version, returns a Boolean value of true if the feature matches the browser type and the version number matches the browser version.
• comparison: lt, the less-than operator. Compares values or expresssions. Returns a Boolean value of true if the first argument is less than the second argument.
• comparison: lte, the less-than or equal operator. Compares values or expresssions. Returns a Boolean value of true if the first argument is less than or equal to the second argument.
• comparison: gt, the greater-than operator. Compares values or expresssions. Returns a Boolean value of true if the first argument is greater than the second argument.
• comparison: gte, the greater-than or equal operator. Compares values or expresssions. Returns a Boolean value of true if the first argument is greater than or equal to the second argument.

Basically, Google currently values sites with simple markup that degrades nicely with images (and probably CSS - screen readers don’t understand CSS, most likely) turned off.

As simple markup ensures that website content may be accessible only using a keyboard, it’s another reason to use it.

Here are some quotes from the Google Accessible Search FAQ:

It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully — pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off.

Broadly, Google defines accessible websites and pages as content that the blind and visually challenged can use and consume using standard online technology…

Currently we take into account several factors, including a given page’s simplicity, how much visual imagery it carries and whether or not it’s primary purpose is immediately viable with keyboard navigation

Some of the basic recommendations on how to make a website more useable and accessible include keeping Web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter — especially extraneous content — and ensuring that the primary purpose of the Web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation.

Basically, to make your site accessible, you’ll need to do the following:
- ensure that you use text anywhere you can
- provide text alternatives (alt and title attributes, audio and video transcripts, etc)
- use valid, simple markup (probably styling separated from content by means of CSS)
- use semantic markup (with headings, etc) to let visitors navigate easily

Read more at Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (2nd version, draft).

Here is a checklist for WCAG 2.0 and a checklist of the current official version of WCAG (1.0).

What more of a reason you need to make your site accessible?

It has to be noted that converting your site to CSS will make it easy for you to make your site accessible. Redesigning your site with CSS has some other benefits as well.

Introduction

Basically, CSS is the code, inline, internal or external, applying to the HTML code of the webpage. The beauty of the code is that it allows applying similar styling to similar elements throughout the site - the data may be stored only in one or two external files.

Inline code is the code, specified for an individual HTML tag, such as <h2 style="background-color:blue;">subheading</h2>.

Internal styles are put in the <head> of the document between the style tags:

<style type="text/css">
h1 {font-size:200%;}
</style>

External styles is the code put in an external CSS file (stylesheet) with an .css extension (styles.css, for instance), attached via a
tag:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/styles.css">

Basically, the most convenient way is to put all the styles in an external stylesheet by copying the code directly, like this:

<h2 style="background-color:blue;">subheading</h2> gets reworked into
<h2>subheading</h2> in the HTML code and h2 {background-color:blue;} in the external CSS file.

Putting internal styles (the ones between the style tags) into an external stylesheet is really easy. Just copy and paste the code into the external file, save the file and remove the code from the HTML code.

When converting inline styles to external, you’ll need to specify the selector (and probably a class or an ID to the element both in HTML and CSS codes).

CSS syntax

Here are is the basic CSS code: h1 {font-size:140%;}.

Here is what it means: on every page on the site every main heading (<h1>) has a font-size of 140%. To change the look of the main heading on every page, you simply need to change a single line in the stylesheet. Slick, eh?

Now to the details.

h1 in the CSS code is called a selector, because this is what you select to apply styling to.

font-size is a property which you use to define the look of the selector.

140% is the value of the property you used to adjust the look of the selector.

For the code to work properly, all styles, applied to the same selector must be enclosed between curved brackets. Each property and its corresponding value are separated by a semi-colon (:), while every pair of a property and value is separated from another by a colon (;). It is a good idea to end a semi-colon after each property-value entry to keep the habit of doing so, because finding a single mistake in the code may be troublesome if you are not using a validator.

Why Cascading Style Sheets?

The Cascading Style Sheets have gotten their name for a reason. They are called ‘cascading’ because styles are applied in cascades. It means that all the styles that affect the page (browser default styles, external, internal, inline and user defined) are displayed in cascades: browser styles have the lowest priority - they can be overridden by any styles. External styles are displayed if there are no internal or inline styles. Internal styles can only be overridden by inline styles. However, inline styles can be overridden by the user defined styles (if the browser supports this), which have the highest priority.

Let’s see an example of this. For instance, we have the following styles:

• h1 has 200% font-size in the browser default (that’s true in Opera 9, at least)
• external stylesheet has it that h1 {background:green;font-style:italic;}
• internal styles have that h1 {font-size:140%;}
• inline styles have that <h1 style="background:red;">main heading</h1>
• user defined styles want a heading have a normal font style {font-style:normal;}

Here is how the browser decides how to display the main heading:

• first it checks it default heading font-size - 200% and checks if there are additional styles
• it notices that the external stylesheet has a green background and an italic font style applied to it. No discrepancies here, yet.
• however, the browser also sees that internal styles have 140% font size applied. As internal styles are more important than browser default styles, 140% font size will now be applied to the heading
• inline styles make the heading have a red background, because inline styles override the external styles
• the browser notices that the user defined styles want a normal font style, so the headings will be displayed normally, not with italics.

As each of the higher priority styles has overridden the previous styles, the browser will display the heading according to the following code:

h1 {font-size:140%;font-style:normal;background:red;}

Classes and IDs

As you may want to distinguish certain selectors from others (like you would like to adjust the look of only certain paragraphs), you’ll need to use classes and identifiers. A class or an identifier (ID) is a name you give to a selector to distinguish it from the rest, both in the HTML and CSS Codes. An identifier can only be used once on the web site. Here is an example:

HTML code:

<p id="intro">Some text</p>
<p class="summary">Summary</p>

CSS code:

p#intro {font-size:120%;}
.summary {font-style:italic;}

In the above example the first paragraph has its font size changed to 120% and the summary paragraph gets its text styled as italics. You may omit the name of the selector in the CSS code (.summary) if there are no other selectors with the same class or selector (no <h1 class="summary"> or <ul class="summary">).

It is generally the best to name the classes and IDs according to the roles their selectors (HTML tags) play in the HTML layout, like ‘topnav’ or ‘content’.

Conclusion

Now you can go on and learn what exactly to specify to change site look. You can search the engines for ‘css reference’ or go to www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp to see CSS examples.

Does anyone find that inconvenient or otherwise unpleasant to deal with? If so, please leave us a comment. If possible, tell us why you prefer full posts over excerpts.

Does anyone like the full posts in their RSS aggregators? If so, why?

The reason for the switch was to actually allow our readers to read the posts without opening a new window (or a tab) to read the post. Though some of the posts may be CSS tutorials (for instance, you need to visit the post to see the 3D CSS button example in the beginning or open a new window with the example anyway), most of the posts are informative and can be easily read in the RSS readers.

Any objections, suggestions, ideas, tips? All kinds of feedback (some flames too - we’ve got a fire extinguisher ready ;) ) is appreciated.

CSS background

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet(s). This is a technique, lately acquired world-wide recognition, to design quick, user-friendly and good looking sites (a mix hard to come by when using tables). It is used to separate presentation (positioning, styling and coloring) and content.

What is CSS exactly?

To be more precise, CSS files are files, containing element positioning, text formatting and other presentation data for a web site. A single .CSS file can be applied to every page on a web site.

What can CSS do?

As CSS is used to separate style from content, it is used whatever deprecated HTML tags could: position page elements, apply styling and coloring with several enhancements:

• position elements, regardless of their position in the HTML code
• apply any styling to all similar elements throughout the site

How does CSS help us?

Here is how exactly CSS helps the web site designer or editor:

• positioning elements on a page regardless of their order in the code pushes the content up for search engine spiders to crawl
• provides nice visual affects, which could earlier be achieved with graphics (hover effects, fixed positions, etc.) to impress your visitors with fast download speed and good effects at a time
• has a number of elements, supporting various media formats: handheld, print, aural (screen readers), etc. to enhance experience for all kinds of visitors

Benefits of CSS

CSS has a wide range of benefits, prompted by what it can do. Here are a couple:

• reduces download times greatly (by 20-80%) to convert more visitors to customers
• makes your web site adapt to user screen size
• eases web site creation and editing: apply similar styling to a single element throughout a site by changing just one file
• reduces the amount of time needed to redesign the site (site maintenance)
• give your visitors an ability to adjust font size with a single click (without using the browser buttons)
• provide text-only version by simply providing a different style sheet (modified to hide extra graphics and/or text from the user or printer)

Conclusion

Basically, just a couple of benefits are enough to force anyone to convert his/her web site to CSS design. And, finally, if nothing else makes sense to you as to why redesign with CSS, do it, because your everyone (including your competitors) either has done it already, is considering doing it, or will be doing it soon.

Update: read a general guide to CSS to apply it to your website.

There are web standards, such as HTML and CSS, and there are web standards compliant browsers. By following the technologies to the letter ((x)HTML/CSS), you can create sites that will work in all web standards compliant browsers. But they won’t work in IE right away, because IE doesn’t support CSS well. In fact, IE is infamous for its lack of CSS support (bugs).

They removed a couple of issues in IE7 and are still working on it, but there isn’t and won’t be full support for CSS in IE7 to call it as web standards compliant as Firefox or Opera.

That’s why CSS developers (yes, that may include you, too) create sites that follow HTML and CSS specifications (the web standards) and work in Firefox, Opera, Safari and other browsers first. Then they overcome IE bugs by adding code that would trick IE in displaying the site right after all.

However, having all the IE fixes in the same stylesheets will both make them larger and harder to edit, so you can create a CSS layout for Firefox/Opera, then add any styles required to make IE display the site correctly, put the IE-specific styles in a separate external stylesheet and attach it via the IE-only IF conditional clauses. This way only IE users will have to wait while IE fixes are loaded and it will be easy to edit the IE fixes in the special separate CSS file.

Generally, one of the most often used fixes is the ‘box model hack’, along with other IE-only predicaments.

How do you create cross-browser friendly sites? Is there a set of fixes you always include in your designs? Why?

There have been a lot of studies on the influence of download speed on the visitors.
Some are really dated, even extinct now (Zona Research, “The Economic Impacts of Unacceptable Web Site Download Speeds”, circa 1998):

• Web Site Delays: what can you do? (PowerPoint presentation by Dennis Galletta, Ray Henry, Scott McCoy, and Peter Polak, 2003)
• The truth about download time by User Interface Engineering, 2001
• Jacob Nielsen on web download speed 1997, 2000, 2004, and response times overview
• “Broadband means more online spending” and worldwide broadband usage overview at Clickz, Nov, 2005

They all speak about how creating faster loading websites is helpful to the visitors. Is still download speed as important as before in the age of the broadband?

First of all, if the broadband speeds have increased and now nearly 40% of the US population has broadband, does it mean the web designers are free to use as much graphics as they want? Not so fast.

Of course, broadband make surfing the Net much more enjoyable. But the response times and times people like to wait for sites to load shouldn’t have changed. If anything, they are more likely to decrease as people get used to everything loading fast.

The fact that broadband users are likely to purchase online simply states that download time indeed plays a major role on the Internet. This can be applied to any site visitor with any website connection speed.

Moreover, if a lot of people use broadband, it doesn’t mean that everyone uses it. This leaves us with another, major, part of the world-wide population who use dial-up or equally slow connections.

Furthermore, even if we make a site load faster for a broadband user, he will appreciate it, as, judging by Nielsen’s research, a tolerable response time is about 1.0 second. How many sites do you know that load faster than 1.0 seconds (becides Google)?

That leads us to a conclusion that it is to early to disregard website download speed. It has too many implications on our users, who may come from every part of the world with any Internet access, be it South Africa, China or anywhere else.

Of course, we don’t really need to disregard the aspect of site download speed perception. The easier it is to find the information, the more interesting the site, the faster it is perceived to load. Which brings us to not only having faster loading websites, but easily navigatable websites as well.

What do you think about website download speed right now?

Why take part in this study?

- you will learn how exactly converting your site to CSS can make your site load faster
- your site will be mentioned in our research material (a link and some traffic to your site)

How to take part?

Just mention the URL of your site in the comments below.

What is the research?

The research will be comprised of the following:
- the site homepage will be saved to an HTML file with images
- the underlying HTML table structure will be converted to CSS
- the look of the homepage will be kept unchanged
- the difference in size of the new homepage and the old one will be reported
- there will also be made an approximation how optimizing images can speed up the website

It will measure the increase of download speed on converting your site to CSS (the code and images, if possible).

To be the one, whose site will be redesigned with CSS, your site only needs to be using tables for layout (learn if your site is on tables) and leave a comment with your URL right here.

We are looking for about 30 websites, but websites over the number may participate in our later studies.

Thank you for your participation.

As the Internet consists (mostly) of content and links, creating content and links should be the most natural thing to do on a website. So why not link out to external websites?

Some web masters think that by linking out they let their PageRank pass on to the other pages. This is not entirely true. PR is determined by the amount of links, pointing at the page, and by other factors, such as the quality of incoming links. In turn, you can pass your vote to other pages by linking to them. The less links to point from a single page, the more value the recipient link receives. But you don’t actually lose PR.

Of course, another factor that determines the quality of a page (in the eyes of Google and - maybe - other search engines) is the quality of sites you link out to. From the perspective of the search engines, you vote for a site you link to. If you link to a site of high quality, all is fine. If you link to a site, involved in cheating website, you may be considered a “cheater” too, as you are considered the same quality of the site you link to. So linking to the so-called ‘bad neighourhood’ isn’t a wise move to do.

Another moment that external links influence is that they help the search engines determine the theme (topic) of your website. If you link to sites of your own industry, it becomes obvious that you belong to the industry. Especially if you mostly get incoming links from your own industry.

So, what should we fear linking to external sites? Yes. But should we link to any sites? No. What we should link to is sites the industry you are in, or to sites of related topics. The higher quality site you link to, the better.

Look at it like this: link to sites that you would like to show to your visitors to make their experience better. This guarantees you link only to the best sites. As the intent counts, the search engines will appreciate this move as well as your visitors.

To fasciliate the point further, here is an excellent article by Ammon Johns about the real meaning of links.

Update: Jim Boykin says “Yes” to external links too.

Another update: Simplenomics doesn’t worry about link leak as well.

So, do you link outwards or not?

Submit

The markup

The HTML markup is pretty straight-forward:

<a href="#">Submit</a>

CSS markup is pretty simple as well:

a {
text-decoration:none;
font-weight:bold;
border:3px solid;
padding:2px;
border-color:#6cf #2af #2af #6cf;
background:#9df;
}
a:hover {
border-color: #2af #6cf #6cf #2af;
}

Explanation

Here is a lowdown on how we create the 3D CSS button:

• first we remove the underline with text-decoration:none
• then we tell the browser to display the text as bold
• later, we specify the width and type of the border (you are free to choose the size and type of the border to suit your visitors)
• afterwards, we provide the padding for the text to look like a button, not like a text with a border
• furthermore, we make the button look like a 3D button: we specify the border colors (top left are lighter than right and bottom)
• and finally, we create a hover state pseudo class with a:hover and change the colors (top left are darker now than the right and bottom borders)

You can add a background color and change the text color to adapt the button to your site as well.

Rounding up

Check out the 3D CSS button example.

The example is pretty bullet-proof, meaning that it uses no hacks and looks relatively the same in all browsers.

First of all, accessible websites are made accessible to people without or with bad eyesight. Apart from people, this includes the search engines, because they don’t appreciate the visual layouts as well.

Let’s see what can be done to improve website accessibility:
- provide text alternative for any media (images, auto, video)
- alt and title attributes are added, describing images and links
- some image links are replaced with text links with the proper anchor text
- use simple language that your visitors can understand

As the main point of accessibility is translating any means of presenting information to text and using the appropriate language (relevant words), it makes the site extremely valuable in the eyes of the search engines, as search engines need text (mostly).

Here is what may result in with increased website accessibility:
- visually or otherwise impaired visitors may actually do business with you via the Internet, which increases your customer base
- search engines rank your site higher, which drives additional traffic, which, in turn, prompts sales

Either way, accessibility will get you the extra push to gain more happy customers.

Of course, accessibility makes the site usable not only for visually impaired visitors and the search engines, but to the seeing humans as well. They will be able to understand what your site is about easier (even with images turned off) and will be more likely to stay on your website. This, consequentially, will increase the amount of repeat visitors and orders, too.

Of course, if someone finds your website inaccessible and decides to sue you, you can even lose money.

As mentioned earlier, website accessibility is a legal requirement
- US: Section 508
- UK: Code of Law (PDF)
- Europe: yet to be released, but there are moves in this direction already

If you haven’t yet considered improving your website accessibility, now is the right time to start considering it, at least.

For instance, the obvious results were that two-column full-justified text is read with almost the same speed than one-column left-justified text but a lot faster than one-column full-justified text and other two and three column variants.

Another piece of results is that full-aligned text and single-column text was easier to comprehend than other variants.

Quote:

	Columns
	One	Two	Three
Full Justification	4.64 (0.92)	4.25 (0.90)	3.99 (1.01)
Left Justification	4.28 (1.17)	3.77 (0.95)	4.14 (1.08)

Yet another thing to note is the effect on fast and slow reading site visitors.

Basically, from the image we can see the following:
- one-column layout seems to be the best for either type, slow or fast readers
- three column layout is a bit faster than two column layout for both, too
- two column layout has greatly increased the reading speed for fast-reading people and has similar beneficial, albeit lesser, effect on slow-reading people
- one-column layout was read slower for left-aligned text

You can see other interesting data from the report, if you want.

What brings this to site designers and owners?

It adds another thing to consider when designing the site for the visitors.
Now we need to know whether people read fast or slow. How can this be determined?

Naturally, those who read a lot tend to read faster due to lots of practice. Who reads a lot? Educated and, consequently, smarter people. Due to reading, they are more likely to have more knowledge than those, who don’t read much (obviously).

This brings us to a theory that if you sell something technical or complex, your site readers will read fast and you’ll need to use two column full justified text.

If you sell something less technical, like grocery products or something, you’d rather go with one-column left-aligned text.

Another factor to consider is the correlation between gender and the speed of reading and intellectual level of the website visitor. Do women read less than men? Or more?

My guess is that they read more, but they read less technical stuff, like women magazines, etc. Of course, nowadays women tend to be more business-like, which somewhat removes the difference between genders for reading speed. However, I’d still make put one-column left-aligned text for the women, as another aspect to consider is a habit of reading two-column newspaper layout. And my guess (it’s only a guess) is that women read less newspapers than men. Shoot me a study or research on this, anyone?

Anyway, what is your take on the problem? Have you spotted anything else in the research?

Of course, there may be numerous factors:
- experience
- skill level
- also takes web standards, usability and accessibility into account
- a level of trust
- communcation level (good language command, if it is his second language)
- enthusiasm
- location
- cost

Which one do you think is the most important?

I personally think that one of the importance ones are skill level and trust. If you can’t trust a web designer, how can you think you will work with him/her? On the other hand, if the designer doesn’t know how to do what you want, you can’t continue working together either.

Another thing that may influence your choise is the designer’s location. But what location influences is how well you can communicate and cooperate with your designer. If you can do it well via the Internet, there is not much reasons to stick to a local designer.

Though, of course, trust can be achieved not only from prompting great referrals by providing excellent services, but also by marketing oneself well. Solid presentation, good proposition, reasonable price can all inspire trust to the designer. But the most efficient way of building trust is meeting presonally. This is where you can learn all you need from a designer and decide whether you trust him or her or not.

This point of view is largely supported by how the folks at 37signals have chosen a web designer.

If you largely are concerned with cost, don’t worry, you’ll get what you pay for.
If you want a great looking website for $100, you’ll get right what you pay for. Because a human can not force himself into spending a great deal more time on something that doesn’t pay well. It is against any good laws of handling business, too.

One thing you may want to do is to get more proof the designer you want to work with is worth it. You can contact the site owners from the designer’s portfolio, ask your IT man(or woman) to take a look at the clients’ site or evaluate the site of the designer himself, if there are no significant testimonials. You have to be 100% sure you are starting to work with the right man, because you may end up with a long-lasting business relationship and you’d rather do that with a professional that loves his work, too.

So what is the most important factor for you when you pick a designer?

Clearly, there are lots of challenges in front of many small business website owners:

• develop a solid business plan
• set up a website
• market the product and the website
• provide excellent customer service
• deliver the product or service

What one can do him- or herself and what is best to invest the budget to get the extra edge?

Of course, many small business owners can develop business plans themselves. Especially, when there are numerous free corresponding resources on the Internet.

Setting up a website is relatively easy for someone, who knows his way around HTML or CSS. One can use a free CMS (WordPress, Zen Cart, etc) to set up an initial website. But will the site have the unique look and feel to match the business? Will it have efficient navigation or page layout?

Some owners may wish to stop on the free choice (not exactly free, they spend their time on it, too), some may want their site designed with the help of professionals. Choices everywhere.

What good it is for a business if noone knows about it? Naturally, some budget is spent on advertising (offline, online, PPC, etc).

Providing excellent customer service is important of course, but it is hard to invest a lot here apart of one’s own efforts and personality.

Product or service delivery is also important. But it is also problematic to invest noticeable budget here, apart from choosing the delivery partner carefully.

So it all comes to establishing or promoting a solid website. But before the site promotion may begin, you’ll need a website. This is what you’ll be living with for the next several years. Now add to the fact that you can do your keyword research and minimal promotion yourself (with some learning, yes..studying opportunities everywhere), we may end up with the choice of seeking a designer to create a site for us. Here is what can be done:

• graphical design
• back-end design (CSS templates)
• dynamic scripting (PHP)
• website content (copywriting)
• SEO: keyword research, on-page optimization, link building
• website marketing: site advertising
• website usability

As a site has to be fast, informational and beautiful, it’d be wise to develop a great design first, then fill it with content.

Here, a small business website owner should rather choose the contractor wisely, as there may a small difference between what you can get for $300 and $3000. A good professional can develop a good looking graphical layout for $700-1500, back-end web development can be done for about $500-700.

If you are pressed for cash, you may want to develop just a graphical layout and a logo (yes, this stuff is considered as different jobs by the designers) with the help of a designer and do the HTML/CSS coding yourself. However, you may want to hire a web developer here as well, depending on how you want to manage your business.

Freelance copywriters can create moderately digestable content for about $30 per page and you’ll need about 15-30 pages at least. That’d be about $1k.

Website usability comes in $300-1500 chunks (for the moderate budget, at least)

If you mix and match properly (choosing best available quality for moderate fees), you may end up with a good website to start on:
- a logo: $300
- a graphical layout (a Photoshop file): $1500
- web development (HTML/CSS coding):$700
- website usability: $800
- some SEO promotion: $500-700
That would amount to $4000 total. Too bad if you don’t have the extra budget. But as the items are listed in the order of importance, you may stop where you want. (SEO and site promotion can be done by yourself, so if you just do your keyword research and writing text stuff yourself.)

So what would you spend or advise someone else to spend the $3000?

P.S. Here is an article on how to choose a web designer.

P.P.S. On a similarly related note, an article from Mike Grehan about considering what to do when on a low budget, and an article from SEOmoz, featuring various low budgets and possible ways of spending them on SEO.

Update: check out an article by Chris Tacy on why $10 000 is the only true price for a website.

Have you had your moments in the real life when your SEO background creeps in?

Supposedly, there is nothing wrong with getting noticed by your target audience. When doing SEO, the main thing is finding words your target audience uses.

However, all the other moments of optimizing your site for the search engines would directly affect the search engine results, not the people.

Most likely, whether something is ethical or not depends on the intent it is done with. If you optimize your site for your visitors (make the site easy to navigate, develop with the web standards, use the words your potential customers use to describe your product, etc), then it is perfectly legitimate.

However, if your main aim is to cheat the search engines, then your activity can’t be even called ‘optimization for the search engines’ - that’s ‘optimization against the search engines’. Needless to say, black hat techniques (keyword stuffing, doorway pages, invisible links) go against both the search engines and the humans, so this strategy will bring the site to its knees, sooner or later.

Of course, this all means that it doesn’t matter whether SEO is ethical. It means the intent one uses the SEO methods matters, not the techniques themselves.

The contemporary search model has it that people search for general things first, then narrowing down to more specific. Social search, in turn, starts focusing not only on keywords the people used to find a product, but on how sites, not having those words in their description, may be noticed by those very people.

Social search results depend not only on the search queries, but also on human behaviour and interests. Suppose there is a discussion of a certain solution to spam. And voila, an ad about some spam blocker will appear without any effort from the searcher.

Basically, the efficiency of this approach is supported by the fact that social bookmarking services are so popular. They offer a different approach to searching (hunting) for information. Another aspect, though, is that the results are based not on what site owners offer them, but what other people recommend them. Spam is reaching its ugly hand to social bookmarking services as well, but for now, we can enjoy quality social search results.

What do you think of the impact social search can make on marketing and SEO?

-ensure that all public websites are accessible by 2010,
-by 2008, put in place actions in the field of digital literacy and skills to reduce gaps for groups at risk of exclusion by half in 2010,
-by 2007, make recommendations on accessibility standards and common approaches, which could become mandatory in public procurement by 2010, and
-assess the necessity for legislative measures in the field of e-Accessibility, and take account of accessibility requirements in the review of the electronic communications regulatory framework beginning in June 2006.

Are you in Europe and own a website? Time to start working in order to improve your business and avoid getting sued, sooner or later.

Read more on the business benefits of accessibility.

Seth Godin has recently discovered that others take two aspects of SEO into account: passive and active. (Passive SEO is anything done on the site itself and active SEO is getting links and traffic to the site from outside). He also thinks that different stuff has to be handled by different people and coordinated.

Actually, it has long been known that there can be two things to do for a website: fix the site and promote the site. Depending on the available staff, both dimensions can be handled either by the same person (with SEO staff less than two) or a team. The main thing, though is to balance the efforts.

A website that can’t convert visitors to customers doesn’t need any traffic. Why get traffic if this results in no clients? This effectively brings us to a point: which one to do first, on-page SEO or promotion? Can passive SEO replace promotion?

In fact, on-page SEO, if we take page titles and website content into account, can replace SEO promotion in a way. Here is how:
- a search-engine friendly website is a part of the success with the search engines
- focus on words, which the target audience uses (would be the main thing to do before anything is done on a website)
- compelling page titles will not only help your pages show up in the SERPs, but will lure the people to click on them
- content, aimed to provide value to the visitors, will generate word-of-mouth advertising and also incoming links

When done properly and consistently, a site with a lot of unique, valuable content can generate a steady stream search engine traffic and, hopefully, potential clients.

As noted, each word has its own connotation and some (like user) may be even derogatory, as it treats a person like a mindless being. On a related note, here is how people of different professions may call people:

• Software developers: users
• Search Engine marketers: visitors
• Executives: Consumers
• Sales department: Customers
• Marketing department: clients
• Paul Mcenany: custconsumers

Though some of the terms may be too technical, they all highlight a certain aspect of how a person is related to the company. Of course, we could call people people, as well.

Sure, when dealing with so huge masses of people, it is tempting to invent a technological word to avoid any emotional relation. But do we have to do that? Why not just recognize that people who visit our websites have their own interests, passions, hobbies and problems? They are the same people like the those on the other part of the fence.

How about using more palatable words, when describing the people you deal with, such as: ‘people’, ‘a person’, ‘individual’, ‘human’ (when comparing to search engine spiders), etc.

Some day, you’ll be that very ‘customer’ too - so you’d rather treat the people you deal with with care, because someday you’ll be one of them.