Web Development

How To Choose Which Web Development Package Is Right For You

2007-10-03T07:09:00.004-07:00

There are plenty of options when it comes to web site creation software and a wannabe web designer might have a hard time deciding which to choose. We will have a look at the most popular web creation programs: Front Page, Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive. All three offer a user-friendly interface and plenty of beginner and advanced options that will allow you to create the website of your dreams. A large majority of website hosting companies accept the final outputs of the three programs, but you will still need to check your web page for compatibility with different web browsers.

Front Page
comes as a natural option to many web designers, partly because being part of the Microsoft Office family this software offers a familiar workspace. The interface is similar to the ones you find in Word or Excel, with many identical buttons, keyboard shortcuts and actions. Text formatting is piece of cake in Front Page as it almost feels like you are using Word to do it. The Insert/Picture command is also available here, allowing the user to easily integrate images into the web page. Although many experienced web designers see Front Page as a basic software, you can still tweak your page to higher standards by using the HTML view.

Dreamweaver
offers a lot more high-end features and is preferred by a large community of web designers. You have more freedom using HTML features and taking your web site closer to perfection. A very useful option is the design and code split view – you see the effects of the changes you make in the source code affect the design in real time. Macromedia Dreamweaver allows you to create from the simplest of web sites to very complex pages that integrate Java applications and Flash elements. You may also check the final result in different browsers, a very important step that allows you to calibrate the web site for maximum compatibility. It is also an excellent programme for beginners because of its WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) interface, this allows the user to create web sites without having knowledge of HTML coding. Some HTML coding knowledge will, however, allow you to create better looking sites.

Adobe GoLive
is a favorite web creation software of designers that are used to working with other Adobe products such as Photoshop or Illustrator. The familiar Adobe workspace reduces the learning curve for this program and allows easy integration of cross-software elements. The graphic elements for the web site, which are usually created in Photoshop, are effortlessly placed into GoLive's workspace by a simple drag and drop move. The excellent compatibility with other graphic design Adobe products recommends GoLive as a great option when you want to create a great looking website.

About The Author

Andrew Smith is a co-webmaster of HowToAll, a site providing well researched information on accomplishing tasks on various topics. http://www.howtoall.com.

Web Application Development

2007-10-03T07:09:00.003-07:00

Prototyping is one of the most important aspects of our development process. We consider the act of prototyping to be a risk mitigation strategy. If approached correctly, we believe that prototyping can reduce the risks in development. In addition, by reducing risks we are often able to reduce project costs.

Prototyping may be done in a number of ways and it may actually employ more than one method over the course of development.

We may begin with hand drawn diagrams and flowcharts to represent User Interface (UI) elements and business processes. These drawings are then converted into HTML-based prototypes of the UI that incorporate a minimal level of functionality.

Customer acceptance tests are then prepared to document the required functionality. These tests are then validated against the prototype, as well as the established business, user and system requirements to ensure that the final system meets the stated goals of the project.

We emphasize to clients that testing should begin early and should be carried out continuously. Testing begins during requirements analysis and prototyping when project managers work with the customer to develop high-level Customer Acceptance Tests that validate the business, user, and system requirements.

During development, unit tests ensure that individual, functional packages of code at the lowest levels do what they are designed to do. Integration testing ensures that all the parts (i.e. functional packages of code) that make up a system function together to meet the specified requirement.

Final Acceptance Testing validates the completed system against the requirements as defined during the requirements analysis and prototyping phase. When all of the final acceptance tests have passed, the system should be ready for production.

Small releases provide positive results to clients in a timely manner, adding value to their business processes as quickly as possible.

Small releases also prevent the project from straying too far from the intended goals before the direction can be corrected. In this regard smaller releases can be considered a risk mitigation strategy as well. The key to a small release approach is to identify the individual subsystems that make up the larger system and rank those subsystems by importance. The most important pieces are then delivered first to add value quickly.

Pair programming is the most difficult to implement of all the development processes identified in this article. While we do not advocate pair programming in all instances, we do feel that there is great value to be gained in many cases. Clients are generally concerned about the development costs of a system. And while the idea of having two developers working side-by-side on the same piece of code may seem counterintuitive, cost savings can be achieved due to shorter testing cycles and less rework as a result of pair programming.

At the same time, managers see the use of two people on one task to be a waste of valuable resources, which can be true if the task is not of sufficient complexity. However, in those situations where it fits, if quality is increased and testing and rework reduced, then we believe the trade-offs are warranted.

About The Author

The AVS Group is a marketing, training, and communications company. AVS is in La Crosse, Wisconsin. AVS helps clients communicate and market effectively. AVS can be found online at http://www.avsgroup.com.

avsinfo@avsgroup.com

Web Development – What Is SEO?

2007-10-03T07:09:00.001-07:00

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the act of altering or optimizing your website and it’s content in order that search engines deem it to be relevant and useful to certain topics. You are able to select the most appropriate topics through the use of certain keywords in your website.

When surfers conduct searches on search engines they are presented with a list of results for that search term. These results are called Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and generally speaking, the websites that appear at the top of the SERPs will receive plenty of traffic to their websites from searchers.

In order to determine your position on the SERPs, search engines use their own algorithms. While nobody knows for absolute certain what these algorithms are it is widely accepted that your website needs to be easy to navigate, popular and relevant.

Easy navigation means that your site should have text links to each of its pages. If you use a flash menu system then you should include a sitemap in order that search engines and visitors can quickly and easily find their way around the whole of your website.

In order to make your website appear popular you need to get links to your site. While search engines would rather these links were generated because visitors to your site genuinely found your content useful, it is commonplace to undertake a reciprocal link campaign or generate inbound links. Reciprocal links mean a website links to you in exchange for a link to their own site.

Relevance is judged by your content. By including the keywords you place in the metatags of your site throughout the body of your content and in certain places within your site you are indicating to the search engines that your website contains relevant information.

By combining these factors you can effectively convince search engines that you deserve to be near the top of their SERPs. However, this can take time and a lot of effort if you don’t fully understand what you are doing.

About The Author

Nati Roberts is the owner of Make Money In Minutes. Learn proven strategies that will help you generating an income online. http://www.makemoneyinminutes.info.

Your Company's Website – Design, Development & Marketing Aspects

2007-10-03T07:08:00.002-07:00

This is the last part of a three part series dealing with guidelines in how to plan, present and develop your company’s website. In part one we explored the importance of having a professional website to represent your company online. In part two, we identified the quality approach of planning your company’s website.

Now in our last part of these series we will take a quick look into the website design, development & marketing aspects and your company’s image.

Company Brand

First step when looking into website design, development and marketing is concentrating in your company's logo. Your company logo should be the focus point of your website – remember: it is all about your company. Your marketing material should all look similar – business cards, printing materials, online PDF’s – all should deliver the same message and have the same connection.

The mainly objective of your website design, development and marketing is to connect prospective clients with your company. They are all alone there, without any sales person to guide them and explain how the company works so make sure it can stands on its own merit. Your website must present your company well as there will be no human factor once a visitor comes around.

Search Engine and User Friendly

A website is not a brochure! When concentrating in your company's website design, development and marketing, all materials should be created accordingly with online marketing. The copyright for a website is not the same as used on your printing materials, images have a special format and size, colors should be wisely used, and navigation should be easy with absolutely no dead ends.

Building a search engine friendly website is not a task that every website design and development company can manage, so make sure you do your home work before hiring a web site design, development and marketing expert. To create a website that is search engine friendly, the team of professionals working on your website need to have the knowledge and expertise on search engines; how they work and index websites. If a website is not built taking into consideration how search engines work and the criteria used to index sites in their database, it will probably be invisible to search engines robots. They will not be able to index your site properly or maybe not to index it at all.

Another common mistake is to hire a website design and development company that has not enough knowledge on search engine algorithms and might put your website in a great risk using spamming techniques. With the incredible growth of websites being indexed -- about 11.5 billion websites indexed with search engines -- you want to make sure the company working on your website has the expertise to build it to be seen.

Search Engine Optimization [SEO] & Search Engine Marketing [SEM]

If you offer products or services that Internet users are searching for, you certainly should look into having your web site indexed with search engines. Building a search engine friendly website is just the beginning; you need to make the website will be found by potential users searching for the products and services you offer.

Potential customers are more and more using the Internet and search engines to look for products and services they need and want and having a website that no potential customer can find is a waste of time and money. Use your website as a marketing and online sales tool.

Over the past few years of the web’s evolution as a key business tool, shows that an effective website mines prospects that other vehicles do not reach, shortens the sales cycle – in many cases dramatically so – and delivers early and consistent ROI.

Monitoring and Measurement of the Product

The capability of being able to evaluate, validate and verify if the effectiveness of your SEO campaign is critical. Reputable Search Engine Optimization [SEO] & Search Engine Marketing [SEM] companies will provide you monthly reports showing your current status and suggestions for areas to that need improvement (number of visitor per page, time spent, referrals, exit pages, high traffic pages, keywords being used, etc).

Use the information above as guidelines and always use common sense. Your website should be an extension of your company’s image online and present the same standards of quality and customer appreciation.

Now that you are ready to start, don’t forget that creating a website has lots of work involved but also lots of excitement. In the process of building your website, you are also expanding your company and giving it new form and shape.

You must be full of enthusiasm to start or redesign your website now.

Have fun!

Carla Reis
President
Quest Quality Solutions

About The Author

Carla Reis is the President of Quest Quality Solutions, a company specialized in Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine friendly website design and development. Carla has a Bachelor Degree in Arts and a Diploma in Website Design; she also has several years of experience in Web site design, Search Engine Marketing and Optimization. Carla’s experience with Web site design and Search Engine Optimization [SEO] began when she was the training manager for one of the biggest Search Engine Marketing companies in North America. She developed the company’s training manual and SEO certification exams to better qualify the staff and deliver high quality services to the company’s clients. After managing the training department and organizing the working flow and distribution for the company, Carla decided to venture on her own. She started her company in 2004 – Quest Quality Solutions. What began as a one-person business has expanded to a team of professionals and has been growing in a steady pace.

questqualitysolutions.com

Web Design and Development Buyers Guide

2007-10-03T07:08:00.001-07:00

Getting Started:

When developing a website for your business there are many important issues which need to be considered. I have made a list of recommendations about many of these issues so that you can evaluate your current project needs and how to prepare for them. Your website is by far the most important aspect of your business marketing. It is the face of your company which people from all across the world are going to see. People base their opinion on your company based on the professionalism of your website. If it looks cheap and amateur, people will simply think you have a poor business model and you aren’t making enough money to afford a professional web presence. But if your site looks incredible, your potential customers will feel comfortable with you and give you instant credibility. Studies have shown that a company’s website design has more influence on a potential customer than the products, functionality or written content within the website.

Preparing Project Requirements

To start preparing for your project, first you must create a project requirement document for your exact needs of your project. It is extremely important to be as detailed as possible when creating these specs because the future of your project depends on it. Many times the company or individual developing your website design or web application does not take the time to help you build a spec, especially if you don’t pay them a consulting fee. If you have the budget to pay for project consulting we highly recommend that you do. It could save you thousands of dollars and months of wasted time. Most companies will even refund your consulting fees once your project.

However if you feel that you don’t need any consulting and you can write your project requirements on your own, then make sure you are as detailed as possible. If you forget something it could cost you much more to have it added later. If you would like some documents which can guide you through writing your project requirements please ask your web development company to provide them to you.

Also, you must write everything down in a word document format or in an email. This is very important especially towards the end of your project when testing begins to see if all the requirements have been met. If it’s not on your sheet, there is a great chance it won’t get done, and you’ll have a real problem convincing a company to do any extras for free unless it’s something small.

Choosing Your Developer or Web Company

Once you have your requirements the next step is to choose your developer or development team. This is a very crucial decision which must be well thought out. Many people and small companies shop for these developers based on price alone. This is a big mistake. These low cost options tend to be college students, low cost offshore developers in India and other parts of the world, local web companies with weak portfolios, and large cookie cutter developers like www.register.com, www.networksolutions.com, or www.yahoo.com.

College students generally only charge $10 to $30 per hour and have very limited skills and experience. Anyone who charges this amount generally does so because they have no real experience and will take anything they can get their hands on. College students only know the basics and usually try to cut and paste their way through the project using free scripts and templates. The result is a website or application that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do and looks extremely amateur. Also college students generally never finish on time, or at all. They are not dedicated to your project because most of their time is spent doing homework, going to class, socializing, or working at a part time job. These delays can cost your business heavily. Also many times desperate college students will agree to take a project which is more than they can handle. They try to get a friend to help them or do it themselves. Once they fail, obviously you most likely won’t be getting your money back. I have heard stories like these 1000 times over.

Another cheap option to avoid is low cost offshore developers. You will generally get hundreds of emails per year from these companies offering to work for $2 per hour up to $30 per hour. 99.9% of the time you are guaranteed to be disappointed. Most of the time the offers are coming from India, China, Russian, Ukraine, or Mexico, so please try to avoid them at all costs. They often reply to any ad posted on websites like www.elance.com, www.craigslist.org or www.guru.com. They usually reply to hundreds of ads per day in hopes that someone will actually give them a project, and then it’s just a game of roulette after that. Many times they will supply you with a stolen portfolio of completed work, or a bunch of promises to give you the highest quality, blah- blah- blah, etc... I have rarely seen anyone successfully do a project off shore without jumping through some major hoops to do it. The time differences, the language barriers, and the lack of security alone should push you away from these options. Many times they are just college students as well, and they can’t provide you with what you need even if they wanted to.

The 3rd option to avoid like the plague is using cookie cutter companies. These large “Do it yourself” corporations butcher the web. Companies like www.register.com and www.networksolutions.com and www.fortunecity.com and many others, will offer you to buy a hosted solution. They offer you the wonderful opportunity to build your own site for only $250 or something, and host it with them for a year for only $20. This is a joke and all too many people have fallen for this. When you are surfing the web and find a site that looks like a kindergartener built it, this is usually one of the do-it-yourself websites that some poor sucker purchased. There is no functionality, there is no design template offered that is worth a look, and there is no way a real company or anyone serious about setting up a legitimate webpage would ever consider using this service. However I can see how many people have decided to buy these sites. They tried to use a college kid, and then tried some Indian offshore developer, and then tried their local low budget web or hosting company, and finally came to the conclusion that all of the quality was pretty similar to that of the cheap cookie cutter corporations. So they fall for the marketing, and buy the cheapo template website and now their stuck looking unprofessional and their potential clients won’t take them serious.

Now that you’ve been informed of all the bad apples out there, lets take a look at the companies out there who actually decided to take this route, then we will look at some companies who took the high road and made a professional site. Please go to www.webpagesthatsuck.com and take a look at all the worthless sites that are out there. This site is dedicated to convincing people how important your web presence is and what people will think of you when you publish low cost amateur sites.

Once you’re done, let’s take a look at a few sites which were done professionally. I will use a few examples of websites our company has developed, and to be fair a few other random sites other companies developed. Take a look at www.dreamsoft.us, this site is very well put together with great use of colors, great structural layout, plenty of relevant content, reasonable use of flash and 3d, and overall you get a professional look and feel when you’re on this website. Here is a www.completebirkenstock.com , nothing really fancy, very conservative use of flash, but yet it’s very professional and easy to look at with a top notch shopping system. Here is a site from one of our competitors www.spiketv.com. As you can see they have done an excellent job with flash animation and 3D graphics, as well as lots of content and functionality. In my opinion its one of the best sites around, and I commend them on their good work. Many people cannot afford this type of work, but it shows true quality. Buying web development and services is like buying a car. There are Cadillac’s, Ferraris, Old Clunkers, and everything in between. The key is to find what’s best for your needs and taking the proper steps to get what you’re looking for.

Negotiating Your Costs:

Now that you’ve chosen a few potential developers, its time to negotiate a fair price for your project, this is a very important step. Generally for descent work you might be able looking at paying an average of $60-$300 USD per hour. This depends on the company and the difficulty of the work you are requesting. It is very possible to get the same quality for $60 USD per hour as it is for $300 USD per hour, so you want to look around and bargain shop. This isn’t easy; you need to understand that many of these companies have new projects coming across their desks everyday. And many times these companies spend countless hours consulting and estimating without ever getting the project they spent so much time on. There are tons of freelancers out there who don’t want to estimate their own projects so they go out and bid it out to a few web companies who will put together a nice presentation and detailed estimation, which they take to their clients and pretend it’s their own. This must happen 1000 times per day all over the world, its one of the oldest tricks in the book. So don’t be surprised if your potential development company asks for a small consulting fee to see if you’re serious. Usually it will be $50-$2000 depending on how large or small your project is, and it’s a good idea for you to pay the fee. It shows that you’re serious, and the web development company will take you much more serious and it will probably lower you additional costs in the long run.

Once you give your project requirements document to the developers, they will begin to dig through it. They will most likely send you some questions to answer to give them a better idea of what you’re looking for. Having a detailed requirements document is extremely important and can lower the cost of your project tremendously. And make sure you have it all written down properly, don’t think you can just call and tell them over the phone. Web developers hate when a client calls and just starts rambling on and on about what they want changed, so if you have any changes make sure to send it in an email or word document and clearly label it. This can help you avoid any disputes later on down the line, and trust me there are always disputes over what the original requirements were and how they were conveyed. Dreamsoft.us built a huge project management and document management system called Projectpro.us just to avoid these conflicts.

As far as pricing goes, don’t be fooled or intimidated by hourly rates. Its not as simple as it seems. Just because company X charges $100 per hour doesn’t make them the wrong company to use, the same as company Z charging $40 per hour doesn’t make them your best bet. For the exact same project, company X might bill you for 25 hours, while company Z might bill you for 100 hours. So for the same project company X charges $2500 while company Z charges $3000, yet company Z looks more attractive because of their low hourly billing structure. Don’t judge your potential developers by their hourly rates; you could drop a reasonable offer just because of some unnecessary sticker shock.

Monthly Website Maintenance:

Also before choosing your developers you should consider the ongoing costs. These can REALLY add up. If you’re going to be paying maintenance on some web program, SEO campaign, or hosting, just make sure it’s reasonable. Most web companies are pretty lenient about these fees, but expect to pay something. Also if you feel you won’t need a lot of updates on a regular basis you can ask them to modify their monthly options to something smaller for your specific needs. Generally your monthly maintenance needs will be around $350 USD per month and up.

Web Hosting:

THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT PLEASE READ CAREFULLY. Hosting is by far one of your most important issues as your company grows. At first it’s always easy to just take the cheapest hosting company in town, or the most well known. This is the recipe for disaster, almost every single time. DO NOT host with the major hosting companies like Godaddy.com, Register.com, Yahoo.com, or Networksolutions.com. Generally when you register your website you do it through a huge company like these, and then you sign up for the 1 year of hosting, and the ecommerce package. These solutions are only for individuals who don’t know what they are doing and buy it out of convenience and low cost.

As your company grows, you will need to add email addresses, add functionality, add software, change server requirements, change passwords, gain particular server access, and many other things. These big low cost hosting providers won’t even pick up the phone, if you can find a number to call. If there is a problem, it takes 2 weeks to 2 months before they can resolve it. And when you try to switch to another provider they will ignore you as long as they can before giving in to your request. They have millions of clients, only paying them a few bucks per year, so you can see they aren’t going to waste a few bucks having a customer service rep or technician help you out in a jam. And when your company goes offline because of some technical failure, not even the president of the United States can get these people on the phone. Meanwhile, your company suffers, and while people are trying to view your site, they see “Page not found”.

Another problem is when you add some new functionality to your website, and it requires that the server needs to run a certain program. Although it might take 5 minutes to install it they will bill you for 2.5 hours (because they have minimums) and they know you can’t do anything about it.

I suggest using someone reliable, someone local, someone you know and trust. This is truly one of the most important aspects of having a web presence is making sure you have reliable hosting and registration.

Registration:

Don’t forget, when registering your domain name; make sure the “administrative contact” is in your name with your email and your contact info. Don’t let web or hosting companies hold you hostage. If the administrative contact information is in their name, they have total control of your site. I have seen this done once before with a fairly good sized web development and hosting company in Chicago. An acquaintance of our CEO had their site developed by a local web company. This acquaintance then asked our CEO if we could do some Search Engine Marketing for them. We agreed to the task, but when we went to get access to the site from the local web company, they decided that they were going to take this marketing project and refused to grant us access. Our customer called the web company and asked them to switch over the hosting rights to us, and they refused. Although this is illegal for this company to do this, there is nothing our client could do. The domain name was registered originally by this web company, and they kept the registration in their name (which is also illegal). But it takes 6 months and tons of court costs to get it back, so our client had no choice but to stay with the ones that refused to let him leave. This happens on a daily basis and the best way to avoid it is to use someone you trust.

As far as the cost, it ranges from $250 per year, up to $5000 depending on what programs your running and how much space you’re using. 99% of sites usually only need the basics which is around $250- $350 per year.

Development Contracts:

Once you’ve made all your important decisions and found the right company to do your project, make sure you get everything in writing. And you must make sure that there is an attachment to the contract specifying the exact amount of time until the completion of your project, the total cost, and the project requirements. This will ensure that you get exactly what you paid for, and get it on time. Make sure to have a signed copy for yourself and also make sure the start date is clearly stated.

During Development:

Now that your project has begun, there is no time to relax yet. Although everything is clearly stated in your project requirements sheet, you must provide the developers with the necessary materials they need in a timely fashion. I am telling you this from a web developer’s standpoint. When a project starts, the development company has allocated tasks for its individual developers just for your project. So if you wait 2 weeks to send materials, then the company must allocate other tasks for their developer to keep him busy earning money for the company. This can cause major delays in your projects completion time. The materials you need to have prepared are images, content, and anything else which the web developers cannot provide for you. Please understand that developers cannot read your mind, don’t just expect them to just miraculously build what you foresee in your mind without some direction from you.

Be attentive and always check your email. Web developers will send you updates and have multiple questions, sometimes on a daily basis, so you need to make sure and not neglect them. Sometimes they hit a brick wall, and cannot move forward without your comments, especially during web application programming or design. Many times if you don’t respond within a day or so they will just keep trudging ahead and many times in the wrong direction. Then when you tell them to erase all the work and do something different they will get pretty angry. So to avoid any conflict try to check your email at least a few times each day, especially during business hours. Always send your responses by email. I cannot stress enough how irritating it is to have a client calling over the phone to tell you everything. This just makes the developer have to write everything down and there can be errors using this method. If you must talk on the phone, then call the developers, talk to them, then go back and recap the discussion on an email so they know what you want.

Project Completion:

Once your project is near completion, you need to start testing. Don’t be angry to find small glitches or bugs, this is very common. You might find links which don’t work, images misplaced, spelling errors, or other small inconveniences, but this is common when the project is coming to a close. The developers will wrap everything up and make everything look good, so don’t get discouraged. When they tell you its finished and you still find something, don’t get angry, just let your developers know and they will surely fix it quickly. Usually these little things take only a few minutes to fix and developers overlook them because they know it’s just something minor and they usually concentrate on the major functions. Some companies have testers which do “quality assurance testing” for the client, but these are only the larger companies, and even they miss things occasionally.

Project Payment:

The web development standard for any project is 50% up front and 50% at the end. In my opinion over years in this industry it’s truly unfair that the web development company gets paid in this fashion. But at the same time paying slowly via milestones is also a pain in the rear. Now for larger companies the 50/50 deal is fine, but for small 5 employee IT companies this can be life or death. I remember years ago when we first started we couldn’t eat if a client decided to pay late, or of the project dragged on for weeks past the due date because our clients weren’t responsive enough, or they haggled over tiny details to delay the payment.

In my opinion no matter what size the company is, make sure to pay when the project is near completion, don’t drag it out, its not fair to the developers who worked so hard to get you what you want. The margins in the web business aren’t what they used to be and some of these small fry companies may be doing great work, but they get killed on delay of payments. We recommend paying via bank wire to all our clients, and we are a company of over 40 developers.

Conclusion:

To wrap things up, I wrote this article in hopes of helping people understand how the web development and web design industry works. Most people who are getting ready to start a web project should read this, a lot of the information you read here you wont find anywhere else. It gives you an inside look at how a web project actually gets done, and hopefully you will avoid the pitfalls by having a better understanding of the process.

About The Author

Alex Dubko
Chief Web Marketing Specialist
DreamSoft Inc.
308 W. Erie st. – 4th Floor
Chicago, IL 60610
DreamSoft: Web design, Chicago
http://dreamsoft.us
sales@dreamsoft.us

Professional Web Development

2007-10-03T07:07:00.004-07:00

As every Internet user knows, web site traffic is a primary concern. Anyone with their own web site would like to increase traffic, get more visitors, and increase their ad revenue. But, as the field of web design grows more and more complex, web development only gets more complicated. Web design is now so complicated that simply building a web page can take hours of study and work.

Because good web design is so important to page views, and yet so hard to achieve, some may consider using professional web development to design their web pages. Getting outside help may sound difficult and even expensive, but professional web development doesn’t have to cost you a thing.

Anyone can still have great web design on their site, using professional web development. The basic elements of a good web page are text, graphics, and links – all things that search engines and your human visitors are going to be looking for and at. If you know where to look, it’s easy to find professional web development for your site.

There are many different sites out there that offer free web content or very cheap web content. Content is a very important aspect of professional web development, as content is what search engines look at first. Without enough content, your site will not get a high ranking with the search engine – which translates directly into fewer visitors. Finding great content is key to professional web development.

By using the search engines yourself, you can find all sorts of graphics for your web site. You can always find free professional photos, backgrounds, font styles, buttons, guestbook, and any other element of your site that you need for free on the Internet. It may take some searching to find exactly what you want, but you can find all that you need with free sites. Professional web development is fabulous, but more so when it’s free.

Many professional web development software and web sites are out there nowadays, because the Internet is so hugely popular and web sites so extremely important. By making use of these sites, you can get the professional, high-quality sort of web design that you want and need. Professional web development will bring you increased traffic, repeat visitors, and a high ranking with the search engine – which is exactly what you need to increase revenue and business for yourself. The best part is, professional web development isn’t expensive – though you may have to devote some of your valuable time. In the end, it’s worth it. Professional web development makes you and your site look better, which is a good reflection on your business. In today’s one-click world, you have to do something to stay ahead of the competition.

About The Author

John Argy has been involved with web site development, promotion, maintenance and hosting for more than 12 years http://www.cyberdias.com/.

The Continuing Development Of CSS As A Web Standard

2007-10-03T07:07:00.003-07:00

Cascading style sheets were formally introduced by the W3C in 1997 and in the nine years since have made gradual progress to becoming a web standard. Although the W3C mandates style sheets instead of HTML formatting for internal styles, many web designers have been slow to adopt CSS.

Graphic designers, especially, have been slow to accept CSS since it does not allow the complex designs made possible by the use of nested tables without concentrated testing and workarounds. That is because CSS is not universally cross-browser compatible. The first release of CSS in 1997 was notorious for breaking on a variety of browsers. The second, and current, release provides more stability but still causes unexpected results on older browsers.

In light of the cross-browser difficulties of CSS. many designers have adopted a hybrid standard, using CSS for styling text but continuing to use nested tables to structure their pages. This provides a measure of stability and control to a web designer who does not have the time or inclination to learn advanced CSS. However, this practice is severely frowned on by both the W3C and by a small but influential group of CSS designers who claim that the use of nested tables slows down page loading and that CSS can, with proper application, create complex designs just as well as nested tables.

However, many freelance web designers have found that their clients are unwilling to accept the additional cost and time to create a completely CSS-based design. This attitude is beginning to change at the corporate level, however, as more and more sites are redesigned using pure CSS.

The continuing acceptance of CSS as a web standard has also been hampered by the popularity of Macromedia Flash as a design tool. Completely vector-based and imported into a web page by the use of a plug-in, Flash offers enormous flexibility in creating complex navigation systems, a historically weak point of CSS. Flash also allows a higher level of artistic expression than the more limited CSS, which is primarily designed to deliver information. This has created a divide in the web design community to the point where there are basically two camps of web designers, those who use Flash and those who don't. The debate over the merits of CSS versus Flash has been known to get quite heated on occasion.

Many have predicted that the third release of CSS will solve many of the problems hampering widespread acceptance of CSS as a web standard. However, the third release has been in development since 1998 and is not expected to be completed anytime soon.

About The Author

Kadence Buchanan writes articles for http://1st-computers.net/ - In addition, Kadence also writes articles for http://fortheloveofscience.com/ and http://4educationinformation.com/.

Web Development Services in India at Affordable Rates

2007-10-03T07:07:00.001-07:00

An India based Web Development and Offshore Software Development Companies providing customized, cost effective, technology driven internet/ web based solutions all across the world. They offer full range of Custom Web Application Development using PHP, ASP, ASP.Net, AJAX, VB.Net, C++, Java and XML and also offer software development services.

Over the years, Web Development Companies has expanded a deep understanding of the industry, a well-built technical background and the ability to give fast gyrate time for the software projects for their clients in India and abroad. Their key principles are, comprehensive understanding our clients’ business objectives, providing highly personalized experiences, maintaining a strong thrust on quality, and stick on to the best ethical practices.

Web development companies are well equipped with modern development facilities. They acquire the latest software development tools and hardware infrastructure with a complete 24 hour power backup facility so that development can take place interruptedly and in timely manner. In most cases Internet, email access with Instant Messengers like MSN, Yahoo, Skype for Text and Voice Based chat is available for all team members for their respective companies.

Their only goal is to understand your business, share a common business goal with you, and help you reach your objectives. They value the long-term relationship they create with their customers and ultimately become an extension of their businesses.

All companies provide the best quality website development & software development services. So, you can be rest assured that your business is in good hands.

Feel free to circulate and share out this article as you wish - if you can post it on your own site or email it to your friends then please do. It’s real time to reproduce the word far and wide amongst all the community across the world.

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About The Author

Rahul Doshi invites you to submit your best articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic www.articlecity.com. Rahul D. is working as SEO in IT Company.

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Web Development With Seo In Mind

2007-10-03T07:06:00.002-07:00

When a business owner decides to bring their business to the web, generally the last thing that they think about is search engine optimization. They assume that whomever they hire to do their web design will put up a site and then submit it to the search engines and the traffic will magically pour in. Unfortunately it takes more than that to drive search engine traffic to your site, and even more unfortunately most developers don't program with SEO in mind, nor do they educate the client about the process involved in gaining traffic from search engines.

Whether it's carelessness or a lack of knowledge, or a combination of the two, this often leads to a client that several months down the road doesn't understand why their site doesn't get any traffic and isn't helping their business. A good designer will not only program with SEO in mind, but will also educate the client about the basic principles of SEO, whether they are the one who executes it or not.

Many times the clients I inherit have gone through this scenario and then face drastic on-site changes to get their site search engine friendly before we are even able to begin the arduous process of link building. Whether you are designing a site for yourself or for a client, following the simple steps below when programming will ultimately save the business time and money and result in a search engine friendly site that truly maximizes the online potential of the business.

Use proper tags for headings, bold text, italic text, and lists – HTML has heading tags, bold tags, italic tags, and ordered and unordered lists for a reason and you should use them. Using CSS you can practically style them however you like, but actually using a heading tag for your headings, and bold tags for important text, will help allow search engines understand what text on a page is a heading or what is more important than the surrounding text. Simply applying a CSS style that makes text larger or bold doesn't do that.

Optimize your images – search engine spiders can't read text within an image. Adding ALT text to your image tag helps, but ideally you should remove all wording from the image and style it using CSS, adding the remaining portion of the image as a background image to the text. Here is a side-by-side comparison (http://www.seo-playbook.com/image_example.php) of two images that look the same in your browser, but much different to a search engine spider.

Avoid canonical problems – believe it or not, search engines can see http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, and http://www.yoursite.com/index.html as three different pages. A simple solution is to use a 301 redirect to point all of your pages to their “www” counterpart. You can also select the preferred domain that Google shows in the new Google Webmaster Tools console.

Get rid of Session IDs if you have a PHP site – have you ever seen a PHPSESSID variable added to the end a URL on a PHP page (it looks something like PHPSESSID=34908908)? This happens because PHP will add a unique PHPSESSID to URLs within your site if cookies aren't available. This can be extremely problematic for your site's search engine ranking. Google and Yahoo will see a unique PHPSESSID in the URL every time they visit a page on your site, and in turn think that said page is a different page each time. At worst, this could be viewed as duplicate content and get your site banned, and at best it will reduce the perceived value of each page. One solution that I've used successfully is to utilize url_rewriter.tags.

Put CSS and JavaScript in external files – nearly every site nowadays uses CSS and JavaScript for something. While both are great for enhancing user experience, neither will help your search engine ranking if left on your page. One of the factors that search engines consider when ranking your site is the percentage of code relevant to the search term. CSS and JavaScript can take up hundreds of lines of code, minimizing the importance of your text and in turn hurting your ranking. By putting them in separate files and simply including them in your page by reference, you can reduce hundreds of lines down to one and increase the amount of code in the file that is relevant content.

Minimize the use of tables in layouts – the debate about whether or not tables should be used in site design has been going on for years and there's no end in site. I fall somewhere in the middle – there are certain circumstances (like organizing tabular data) where I think tables still make the most sense, but I also appreciate the SEO benefits of using CSS layouts. CSS layouts drastically reduce the amount of code in your site that isn't content that the user sees. Just like moving CSS and JavaScript to an external file, the less on-page code that isn't content, the better. Check out www.searchenginefriendlylayouts.com for some free example layouts.

Validate your site – a site doesn't have to be perfectly coded to rank high in the search engines (there are many, many other factors), but valid HTML will help ensure that search engines and browsers alike will accurately see your page. Try using the official W3C Validator (http://validator.w3.org/) or install this handy Firefox extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/249/). Validating generally identifies areas of code that are redundant, unnecessary, or not accepted across all browsers. All of which will help make your site more search engine friendly.

About The Author

Adam McFarland owns iPrioritize (http://www.iPrioritize.com) - to-do lists that can be edited at any time from any place in the world. He also provides SEO consulting for small businesses looking for a cost-effective way to drive more traffic to their site. Visit http://www.SEO-Playbook.com for more information.

Web Designing Development

2007-10-03T07:06:00.001-07:00

A decent website is a pre-requisite to online business these days. But if you want your website to offer something more, something different then others then it has to be different. Your website should attract the visitor's attention so much so that he stays on to explore your site and returns again and again to get information about your offers. This type of advanced & dynamic website design and web design development requires high level of skill and expertise in this specialized field.

Mosaic's enterprising young team of web developers is a pool of talent; impatient to give you that customized service you were looking for. These skilled professionals well versed with the intricacies of the web development tools like PHP, HTML, DHTML, .NET, ASP and others give the right balance of design and functionality to your website. They design and develop the website considering the basic tenets of web design & webdesign development like readability, easily download, user friendliness and an attractive design. The mosaic team creates attractive & effective webdesign development solutions to cater to your specific needs and special requirements. Your website is created using the latest technologies and uses the latest coding standards for code customization at a later stage. The web development processes are also optimized to give your website greater ROI. A vigorous quality analysis is maintained throughout the web development process to provide the website with exceptional quality.

Mosaic team can add functionality to your site like a shopping cart or can change your static website to dynamic or it can even provide an application with a web interface for you. The various web development services offered are e-commerce, application development, database development and custom programming etc. The company offers webdesign services besides a complete range of LSI based SEO services. You can even get a free website analysis to check what additional functionalities can be incorporated into your website to enhance it. In case you know your requirements, you can request a free quote for a detailed proposal from the renowned web development India company http://www.technology.mosaic-service.com . Mosaic services also offers other advertising, marketing and technical services that cater to your marketing and promotional needs at competitive charges.

Visit the site http://technology.mosaic-service.com to get details about the various other services offered by the company and to solve any web design and development related queries. You will surely get more then your expectation from one of the India's finest web development company.

About The Author

Miss Ruchira Sharma is a very well known author and she writes articles for http://www.technology.mosaic-service.com.