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Friday, 30 January 2009 |
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 A good number of documents are created during the web design process. There is certainly a lot for the competent web designer to document throughout the discovery, planning, design, integration and delivery stages of a complex web project. Not all of these documents are of interest to the client, and over the years I've learned only to present the minimum number of documents needed to ensure a successful project. The following are the standard deliverables I ask my clients to sign off on.
Creative Brief
This is a project definition document. It includes all the requirements and specifications of the project, including scope, audience, objective, call to action, and technical specification. Download Creative Brief Worksheet Content Outline
The content outline defines every piece of content that will appear on the website. If it isn't on the content outline, it isn't going to appear on the website. The content outline is part of the information architecure, and as such should be organized in a hierarchy that represents the structure of the website rather than a hierarchy based on arbitrary categorization of content. View Sample Content Outline Site Map
The site map represents the structure and navigation of the website and should closely coincide with the content outline. There should be a common numbering system in place. Pages are represented by boxes and links by arrows. View Sample Sitemap Wireframes
Wireframes are schematic versions of the pages on a website and should similate the final navigation, although the page layout at this point in the process is rough. Wireframes can be made into clickable web pages, allowing the client to preview the navigation of the site in action. Each wireframe should include all pieces of content that the final web page will display. View Sample Wireframe Graphic Design
Mockups/Comps The graphic design mockup is a composite image of how the final web page will look. Color, layout, typography, and images are all worked out at this stage for each significantly different page type on the website. I should make clear that even though the composite (mockup or comp for short) looks like a web page, it is still only a single image. It is not a web page, and include no code at this point in the process. View Sample Mockup Development Site/Prototype
During the integration/programming step of the web design process, the graphic design comps are converted into code (HTML, DHTML, CSS, scripting, database tables, etc). The site is built and tested on a domain or subdomain of a development server that has the same technical specs as the live server will have. When the site is fully functional on the development server, it is migrated to the live server. This is the final deliverable of the web design project.
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Wednesday, 26 November 2008 |
1. Believing the hype. “Anyone can be making thousands of dollars with their own website in minutes just by ordering this free CD!”
A good Web design is crucial to a successful Internet business, but it is not the only requirement. The Internet can be a very competetive marketplace. Stories about making easy money by owning a Website are always connected to scams. The problem is that by hearing these marketing hooks over and over again, and hearing antecdotes about how this guy, or that gal started an Internet business from their bedroom when they were 12 and are now millionaires, some people get the impression that “easy” is somehow associated with an Internet business. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like any business you start you need a good business plan. Not a business plan written off the top of your head, but a business plan based on research and knowledge of the market you will be entering. Internet professionals are a valuable source of this information.
2. Purchasing your domain name and hosting account first, and then looking for a web designer to build your Website.
Not all domain name registrars or web hosting companies are created equal! In fact, either can range from out-and-out scam artists to quality, reputable companies. Your web design professional has years of experience and knowledge of dealing with web hosting companies and domain name registrars, and can save you money and headaches by choosing the right provider the first time. Do you need ASP or PHP? Do you need a database or not? Does your project require a dedicated server? Do you have multiple domains to point to your Website? Your web design professional can help you answer these questions.
3. Not taking the Web design process seriously. “Why all these questions? Just design my homepage and I’ll give you all the information to put in later.”
If you were building a house, you wouldn’t tell the contractor to start building and give him the plans at a later date. Websites are complex software and informational systems. If a web designer does not have all of the information he/she needs upfront during the planning stages there is a 100% probability that significant design or production work will need to be redone before the site is launched, costing both time and money. Hastily put together, or incomplete information will undoubtedly lead to a Website that doesn’t meet your needs, or those of your visitors.
4. Telling the web designer to match a competitor’s website. “Give me a website like ABC.com.”
Copying another Internet business' Website is like dressing up like Donald Trump, and expecting the money to start pouring in. It can be helpful to show a web designer the kind of Website you are looking for, but it is by no means a substitute for doing your homework, knowing your industry and coming up with your own quality business plan. The Website is the client-facing portion of your competitor’s Internet business. Only a limited knowledge of their business model, operations and back-end can be gained by you or your web designer from studying their Website. Your web designer can assist you in building the business plan for your Internet business from the ground up. From that foundation they can build a quality Website that is an exact fit for your quality business.
5. Doing it on the cheap for yourself, just to start out.
This includes:
- Putting up a quick website yourself and then looking for a web designer to improve it.
- Having your son’s friend set up a quick website and looking for a web designer to make it look professional.
- Buying a cheap canned script, and then looking for a web designer to improve it.
An experiened web designer knows that touching any of these projects is going to be a waste of time and money. He will be able to deliver a higher quality Website quicker and cheaper by starting from scratch.
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Tuesday, 18 November 2008 |
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Everyone who has an email account or surfs the web is aware of the wasted time and loss of productivity caused by SPAM. Spam email is unsolicited bulk email (UBE). The senders of these spam emails usually rack up a small fee for each person who clicks on the link in the email, or makes a purchase on the advertised website. If you so much as click on a link in a spam email, or worse yet, purchase something through a spam email, you are ensuring the survival of this kind of advertising. If you want to stop rather than encourage it, you must never click on a link in a spam email, even if it is a product or service you are interested in. Because spamming is generally seen as an unethical practice in the business community, there is a good chance that any businesses you get involved in through spam will be unethical in other ways, and it is best to stay away. If the business being promoted is a major company, let them know directly that you do not appreciate the spam you receive on their behalf from the 3rd party advertiser. Emails used by spammers are often "harvested" by robots (software programs) from the Internet. If you post your email address on a website, encrypt it using JavaScript or some other method that makes it unreadable to a robot looking for email addresses. If you do post your email address on a website, and do not encrypt it, expect that it will be harvested, added to a spammers list, and you will be receiving a good amount of spam because of it. SPAM websites are similar to Spam emails in that they are usually put up by a 3rd party to advertise another business' products or services. These websites contain no useful content themselves, only "affiliate links" for which the website owner is paid per click or per purchase. If you do a search, click on a result, but the page does not have any useful information, hit the back button rather than clicking the "sponsored link." These sponsored links are often made to look like standard links or navigation to trick you into clicking on them. If the page has no content, hit the back button and look for another result. This is not to say that the appearance of sponsored links indicates that the page is spam, but if there is no useful information on the page, don't reward the website owner financially by clicking on a sponsored link. Digging through these spam results can be a big waste of time and you might even consider reporting the spam result to the search engine you used to find it. Search engines have staff that will review the report, and if the page does violate the search engines terms of inclusion, they will delete it from the results. Spamming can be financially rewarding, or it wouldn't be so prevalent. It is unlikely spam will ever be eliminated, but you can help reduce it by not clicking.
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Sunday, 07 September 2008 |
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Blogs have revolutionized the Internet. Ten years ago the Web was a different place. If you wanted to find out about a business, you would do a search, find their corporate web site, and find out what they had to say about themselves. The corporate web site was most often a kind of online brochure. It could sit there for a year or two without changing much, and it was no big deal, because the other web sites weren't changing much either. Many small business people have the idea that a web site like that is still OK. The following are the reasons why it is no longer good enough: 1. Fresh content - It's always been understood that fresh content on a web site is necessary to keep visitors coming back for more. A blog can serve as a news section of the web site, to keep your customers informed, and coming back to stay informed. It will also keep the search engines coming back for more. 2. A larger website - Search engine algorithms consider large websites with a lot of pages more authoritative, or important than smaller web sites, and they treat them as such in their search results. 3. More searchable content - The more keyword-targeted pages relating to your products and services that you have on your web site, the more chance that a potential customer searching for those niche keywords will find your web site. And that's what you want to happen, right? 4. Incoming links - If you write interesting, useful and informative articles, other bloggers or webmasters will link to them. This increases your link authority, which is an important consideration in getting high ranking in the search engines. 5. Share your knowledge - It's not enough anymore to say your business is number one in its field. You need to demonstrate your knowlege to potential customers, and what better way than writing a blog? You can become an indispensible fountain of knowledge, and make that sale before you are even aware of it!
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Sunday, 31 August 2008 |
Page Rank is a measurement, calculated by Google, of how important, or how authoritative your web page is. Page Rank, also termed link authority or link popularity is a very important factor in how well your web page ranks on the search engines. It becomes increasingly important as the searches become more competitive.
Other search engines, such as Yahoo, also use systems similar to Page Rank in their search algorithm. Page Rank is based on incoming links to your website. If another website links to your web site, search engines, such as Google take that as an indication that the content of your web site holds some importance. If your web site has NO incoming links, the search engines may not even bother to index it.
Page Rank is not only determined by the number of incoming links to your web site, but also some of the following factors:
1) What is the Page Rank of the web page that contains the link to your site.
2) Is the text in the link (anchor text) relevant to the content of your web site.
3) Is the content of the web site linking to yours relevant to your content.
To get the Page Rank of your sites and any site you can pull up on the Internet, install the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/) and enable the Page Rank function. You will need to accept the privacy policy.
Once installed you will see the word PageRank above a bar graphic. The bar graphic will range from completely white in color (Page Rank of zero) to completely green in color (Page Rank of ten). Now you can check the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target searches. Click on the number one result and look at the Page Rank of that web site. If it is a competitive search, now you have an idea where your Page Rank needs to be to reach the number one spot.
To increase your Page Rank, get relevant links with your target keywords in the anchor text. Try to get links on pages that have a high Page Rank themselves. Increasing your Page Rank WILL be a lot of work, but if you keep at it, it WILL yield results.
Page Rank Gotchas:
1. The toolbar Page Rank is just a snapshot of the actual Page Rank that Google uses in its algorithm. That snapshot is not updated often, so at any point in time it could be fairly inaccurate. If you are asking why the web page with a Page Rank of zero is higher in the SERPs than yours, this could be the reason.
2. The Google toolbar also has a function that allows you to check backlinks, or the number of incoming links to the web page you are checking. You may see a web site with a Page Rank higher than yours, but is shows no backlinks. First, Google backlinks function is not that accurate, and only shows a portion of backlinks that they have on record. This is particularly true for low Page Rank websites. Secondly, a clever SEO will get links not only to their homepage, but to internal pages in their website, and the Page Rank of those internal pages will naturally flow to other pages in the web site, including the homepage.
Page Rank is a concept that is fundamental to understanding modern search engines. In combination with an understanding of keyword relevance, you are on your way to improving your search engine rankings.
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Sunday, 10 August 2008 |
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Submitting your XML sitemap to MSN is easy if you know where to start. That starting place is: http://webmaster.live.com/ 
If you don't already have an MSN Live account, sign up for one. Once you are logged in go to http://webmaster.live.com/ and click on "Sign in to use the tools." You are immediately brought to the Site List page: 
From there, click on "Add a Site." You'll be directed to the page where you can enter the URL of your site, the URL of the XML Sitemap and whether you'd like to authenticate your site ownership via META tag or XML file. 
You'll also be able to enter your email address and choose whether or not you will receive the webmaster newsletter. After clicking "Submit" your site will be added and you'll be given the code with which you can authenticate your site. 
Click "OK" when you are ready to authenticate. You'll be directed back to the Site List page. You can now click on the "Web Address" or your site to access the tools. 
Clicking on "Sitemap" in the top navigation will bring you to the "Sitemap" page, where you can change the sitemap URL or ping the sitemap. 
Explore the tools and ENJOY!
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Sunday, 20 July 2008 |
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A little less than a month ago I posted an article describing how the new Google algorithm had filled the results page for a search of my name "Troy Philis" with irrelevant results . Here is a screenshot of what I was talking about: 
The first listing is of my portfolio site. So far, so good. The second, however, is entitiled "Troy Philips Photography." This result is completely irrelevant because the word "Philis" is nowhere on the website. In addition, the page contains pictures of half-naked men in thong bathing suits. Not something I want to be associated with (not that there's anything wrong with that). Take another search I entered today - for C & T Recycling. In Google, the term C & T Recycling does not appear on page one of the SERP: 
I really wanted to find information on C & T Recycling though, so I decided to try Yahoo. The term shows up near the top of page 1: 
Search Yahoo for my name, and it's all me: 
So why would the biggest search engine serve up bad, irrelevant search results, when they are in the business of serving up good, relevant search results. To answer that question, I'll need to define the two most important variables in ordering search results: 1) Keyword Relevance and 2) Link Authority - or PageRank. Keyword relevance is what we've been talking about, and is what Google is now lacking in its searches. How closely do the search results displayed match the search terms you typed in to the search box? How many times do those terms appear on different parts of the page? Do links pointing to that page include the search terms? Link authority is determined by counting the links pointing to a particular page. Huge corporations have websites with many, many pages, all linked together through the navigation. Their websites are generally linked to by many other individuals, associates and companies. A small company's website may have relatively few pages, and even fewer pages from other websites linked to it. Link authority tells the seach engine if your website is a big fish or a little fish. It is possible to roughly check link authority, or PageRank, as Google calls it, using the Google Toolbar. In checking the examples of irrelevant search results described above, I found that the intruding irrelevant result always had a higher link authority than the relevant results that it pushed down the results page. Conclusion: Google appears to have made a decision to let link authority trump relevance under certain circumstances. If you are like me, and would like to see results related to the search terms you typed in the box, rather than results Google is telling you are more important, than you will switch to Yahoo for your search needs too! What does this mean to a small business trying to get some free advertising on Google? It's going to b e more difficult - get your website established as early as possible, work consistently on search engine promotion and optimization, and don't count on quick and easy results. UPDATE: Another factor in the appearance of irrelevant search results could be a result of Google's apparent attempt to push searchers to more "popular" SERPS where more expensive Adwords advertisements are displayed.
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Sunday, 29 June 2008 |
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 Choosing a hosting package for your Website.
One of the most critical tasks in planning your new Website is choosing the correct hosting package. It is also one of the trickiest. Is it important that your Website load fast on a consistant basis? Do you plan on having many visitors right off the bat? Do you have a lot of large items to download, such as images or video? Do you have programming that requires a lot of server resources? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions then you might want to consider a dedicated server. What is a dedicated server? As the name implies, a dedicated server is a web server that holds your Website, and your Website alone. Shared servers, which are the most common type of hosting available, hold many different Websites. These Websites are competing for server resources. This can lead to problems, such as: 1. A Website on your server gets a lot of traffic on a given day, and hogs the bandwidth. That can cause your Website to load slowly or become unavailable to your users. 2. YOUR Website gets a lot of traffic on a given day. This can even be traffic from a Web spider or a spammer. The hosting administrator will clamp down on your bandwidth, limiting your resources, which will also cause your Website to load slowly or become unavailable. 3. The web hosting company puts too many websites on your shared server. Everything can load well at first, but as the server fills up and there is more competition for resources, your website, that looked so good during development and at launch, now loads so slowly that you lose visitors. There are other problems with shared hosting, but these are the main ones. Shared hosting can be as much as 10 times cheaper than dedicated hosting, but if a fast loading Website is critical to your business, the extra cost will definitely be worth the stability and performance you gain. One important item to note, however, is that if you aren't a techie, you'll need a managed dedicated server. Without the "managed" option, you will be on your own with setup and support.
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Sunday, 25 May 2008 |
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Last month I noticed that Google updated the pagerank number that displays in the toolbar for some of my clients' websites. Although I didn't see changes for my own websites, my clients' websites, particularly the newer ones, showed an increase as they claw their way out of the sandbox, and their promotion efforts work to increase their link authority. Of course, this toolbar pagerank display is just a snapshot, and may or may not reflect the pagerank that Google is actually using in their algorithm. Another thing I noticed, which was troubling to me, was that when I typed my own name in, I only received the number one listing. From number two down were "mispellings" of my name. My name, Troy Philis, is a pretty long-tail term, and normally I would get at least two pages of results. Now, listing number two is a completely irrelevant result. This seems to me to indicate a big potential problem with this new algorithm. The advantage of Google used to be that you could find anything easily, compared to the other search engines. Now it appears they may be losing that advantage. This one example is certainly not definitive, but it does indicate something is awry. I will be monitoring this issue and post my findings as I make them. More irrelevant Google search results
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Sunday, 18 November 2007 |
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The first thing you should do before starting your Adwords campaign is to read the Google Adwords Help section. There are a number of concepts that it's good to understand before throwing money at Google. This can shorten a potentially expensive learning curve. Having said that, here are some quick tips to get you started: 1. Set up a campaign. If you're just starting out, promoting to the content network will be over your head, so don't include that in your campaign. 2. Set up an ad group targeted to the content of one page on your website. That page should obviously be optimized for a set of keywords. Use those keywords in the adgroup, as well as in the wording of your ad. Link the ad to that page. Don't link to your hompage. 3. Set up ad groups within the campaign for each page you want to point traffic to. I'd recommend starting off with phrase match keywords, which is your keyword or phrase enclosed in quotes. If you use broad match (no quotes), your ad could show up in non-relevent SERPS because one word of the phrase could take it out of context.
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