Posts In Web Design & Development

Designers & Developers – Two Of A Kind!

Hi,

Web designers and developers are like two sides of a coin... Both different but still incomplete without the other. A website needs to be complete from both the design and development aspects in order to establish a strong presence on the web. However, most often than not, there are major differences between the two teams that further leads to conflicts in the website development project.

If the two teams can find a common ground and could work together, they can produce great amazing results, something that would not have been possible as single party entities. The idea is to combine the advantages of both the teams and achieve greater results rather than losing out points because of their internal differences and conflicts.

Difference between Designers and Developers

Designers are responsible for the whole look and feel of the website. They focus on the color, aesthetics and branding. They are creative people and visual thinkers and aim to create a rich user experience for the website audiences. If you have browsed across portfolio websites of web designers, you would have noticed that they are exquisitely beautiful and innovative. However, designers often don't pay much attention to proper coding practices and form testing etc. Instead they focus on creating visually stimulating designs.

Developers belong to a different realm altogether. They are logical and procedural and follow a strict work code. Their prime concern is the functionality of the website and focus on creating a strong website structure.

Solution

In order to create websites that are perfect in all respects, you need to bridge the gap between the design and development team. For this, designers need to learn the coding procedures of website development and developers at their end need to understand the design practices.

Optimize Images & Decrease Load Time Of Your Website

Hi,

One of the key factors that determine the usability and accessibility of your website is its loading time i.e. how much time do the web pages take to get displayed in the browser. Therefore, this should be one of the most important considerations while designing your website.

The textual contents on your web pages generally get loaded very easily. The prime reason for slow loading websites are their images. Large images weight more too and cause the websites to load slowly. To make sure your website loads quickly enough, you need to make sure you use just enough images that add to the visual appeal of the website but doesn't add to its weight.

Optimizing Images

Remove Additional Information
To make sure your images don't become too heavy, you should optimize them efficiently so that they load in the least possible time. You can use an image editing software to trim off the unnecessary information on your images and thus reduce their file size without altering its appearance.

Save as JPEG
When using Photoshop, make sure your save your images as JPEG file. Also, set the quality to about 8 to 10. this is more than enough to preserve the quality of the image as you save it at a small file size. There are also free image compressors online that help you reduce the size of your images.

Save as PNG
You can also save the images in the PNG format. You can get the best quality at the least file size. GIF is another popular format to save images. Image editing softwares can help you trim away the additional color information and gives you the least possible file size. However, the appearance of the image would not be as good.

By optimizing your images, you can be sure they are light and would pose no problem for the website loading process. This will be a tweak in your accessibility features!  This is something you have to take care during the website development process

How To Get To The Google Top Slots With A Magic Keyword?

Hi,

Just about every company serious about doing good business online seeks to appear in the top slots of search engine results... Yeah I am talking about Google. However, it ain't that easy a task. To get a website featured on the top of search engine results, rigorous search engine optimization processes needs to be undertaken.

Search engine optimization is a daunting task. It is not difficult as such but the difficulty lies in the persistence and constant attention that it requires. The prime process of SEO is to find a keyword relevant to the business and optimize for the same. Like if you have an online skin care products store, you need to work on 'skin care products' and if you are a marketing firm, you need something like 'marketing services' and so on....

But then how long will it take for you to compete with the millions of businesses already listed for such broad keywords and beat them to appear on the top positions? No wonder they say SEO is a slow and steady process!

Well... Here is an alternate solution. But yeah... This works for established businesses only or probably those who are working aggressively at creating a brand identity.

Instead of broad generic keywords (or in addition to them) choose a unique keyword for yourself. It can be your company name or the popular products/services that you offer. And then optimize it! Because you'll probably be the only one targeting the keyword, an instant top rank is totally assured. Its like when you type in Mc Donald's, there will be only one place you will be led to right? Try typing 'burgers' instead and there will be a mess altogether. See my point now?

But hold on... Such an approach would only work for businesses who already have a strong market presence or are working towards building their brand recognition. Once they know you by your brand, they will search for you by the same name. And that'll be the time your online popularity will hit a high!

Just follow this 4-point plan and you are ready to go.

• Select a unique keyword for your business
• Build your brand around that (if you don't have it already)
• Popularize the term over the Internet courtesy social media
• Also perform search engine optimization alongside