Posts In Web Design & Development

5 Ways To Protect Your Website Against Content Theft

Hi,

The World Wide Web is a huge platform that promotes free exchange of ideas and provides infinite scope to learn and explore new things for free. But the contrast comes in where people think that all that is available on the net is free and can be used in whichever ways.

If you have a website and have valuable content therein, it’s only appropriate that you realize the dangers and protect your site against so called ’borrowing of content and images.’

Here are some ways to do the same:

1. Get your website Copyright Protection

Display a Copyright Symbol on all the pages of you website. It is advised to place it next to your company name and year of publication. By getting this done, you stand to get limited copyright protection for your website and that too without a copyright registration.

2. Protect your Trademarks

Make sure to protect your company name, product names and all other proprietary assets with trademark symbols.

Caveat: (™) stands for pending or unregistered trademarks while (®) stands for registered trademarks that are fully protected by the law.

3. Contract the Website Development Project

If you are outsourcing your website project to a web development company, make sure you have a written contract that specifies the ownership rights of the website. Otherwise the web developer can claim the site to be his own.

4. Monitor the Web for any Theft

Always look out on the web for any possible content theft. Websites like ‘Copyscape’ show you other pages on the internet that have resemblance to your website pages. Also monitor your images with the help of Google Site. It’s equally important to protect your trademarks as it is to register them.

5. Know about Technical Solutions

There are advised some technical solutions to counter plagiarism. Some of them include:
• Putting a transparent graphic over the web pages
• Putting watermarks on images
• Using JavaScript in the code to disable right clicking

These solutions can sure hamper piracy prospects but then you should keep in mind they are not foolproof.

Make haste and before it is too late, protect your website from content thieves.

Do Not Fail To Use Flash

Hi,

I had a hectic day yesterday! A major chunk of my time went in a client meeting where I was convincing him that a little Flash employed appropriately wouldn’t hamper his website success.

Using Flash has always been a debatable issue in the world of website designing! Critics argue about accessibility and SEO considerations but fact remains that if used correctly, Flash animations can do wonders for your website.

Ok… So there are some very bad ways to install Flash. Like the Intro pages that you get to see that has a peevish ‘skip intro’ option. I mean who would like to wait to get information? It’s like a fool-proof technique to send your visitors your competitors’ site.

However, if you use Flash intelligently enough it can get you more benefits and no loss. Flash can boost usability features, minimize the loading time of your website and even improve accessibility without having any effect on the search engine rankings.

If a picture can describe a thousand words, then a flash animation can be worth a company intro.

Successful employment of Flash involves using it to represent what your business stands for and getting intimate with your website visitors.

Search Engine Friendly
Now… websites that are built solely on Flash may have it difficult to rank well in search engines. But that’s not to say they can’t. However, websites that use a little bit of Flash can rank really well in search engines. It just needs to be optimized appropriately! Your just need to get your primary keywords noticed and there is way ahead to go.

Accessible… Yeah!

Though there may be pretty many arguments against it, flash can really help you to engage visitors in animation, sound or graphic effects. Really! It can make your website much more accessible.

Using Space Well Enough

This is a brownie point!

Space to Spread
Flash enables you to display a large amount of visual data in one place. You can highlight particular points like products and services. Effective communication with equal ease! That’s what Flash gets you!

Remember, a professional web development company will never advise you against Flash. Rather they will make the best use of Flash to make your website better.

As The Web Portal So The Web Design

Hi,

The Internet is like our Universe, bigger perhaps!
And just like the countless celestial bodies floating about in space, there are innumerable websites striving in cyberspace, but each different from the other in genre and style and what not.

All so alike and yet so different, that is how it goes. And as they are different, so different should be the designs approaches.

Websites are designed for dissimilar purposes. There are business promoting websites, social networking websites, shopping websites, blogging websites, official websites and websites belonging to other genres.
As different as these websites are from each other, as special skills they demand for their production and further execution. Different businesses need different professional web design services to make their website success.

Let me tell you…

Online Shopping Websites
These websites are designed with an aim to sell thus demand powerful database and easy navigation for their success. It should ideally be capable of providing proficient selling information to the consumers in the form of text as well as graphics. If you have one like this, make sure it has a competent search criterion to facilitate consumer with desired products. Such websites should also have features like catalog maintenance and payment processing.

Social Networking Websites
Its all about MySpace and Orkut here. They claim to provide social exposure to users. And no one wants to interact in a dull cell. The main aim here is to attract people and make them stay. So they should have colorful layout and features like user-friendliness, browser capability, beautiful style sheets and a powerful back end to support ever-increasing number of users.

Business Promotion Websites
Now this is serious business. Web portals meant for promoting products and services related to businesses are of utmost importance for the company. And if you are heading a serious business, you’ll know what I mean. These websites must have a professional look and feel alongside a rich content. The website design must include web pages related to services offered, company profile, about us section, contact us web page and other features.

General Information Websites
These are websites that provide information related to just about anything. It can be some geographical location, government offices or different types of institutes. Here, all information must be categorized under suitable sections and there must be integration of information in the form of graphics. And again, these types of websites must provide useful and informative content to the viewers.

So here it is, different approaches for different demands of the different web portals.

Till next time …
Byeee

Fixed Or Fluid- Which Way To Go?

Hi,

One of our clients wanted to get his website redesigned and was skeptical about what design layout to choose. As we went through the discussion, I realized that there is no one better than the other

The debate has been an ancient one. Whether to go fixed or whether to go fluid?
The answer however is- To each his own

Be it Fixed or be it Fluid, both the design layouts have their pros and cons.

Let me tell you…

Fixed design layouts have a specific width and do not scale to fit the browser window. With it, you have firm control over the web page and the elements in it. The line length, the flow and the placement of text and images can be controlled by you.

But one problem with fixed design is that when it’s viewed in high resolution screens, it tends to leave out lots of empty spaces because it clings on to the width specified.
Just increase your screen resolution and try viewing a fixed design site and you’ll know. The website appears to be dwarfed out completely!
Yeah… If you want a site that floats, then you can try this ;-)

Now, in Fluid design layouts, this problem is eliminated. Fluid designs tend to spread out to occupy the full space of the browser, thus eliminating all empty spaces. That means you have more content to view at one time.

But then again, because of its ability to spread about to fit the screen, the design gets distorted. You have no control over the placement of the page elements as they designate their own positioning in the liquid design. At high screen resolutions, when users tend to scan back and forth repeatedly, and here the line length can crop up some legibility problems.
And when the positioning of elements is altered, you would not be able to make users focus where you want them to.

At LeXolution IT, we prefer using a hybrid of both the layouts. I always urge clients to go in for a combination of Fixed and Fluid design layouts so as to extract the maximum out of both.

For this client I had used this method. We made part of the site fixed and part fluid. All the textual content was made with a fixed layout and the background elements were done with fluid. Thus the alignment of the text remained same no matter the browser while the background color spread out to fill all the empty spaces.
The best of both worlds!