Web Design News

The Internet became what we see today to spread information. While some may believe the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words there’s plenty of information that can never be conveyed in pretty pictures.

There’s also a power that words possess that images do not. The Gettysburg Address was never delivered as a Power Point presentation. Churchill’s address to the English people in the darkest hours of 1940 contained no pretty pictures and Curtin’s address to the Australian people at the critical time in World War 2 contained no graphs, no charts … just words.

Words have far more power than you might ever imagine … even on the Web so never discount the value of words on a website. They can turn disinterested surfers into eager buyers far more quickly than pretty pictures can.

We find that quite often clients come to us to have a website designed but they have no clear idea of what domain name they should choose. Of course that choice is almost always governed by what domain names have already been taken however not many web designers - and even fewer clients - think about the importance of choosing a domain name that’s brandable.

Quick Sprout has some fairly basic thoughts on domain names and branding that are worth considering and you can find them at How to Choose a Brandable Domain Name

Sometimes good web design is governed by the computer that people will be able to access the website on. For example, if you’re not websites today that are capable of being viewed on PDAs and mobile phones as well as on widescreen computer monitors you’re a bit behind the times.

But what about the future?

Well the future could be in Milan … no, not Milan in Italy but the tabletop computer code-named Milan that Microsoft is about to launch tomorrow. Milan is controlled entirely by touch - there’s no keyboard and there’s no mouse.

Even Microsoft admits that the first version of Milan - priced at around $US10k - is not going to make it into many homes but Microsoft suggests that Milan is only three or four years away from reaching a price level that will be within reach of most consumers.

So what does a website need to look like to be functional on a tabletop computer?

You can read more about Milan here and here

We’ve been involved in web design for a long time now and we’ve come across some incredibly bad examples of web design by businesses who claim to be professional web designers. Here’s one from a ‘professional’ web designer here where we live.

The blue bar at the top of every browser window is known as the title bar. It displays the text that a designer places in the title tags on a web page.

 Any designer worth his salt will tell you that the title bar is prime property when it comes to achieving good search engine placement. It’s definitely not the only factor in achieving good search engine placement but it is very important.

Any designer worth his salt will also tell you that what you consider to be the title of a page and what should actually appear in that title bar are usually quite different. What should appear in that title bar is a short, well written snippet that includes keywords or keyword phrases that are important to your site and the title bar should change for each and every page on your website.

What shouldn’t appear in the title bar on your website is what you see here - the address of the business.

I can’t get over how many small business people fail to understand the importance of their domain name and take no steps to protect their domain name once it’s been registered. Here in Hervey Bay there is one web design business that registers domain names on behalf of their clients … in fact most of us can and will do that for our clients.

However, it seems that this particular web design business doesn’t take the necessary steps to then transfer those domain names to the control of their clients. While that may seem fairly insignificant it can lead to problems further down the track.

Here is a story of one small business from the United States who suddenly found just how nasty those problems can be and what they should have done right from the start.