Web Design News

You’ll find a short article here on the changes that are occurring in the way people use the Internet.

It’s of some importance to us if you read between the lines

We often recommend that to clients that they should think seriously about having a blog on their website. The advantages are obvious but are there any disadvantages?

Well one or two posts in a month tends to say nothing positive about any business … except that they really have very little to say and may not be on the cutting edge of their industry.

So don’t rush in to recommend a client has a blog on their website unless they really do have something to say.

So you’re designing a killer website for a client and they ask you recommend an analytics programme for their website. What do you suggest?

Would you recommend Google Analytics or something that’s going to set the client back a thousand bucks?

Of course, free is good isn’t it? And something as wonderful as Google Analytics can’t be beat can it?

Well be careful what you recommend because $165k in Adwords + Broken Google Analytics = Pissed Off Client

Late last week we were talking to a local signwriter who was telling us that he was about to resort to legal action against local web design business here in Hervey Bay. It seems that said web design business had taken much of the signwriters website and incorporated it into their own without bothering to ask.

Out of curiosity we wandered over to the offending site last night and got quite a surprise. There was a site promoting the web design business and it was littered with Google Adsense ads … including a rather eye-catching ad for the biggest web design business here in town.

There’s nothing quite like advertising your competition on a site that is supposed to be displaying your talens to prospective clients.

It’s an interesting question that David Risley is dealing with in a six part series over on Webby Online. Are they nothing more than an online brochure or will they actually generate leads for your clients?

I know that David is certainly against the idea of having a website that’s just an online brochure for your business but as local search grows in popularity even online brochures can work. However it really is far better to have a site that generates leads and pays for itself many times over than just having a brochure.

You can find the start of David’s series here at What’s the Point of Your Website?

If you’re involved in a small web design business sooner or later you will also be asked for your advice and help in promoting your clients’ websites. There are a lot of people out there who will tell you that the best places to start doing that are the social media sites such as Digg, Reddit and other places where people on the Net can discuss what they see.

However, there’s a dark side to social media sites and there are some good reasons why you may not want to promote your clients’ sites in that way.

The isms of SM over on the SEO Igloo Blog has some great food for thought.

If you happen to use Firefox as your browser of choice here are two useful add-ons that I just came across thanks to WebbyOnline

The first is extremely helpful if you work across several computers. Foxmark allows you to sychronise your bookmarks across all your computers and keep them synchronised automatically. It even keeps a master copy of your bookmarks online so if you need to upgrade your computer you simply download your bookmarks and you’re ready to go.

It took me a total of around five minutes to install Foxmarks across the three computers I use every day.

The second Firefox add-on is Firebug. Firebug is a great tool for web designers and developers because it allows you to edit, debug and monitor CSS, HTML and JavaScript live on any web page. There’s also a Lite version for IE, Opera and Safari users.

If I’m building a site for an Australian business who wants to market their goods or services in another country should I be designing on the basis of what ‘works’ in Australia?

It’s an interesting question that my partner considered and wrote about several years ago. Back then she compared two shop windows and suggested that there was a lesson in those windows for anyone who was building websites. The shop windows she was talking about where two that we saw quite frequently.

One window belonged to a typically western-culture shop while the other was a riot of colours, contents and even smells and it belonged to a shop that catered for the local Chinese community … and the shop behind the window wasn’t much better. I know that we wondered how anyone could possibly find anything that they were looking for in a shop like that but the Chinese community certainly shopped there.

Anyway, like most husbands tend to do, I didn’t pay much attention to what Toni wrote but now I’m beginning to see that she was definitely on the right track and perhaps well ahead of many other people in what she was thinking about.

You see, the big noise now in search engine marketing circles is that what appeals to western cultures doesn’t appeal much to the Chinese and neat, clean websites like Google are not appealing to the Chinese at all.

You can read more about it in ‘A Tale of Two Cultures’ and it should certainly think about what your target market is for the sites that you design.

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