by Qing Hu | Jul 27, 2012 | Business Success, Design, Interactive
Web Design isn’t about the layout, the colour, the look or the impact of a site. In fact, behind every great website is a great web design usability interface. Success or failure of your website depends on user the web design usability interface. A website is your first impression out there in the real world… so it’s important that the user interface provides everything that the end user is looking for , easily, while on your website. Success or failure of your website depends on user the interface. Viewers, surfers, user… a call them what you will, cannot find what they seek if the interface is poor.
Jakob Nielsen, a Denmark web usability consultant, suggested the following heuristics (must haves!) for user interface design:
Visibility of system status
A website should always keep users informed about what the site is about, what page they’re currently looking at and where to click. It is recommended to have your site’s title and page name visible on every page so that users know their whereabouts.
Match between system and the real world
Websites should speak the target audiences’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to them, rather than using technical terms. The copy should be relevant, engaging and provide learning. It should also be streamlined and efficient.
User control and freedom
Viewers often click for the stake of well, clicking and find themselves on a page that they don’t want to be on. Make sure your website has clearly marked “exit” to leave any unwanted pages… and back to the pages they want to be on. Similarly, users sometimes will click on links that takes them to another page while leaving the page they are visiting. To remedy this problem, websites should support undo and redo. For example, having links opened in a new tab or new page instead of having users leave the page.
Consistency and standards
The intended audience should not have to wonder whether different words, actions or layout mean the same thing. Websites should follow conventions (e.g. font color and size consistency, same header and footer height across pages, image size and etc). Make sure all pages on your website have the same look and feel. If not, users will think they’re on another website.
Error prevention: Recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
A good design should prevent problems from occurring in the first place. For example, when designing a contact us form for your website, you should clearly mark the required fields. Somewhere on your contact form, you should include *(denotes required field). If an error still occurs, be sure to send the users a clear error message. The message should be worded in plain language (no codes), indicate where were the errors and suggest a solution on how to fix the errors.
Recognition rather than recall
Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. Instructions for use of the website, such as sitemap should be visible whenever appropriate.
Example: In interface speak, website links have 4 states. Make use of these to ensure that users know where to click, where they’ve visited and what page they’re on at all times. Here are the 4 states.
a:link {color:#000000;} /* unvisited link */
a:visited {color:#666666;} /* visited link */
a:hover {color:#CCCCCC;} /* mouse over link */
a:active {color:#FFFFFF;} /* selected link */
Help and documentation
Even though it is better if the website can be used without instruction, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation, such as a FAQ page that contains information related to what the user is trying to find. Have a “contact us” link visible on every page, so they can email you with any issues, questions or concerns.
Why is this important? Consider this: You may have the greatest SEO campaign or Google Ad Word Campaign, but if it leads your intended audience to a site that isn’t providing them with the expected web experience, you’ve just lost them.
Is your website design usability optimized for user interface?
by Qing Hu | Jul 11, 2012 | Business Success, Social Media
Improving your Search Engine rankings is key for your business to be found. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of getting free traffic from search engines. Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo have search results where contents on web pages are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. SEO is a prevailing part of your company’s marketing plan. It refers to how easily consumers can find your products and services through major search engines.
Here are 10 tips on how to improve your Search Engine rankings:
1. Submitting URLs to Search Engines
Submitting the URLs of your web pages is a relatively easy process. You could simply click on “submit URL” or “suggest a site” which can be found on the main page of the more popular Search Engines. URL should be submitted whenever a new webpage is created. Most importantly, it is necessary to resubmit the URL to Search Engines when a web page is updated or revised.
2. Enticing Page Titles
Enticement to click is often based on an attractive page title. A page title is displayed on browser’s title bar and the user’s list of query results on Search Engines. Enticement to click can be achieved by having good page titles accompanied good descriptions, which come from the Meta description tags.
3. Paid Submission
Paid submission allows companies to rank higher in a competitive environment. For example, having your company listed as a sponsored search result will make your products and services more visible.
4. Keywords
If your website contains the word “advertising” 50 times and your competitor’s page contains the word “advertising” only 20 times, and you have the word “advertising” in the Meta tags and in a page title, your page would rank higher in major Search Engines.
5. Relevant Page Content
The amount of words on a page, their arrangement and relevance to the title can improve Search Engine ranking. Frequency of particular words on the page indicates the likelihood that the Search Engine will pick up on your keywords and indicate to a search result that you have the content people are looking for.
6. Consistent Image Naming
Having many images on a page does not improve your ranking, however, if you name your images correctly, it is likely that Search Engines such as Google Images will find your image. Therefore, name your images carefully and always create alt attributes for your images.
7. Including Meta Tags
Meta Keyword tags describe what a page contains to the Search Engine. Using as many keywords as possible will help to increase the chance that users can find your site based on that word.
8. Adding Links and Cross-links
Make sure you include links on your website. Link out to other websites and other pages within your website. This will cause the site to be considered more valuable by Search Engines since it allows browsers to turn links into information on other pages.
9. Frequency of Updates
You should regularly update your site. Search Engines usually rank sites that are current and provide valuable information that has been recently updated. Making frequent changes to your pages and content will give you a higher ranking in Search Engines.
10. Mobile Optimization
People now often use their smart phones to view webpage, therefore it is necessary for your company to create pages that are optimized for mobile phones. Google has created capabilities to allow cell phone users to search listings that were mobile device enabled.
What SEO tactics do you employ? Have you found them to be successful?
by Qing Hu | Jun 15, 2012 | Branding, Business Success, Interactive
Is choosing the right tool to create your website a challenge? Depending on your needs and objectives, you could consider a CMS (Content Management System) as it allows you to create, control and manage the content of your web site without any programming knowledge.
There are a variety of open and closed source CMS solutions available for you to choose from. The most common open-sourced options include WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, and closed ones such as Subdreamer, CushyCMS and ExpressionEngine. These tools have a lot of similarities. Hence, it is difficult to decide which one to use.
Here is a summary of the advantages and disadvantages for WordPress, Joomla and Subdreamer.
1. WordPress
The core software of WordPress is built by hundreds of community volunteers. Thus, the most prevailing feature of WordPress is that it has thousands of free plug-ins and themes available for users to download.
Key advantages of using WordPress:
– It’s free, helps minimize your cost for start-up business
– Open-source
– It has a huge user database, drives more traffic to your site
– Allows quick and simple integration with other software packages, you can upload content directly to your website with no hassles
– Search engine friendly. I noticed that search engines love WordPress because a lot of websites displaying on the first page of search engines are built with WordPress. This is because WordPress has many outstanding SEO plug-ins available for users to download.
Comparing with the benefits of WordPress, there aren’t many disadvantages for WordPress, if I had to find one, I would say that WordPress has some security issues. Hacking and spamming seemed to exist and there are many unsecured plug-ins that may cause problem to your website, but these issues can be prevented such as disabling the unsecured plug-ins and installing spam prevention tools such as RECAPTCHA.
2. Joomla
Joomla is an award-winning CMS. Similar to WordPress, Joomla is good because:
– It’s free and open source
– Has a more simple and user-friendly admin interface than WordPress
– Great for large companies because it allows multiple users to edit the site simultaneously without causing problems
– Supports multi-language sites
Similar to WordPress, Joomla also had many highly customizable themes, templates and web modules available. One of the most prevailing features of Joomla, comparing to WordPress, is that the system itself has lots of readily integrated features (such as polls and user control). There are no additional plug-ins need to be installed, whereas in WordPress, a brand new system only contain the most basic features, all other features have to be added through plug-ins. Hence, I believed that Joomla would be more appropriate for large companies, whereas WordPress would be more suitable for small and medium companies.
Some disadvantages of using Joomla include that it is harder to learn than WordPress and it has less plugins (including free plugins) comparing to WordPress. Making changes on Joomla is not as simple as it is on WordPress because changes often require development support.
3. Subdreamer
Subdreamer is an example of good closed source system that also uses PHP and MySQL database. It is 100% rebrandable, it allows you to white label the CMS. White labeling gives the freedom to re-brand the CMS under your own name. It’s a great way to promote your company. Subdreamer also includes its own discussion forum plugin so that you can integrate your website with forums such as vBulletin, phpBB.
The reason why I list Subdreamer as a solution is because it contains most of the functions open source systems has and it is more reliable and secure than using open-source systems because most of the security issues in the open source system come from the free plug-ins that might contain unknown threats to your website. For Subdreamer, every plug-in is made and under the administrative of the Subdreamer’s development team. Many hacking and spamming from auto-generated programs could be prevented.
A typical Subdreamer CMS cost $99.95 USD. Considering this cost, I assume it will be easier to obtain support when you experience problems since the license purchased also comes with 24-hour real human technical support. However, some of the drawbacks of this system is that it will not be updated as often as the open source system due to its nature of close sourcing, only the developers of Subdreamer can fix the bugs and add features and functionality whereas in a free open source system, everyone could contribute the system.
In the process of selecting a CMS, always remember to a research before you decide to invest time and money in it. The main purpose of a CMS is to create a website that is easy to manage. As long as the CMS fits all of your needs, it will be the right decision.
