Splash or Not be Flashy
One of our client who has been in online women’s fashion business (US, UK & Australia) for over 4 years, now considering redesign their existing web site. They were keen to add flash animation to their site, however, we discourage our clients about adding flash for many good reasons. It’s a graphic intensive eCommerce site, including flash animations can have some implication. Here are few essential factors to evaluate when you planing to build a site with Flash: Although flash or splash home pages may seem like they give a site bells and whistles, they can impair how rapidly your site loads. Slow loading sites have higher bounce rates (site abandonment). If you plan to attract a lot of site traffic, the bandwidth may eat into your hosting budget. Many consumers do their shopping during work hours. As a result, if your fashion catalog is promoting a sale, and visitors have to watch a 15-second splash introduction, there’s a higher probability of losing more traffic. Flash introductions should be optional. Not all visitors want to sit through the presentation; especially, if they’re trying make a purchase without being caught on company time. Web design tip: Hire a web design company, who can harmonize your site’s splash and non-flash functionality. Click here to obtain a no obligation web design...
read more5 Tips for your Twitter account
Although Twitter as a social network in Sri Lanka that does not take over the leadership position, the Sri Lankan president even answer questions on a Twitter Q&A session recently, which shows the micro-blogging service is steadily gaining in importance. But how to create small and medium-sized enterprises to use their twitter account and so expand their reach? Today we have 5 tips for your Twitter account: 1 Use Twitter as a way to communicate with and most importantly you need to follow other twitterers – appropriate to your specific interests. 2 Use short URL or URL-less. On Twitter you have 140 characters are available to convey your message to your followers. Do not give unnecessary characters by posting long URLs. 3 Twitter is not PR spin. Provide your followers quality content that adds value so others may Retweet. 4 Also on twitter you should always be careful what you published about you and your compnay. So be friendly, courteous and above all be genuine. 5 Tweet topics relevant and current as possible. Twitter is a great channel in a balanced marketing mix to give more attention to your company. Have fun and good...
read moreGoogle’s hummingbird – a new search algorithm for the search engine
Last week Google announced one of the biggest revision to their search algorithm called “Hummingbird”. Just a month earlier, without the users’ knowledge Google had introduced the search algorithm, which is under the poetic name Hummingbird (Hummingbird). The aim of the Hummingbird updates is to provide users relevant search results to more complex search requests. The algorithm now no longer relies on simple keyword matching on websites but trying to recognize phrases and to find appropriate contexts. Last year, with the introduction of The Knowledge Graph it was an appropriate step in this direction, because the Knowledge Graph recognizes information about specific places, people, things, etc and the relationship between them. In the past two years, the proportion of searches that are made by phone and voice input, has also increased. Whether auto-complete, context-sensitive search, precaching or universal search – the more comfortable search options that Google introduced in the past, users now represent more complex search queries easily. Thus, this new algorithm is a logical development by Google. However, the introduction of the Hummingbird algorithm is not the only innovation by Google on it’s 15th birthday: The Knowledge Graph can now compare two things together. In the official blog post this, there is a nice example: You want to know how much butter has saturated fat compared to olive oil? Just search for “comparative butter olive oil”. Users can now able to set filters in their quest to specialize the query...
read moreTips to Improve Your Page Speed Load Time
Do you know how fast your website loads? Did you know that a slow loading web page not only hurt your conversions but can also hurt your ranking, both of which will impact your site’s revenue? Designers sometimes get so caught up in making a site visually appealing, by adding numerous graphics, images, music, or videos without realising that they have slowed down the loading speed of the website. Slow load time increases bounce rate, reduces the conversion rate, and lowers the perceived credibility of the website as well as the compatibility to mobile devices. A faster website means happier visitors. The following tips will be helpful as you build websites that load quickly. Get a good web hosting Provider. Instead of pinching pennies and purchasing a cheap host for your website be sure to select a hosting company that is reliable and reachable. Having so many really good online reviews or they are on the top 10 best web hosting providers, doesn’t mean their services are reliable, most of these hosting companies hire people to write their own reviews. If the company isn’t reliable then all of the other steps you take to speed up your website will be of little consequence. Combine external files such as Javascript and CSS files to reduce HTTP requests. Instead of having a separate file for things such as Flash and a second file for basic image rollovers, which a server would have to source individually, you can combine them into a single scripts file on the same page. This step will cut down the number of files the server will have to load, or HTTP GET requests for that web page. This also allows you to manage all of the Javascript on the one page. This same process can also be used for external Stylesheets. When you combine files, you reduce the HTTP request overhead required to generate the webpage and speed up the rate at which it loads. Image size optimization. Big images can make a big impact on your site visitors but they can also make a big impact on your site speed. You need to make sure your images are sized properly in the right format so they don’t slow down your site. Images can be adjusted to lower their size but still look good. GIF is appropriate for images with few colors such as logos or text and line art. JPG is appropriate for images with lots of color and detail such as photographs. PNG is appropriate when you want to use a quality transparent image. Efficient use of HTML and CSS. With more CSS experience you find ways to use code more efficiently and use less of it. Using optimized CSS and as little code as possible in your CSS and HTML will make a big difference in reducing the size of your files. Extra lines of code can sometimes be overlooked and can add time to your loading time. Be sure to look over your web page code to be sure it is clean and optimized for best performance. Sourcing your RSS from Feedburner. If you have an RSS feed on your site, you should use Google’s Feedburner tool which is a free service. This will load much more quickly. Update plug-ins and software applications....
read moreHow To Engage Visitors With Your Content
Writing great content is the key to have your website/blog stand out and attract readers. Content is the most important.. without it, your website is just a template. Many bloggers and webmasters try to get away with writing sub-par content. This content might be hastily written ramblings stuffed with keywords just to provide some kind of meat to a website and make it attractive to the search engines. Often, software s been used to “spin” existing content to make it unique. Usually these articles are confusing and unreadable to an actual human visitor. Many webmasters try to outsource their content as cheap as possible, while this works okay in some cases, most of time you get what you pay for. If your website/blog exists solely for backlink juice, this might be all right (for now!). But if your goal is to attract and engage an active readership you must be willing to put in time and effort to produce great, interesting content. Here are some basic tips and tricks for doing just that! Find out the hot topics and talk about them. Try to find an ‘angle’ that other writers have not covered and be the first to provide information / opinions on it. Be controversial. Voice an opinion that arouses intrigue and fiery debate. Ask provocative questions and encourage your readers to comment their thoughts and opinions. For example: “Marketers who promote CPA are just glorified spammers! Can CPA and ‘ethics’ be mentioned in the same sentence?” You’ll find that you’ll get a lot of responses and your post may even be featured on forums or other areas where you’ll get tons of traffic. Always provide many line breaks in your writing. This will make your blog post easily digestible. Huge blocks of text are difficult to read and readers will have the natural inclination to overlook the content and click off the page to find something easier to read. Content doesn’t always have be in written format. Spice up your blog with occasional photographs, videos, and pod-casts. Read lots of blogs in both your niche and others. Find out what makes the popular blogs so interesting and fun to read, and apply your findings to your own blog. Don’t be self-conscious about your writing! So many people have extremely low confidence in their own ability to write. Don’t even think about it. Sure, you might not be the next Shakespeare, but if you write from the heart and genuinely commit to providing your readers with useful information, you’ll do a great job. That’s it for now. Start using these tips today to provide great content and attract tons of...
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