Web 2.0 developers rank MSN/Live higher than Google, Yahoo and Facebook

Web 2.0 software developers ranked Microsoft's MSN/Live Windows developer program higher than competing programs offered by Internet leaders Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and PayPal, according to results of an Evans Data Corp. report released today.

The "Users' Choice: Web 2.0 Developer Programs" report is based on the results of a survey of more than 400 developers, who rated developer programs from the seven companies in 13 categories, including API functionality, blogs, marketing assistance tools/SDKs, Web services, documentation, support and forums. The Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. programs were ranked right after Microsoft Corp.'s.

While the recent opening of Facebook's development platform has garnered lots of attention for the social network, it ranked next to last among the seven Web 2.0 development programs included in the survey. Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. also ranked higher than Facebook, with all of them ahead of last place PayPal Inc.

Microsoft scored high in user satisfaction for its Web services, software development kits, documentation and forums. In the Web services category, Microsoft came in on top this year after ranking last in the year-earlier survey.

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Businesses 'need to know what they are doing when designing a website'

Growing businesses have been urged to ensure they "know what they are doing" when designing a website to increase their online presence.

Julie Howell, accessibility director of web design company Fortune Cookie, has stated that it is vital to have some prior knowledge when creating a site as if software is "cutting corners", it could lead to problems for people who visit it.

She explained that developments at the end of the last century mean that people are now using automated authoring software without any interest in HTML code.

"These new authoring tools meant we suddenly had a generation of web developers who were creating websites that looked ok on the screen but those developers had no understanding of what was actually happening under the hood of websites," she said.

Ms Howells added that such issues can mean that people who rely on software to help them browse the web, including the disabled, could face difficulties.

Fortune Cookie has helped to design websites for businesses and organisations including Aqualisa, Legal & General and Voyages Jules Verne.

Source : http://www.businessstrata.com/

Businesses 'need to know what they are doing when designing a website'

Growing businesses have been urged to ensure they "know what they are doing" when designing a website to increase their online presence.

Julie Howell, accessibility director of web design company Fortune Cookie, has stated that it is vital to have some prior knowledge when creating a site as if software is "cutting corners", it could lead to problems for people who visit it.

She explained that developments at the end of the last century mean that people are now using automated authoring software without any interest in HTML code.

"These new authoring tools meant we suddenly had a generation of web developers who were creating websites that looked ok on the screen but those developers had no understanding of what was actually happening under the hood of websites," she said.

Ms Howells added that such issues can mean that people who rely on software to help them browse the web, including the disabled, could face difficulties.

Fortune Cookie has helped to design websites for businesses and organisations including Aqualisa, Legal & General and Voyages Jules Verne.

Source : http://www.businessstrata.com/

Good understanding vital for website design

Individuals and company´s designing a website should ensure that they know fully what they are doing so that it can be easily used by as many people as possible, it has been claimed.

According to web design and build company Fortune Cookie, recent trends in web design have made a number of new websites inaccessible for certain disabled users.

Julie Howell, director of accessibility at the firm explained that an advancement in automated authoring software has allowed new ´web developers´ to create websites that look good on screen without any knowledge of the behind the scenes workings.

This, she explained made it difficult for some people to use, particularly blind people, whose software relies upon the structure behind the website being correct.

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Elements to Avoid in Web Designing

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn't matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design -- accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I've come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I'd just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitor’s burden when viewing your site -- users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics -- user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it's illegible you won't be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct every time each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it's meant to do effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!

In Summary:

1. Avoid background music
2. Avoid Extra large/small text size
3. Avoid Popup windows
   

About The Author
Colin Stables owns and operates http://eBooksAtoZ.com.

New tool could make web development simpler

Having a web presence is a must these days but developing that presence is not easy, especially if you are starting from square one. A new tool from Fresh Tilled Soil could make the process simpler. Rapid Web Prototyping gives developers guides to use while developing HTML/CSS web pages, speeding up the process.

According to the company, websites have been developed in as little as three weeks; most, however, take between four and six weeks to complete. If you've checked in with other web development companies, you know this is quite a bit quicker than other options.

Here is how it works: developers begin by creating the user interface. By polling consumers about what works, which areas need more information and which areas are ready to go, marketers can be more certain that the website will be user-friendly once it goes live. From the customer phase, developers actually begin developing the full site.

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Designing a fast loading web site

Tips and tricks on effective web design

The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load. Try out our tips to build a great looking web site that also loads fast.

1. Minimize the use of images - The key to a fast loading web site is to minimize the use of images. Images do enhance a page but don't make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Notice the popular sites like Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Amazon etc., they have very few images because the load time is more important. Very often simple designs are the best.
   
   
2. Optimize images for the web - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image. You can also use online tools like Gif Wizard to optimize your images or to get a recommendation on how to cut down the size of an image.
   
   
3. Use Tables creatively - You can get some great looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like. Check out our homepage and our menus to see how we have used tables in our site.
   
   
4. Cut down the use of animated gifs - Don't use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor's attention to a particular section of your site.
   
   
5. Design simple icons - Instead of using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor. We have used small icons in our homepage to highlight the main sections of our site.
   
   
6. Use background images instead of big images whenever possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small. The code will look like this :
   
   
7. Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.
   
   Rollover the text on the right menu to see how we have used CSS Styles to get a simple but nice text effect.
   
   Check out our CSS Styles tutorial for more cool tips on CSS Styles
   
   
8. Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don't make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.
   
   
9. Design most of your site in HTML - As much as possible try to design your site using HTML. You can create great designs by just using HTML code. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc.
   
   
10. Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful. We kept using it to improve our site till we got a report that said good loading time!
    

We learnt these tips while building our web site. We've enjoyed sharing them with you and hope that you found them useful.

Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

Top -10 lists of the biggest mistakes in Web design.

1. Bad Search
   
   Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they're unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.
   
   A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document's importance. Much better if your search engine calls out "best bets" at the top of the list -- especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.
   
   Search is the user's lifeline when navigation fails. Even though advanced search can sometimes help, simple search usually works best, and search should be presented as a simple box, since that's what users are looking for.
   
   
2. PDF Files for Online Reading
   
   Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don't work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user's browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.
   
   Worst of all, PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that's hard to navigate.
   
   PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.
   
   
3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links
   
   A good grasp of past navigation helps you understand your current location, since it's the culmination of your journey. Knowing your past and present locations in turn makes it easier to decide where to go next. Links are a key factor in this navigation process. Users can exclude links that proved fruitless in their earlier visits. Conversely, they might revisit links they found helpful in the past.
   
   Most important, knowing which pages they've already visited frees users from unintentionally revisiting the same pages over and over again.
   
   These benefits only accrue under one important assumption: that users can tell the difference between visited and unvisited links because the site shows them in different colors. When visited links don't change color, users exhibit more navigational disorientation in usability testing and unintentionally revisit the same pages repeatedly.
   
   
4. Non-Scannable Text
   
   A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read.
   
   Write for online, not print. To draw users into the text and support scannability, use well-documented tricks:
   
   • subheads
   • bulleted lists
   • highlighted keywords
   • short paragraphs
   • the inverted pyramid
   • a simple writing style, and
   • de-fluffed language devoid of marketese.
   
   
5. Fixed Font Size
   
   CSS style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.
   
   Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.
   
   
6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility
   
   Search is the most important way users discover websites. Search is also one of the most important ways users find their way around individual websites. The humble page title is your main tool to attract new visitors from search listings and to help your existing users to locate the specific pages that they need.
   
   Page tag and is almost always used as the clickable headline for listings on search engine result pages (SERP). Search engines typically show the first 66 characters or so of the title, so it's truly microcontent. The page title is contained within the HTML.
   
   Page titles are also used as the default entry in the Favorites when users bookmark a site. For your homepage, begin the with the company name, followed by a brief description of the site. Don't start with words like "The" or "Welcome to" unless you want to be alphabetized under "T" or "W."
   
   For other pages than the homepage, start the title with a few of the most salient information-carrying words that describe the specifics of what users will find on that page. Since the page title is used as the window title in the browser, it's also used as the label for that window in the taskbar under Windows, meaning that advanced users will move between multiple windows under the guidance of the first one or two words of each page title. If all your page titles start with the same words, you have severely reduced usability for your multi-windowing users.
   
   Taglines on homepages are a related subject: they also need to be short and quickly communicate the purpose of the site.
   
   
7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement
   
   Selective attention is very powerful, and Web users have learned to stop paying attention to any ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation. (The main exception being text-only search-engine ads.)
   
   Unfortunately, users also ignore legitimate design elements that look like prevalent forms of advertising. After all, when you ignore something, you don't study it in detail to find out what it is.
   
   Therefore, it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements. The exact implications of this guideline will vary with new forms of ads; currently follow these rules:
   
   
   • banner blindness means that users never fixate their eyes on anything that looks like a banner ad due to shape or position on the page.
   • animation avoidance makes users ignore areas with blinking or flashing text or other aggressive animation.
   • spop-up purges mean that users close pop-up windoids before they have even fully rendered; sometimes with great viciousness (a sort of getting-back-at-GeoCities triumph).
     
   
   
8. Violating Design Conventions
   
   Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don't have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. Every time you release an apple over Sir Isaac Newton, it will drop on his head. That's good.
   
   The more users' expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users' expectations, the more they will feel insecure. Oops, maybe if I let go of this apple, it will turn into a tomato and jump a mile into the sky.
   
   Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend most of their time on other websites."
   
   This means that they form their expectations for your site based on what's commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave.
   
   
9. Opening New Browser Windows
   
   Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer's carpet. Don't pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks (particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management).
   
   Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users on their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over the user's machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the Back button which is the normal way users return to previous sites. Users often don't notice that a new window has opened, especially if they are using a small monitor where the windows are maximized to fill up the screen. So a user who tries to return to the origin will be confused by a grayed out Back button.
   
   Links that don't behave as expected undermine users' understanding of their own system. A link should be a simple hypertext reference that replaces the current page with new content. Users hate unwarranted pop-up windows. When they want the destination to appear in a new page, they can use their browser's "open in new window" command -- assuming, of course, that the link is not a piece of code that interferes with the browser’s standard behavior.
   
   
10. Not Answering Users' Questions
    
    Users are highly goal-driven on the Web. They visit sites because there's something they want to accomplish -- maybe even buy your product. The ultimate failure of a website is to fail to provide the information users are looking for.
    
    Sometimes the answer is simply not there and you lose the sale because users have to assume that your product or service doesn't meet their needs if you don't tell them the specifics. Other times the specifics are buried under a thick layer of marketese and bland slogans. Since users don't have time to read everything, such hidden info might almost as well not be there.
    
    The worst example of not answering users' questions is to avoid listing the price of products and services. No B2C e commerce site would make this mistake, but it's rife in B2B, where most "enterprise solutions" are presented so that you can't tell whether they are suited for 100 people or 100,000 people. Price is the most specific piece of info customers use to understand the nature of an offering, and not providing it makes people feel lost and reduces their understanding of a product line. We have miles of videotape of users asking "Where's the price?" while tearing their hair out.
    

Even B2C sites often make the associated mistake of forgetting prices in product lists, such as category pages or search results. Knowing the price is key in both situations; it lets users differentiate among products and click through to the most relevant ones.

Source : http://www.useit.com/

Can Microsoft win over enough developers to change the paradigm?

Over the last few months, I have written about some of the changes occurring in the development landscape. Some of the other writers in TechRepublic’s Programming and Development space have also been approaching the same topic with hands-on articles, such as Tony Patton’s recent piece on Silverlight 2.0, and Peter Mikhalenko’s continuing articles on various Java APIs. Today, I want to touch on the concept of reflexivity.

Reflexivity, in a nutshell, is the idea that when many people believe something is going to happen, they unwittingly cause it to happen. The idea originated in economics, and I first stumbled across it in a piece about stock prices. In the stock market, when companies fear that a crash may be coming, they take certain measures (such as cutting back orders of stock or laying off employees) that play a significant role in creating a stock market crash.

We all know who the 800 lb. gorillas in IT are: IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems (which is slimming down to be a 500 lb. gorilla), and so on. Now, how many of these gorillas are really involved in what programmers do? Or, you might think about where the tools and languages you use originate. It’s a pretty short list. If you are a Java developer, your language comes from Sun, and your tools are either Eclipse (originally an IBM AlphaWorks project), JDeveloper (Oracle), or NetBeans (Sun). PHP developers seem to stick with text editors of some variety or another, by and large. This leaves nearly 100% of Windows desktop application developers, and probably 30% - 60% of Web developers using one tool: Microsoft Visual Studio. Talk about an 800 lb. gorilla!

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Why change management is critical to Web 2.0 success

Rolling out social software in an organisation isn’t akin to buying another version of Oracle. There is a degree of organisational readiness that needs to be achieved in order to successfully deploy and absorb the changes associated with Web 2.0. And this change management has caught many businesses unaware.

Since Web 2.0 poked its way into the corporate province, firms have been gearing up to implement social software in internets, intranets and extranets. And whether it’s being used to communicate with customers or enable collaboration between employees, this year will see more businesses than ever embrace the possibilities of Web 2.0.

A survey of 1,800 executives worldwide by McKinsey last year, for instance, revealed that a fifth of them were already using blogs to improve customer service or solicit customer feedback. It’s a sure bet that 2008 will see firms not only exploring blogs, but also peer to peer networking, social networks and podcasts.

But rolling out social software in an organisation isn’t akin to buying another version of Oracle. There is a certain degree of organisational readiness that needs to be achieved in order to successfully deploy and absorb the changes associated with implementing social software. And the change management necessary to precede such a Web 2.0 strategy has caught many businesses unaware.

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Why change management is critical to Web 2.0 success

Rolling out social software in an organisation isn’t akin to buying another version of Oracle. There is a degree of organisational readiness that needs to be achieved in order to successfully deploy and absorb the changes associated with Web 2.0. And this change management has caught many businesses unaware.

Since Web 2.0 poked its way into the corporate province, firms have been gearing up to implement social software in internets, intranets and extranets. And whether it’s being used to communicate with customers or enable collaboration between employees, this year will see more businesses than ever embrace the possibilities of Web 2.0.

A survey of 1,800 executives worldwide by McKinsey last year, for instance, revealed that a fifth of them were already using blogs to improve customer service or solicit customer feedback. It’s a sure bet that 2008 will see firms not only exploring blogs, but also peer to peer networking, social networks and podcasts.

But rolling out social software in an organisation isn’t akin to buying another version of Oracle. There is a certain degree of organisational readiness that needs to be achieved in order to successfully deploy and absorb the changes associated with implementing social software. And the change management necessary to precede such a Web 2.0 strategy has caught many businesses unaware.

Read More Article...

Why change management is critical to Web 2.0 success

Rolling out social software in an organisation isn’t akin to buying another version of Oracle. There is a degree of organisational readiness that needs to be achieved in order to successfully deploy and absorb the changes associated with Web 2.0. And this change management has caught many businesses unaware.

Since Web 2.0 poked its way into the corporate province, firms have been gearing up to implement social software in internets, intranets and extranets. And whether it’s being used to communicate with customers or enable collaboration between employees, this year will see more businesses than ever embrace the possibilities of Web 2.0.

A survey of 1,800 executives worldwide by McKinsey last year, for instance, revealed that a fifth of them were already using blogs to improve customer service or solicit customer feedback. It’s a sure bet that 2008 will see firms not only exploring blogs, but also peer to peer networking, social networks and podcasts.

But rolling out social software in an organisation isn’t akin to buying another version of Oracle. There is a certain degree of organisational readiness that needs to be achieved in order to successfully deploy and absorb the changes associated with implementing social software. And the change management necessary to precede such a Web 2.0 strategy has caught many businesses unaware.

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Domain Development is harder than Domain Parking

Leonard Holmes of ParkQuick details the trials and tribulations of domain development.

Are you getting tired of parking domains? Are you serious about developing?

For the past 12 months I have been paying $800 a month to an educational organization to learn web development, Internet marketing, and SEO. This is a lot of money, and I ask myself every few months whether it is really worth it. So far I have decided that it is. Stompernet has been closed to new members since May of 2007. It is opening its doors again this coming week, but probably for just few days. It seems that people beat the door down to pay this much money for this kind of training.

They are also offering No-cost tools to assist webmasters and domain developers. Their most recent offering - Stomper Site Seer - is a web-based tool that you don’t have to pay for. It generates a lot of information about your site in one report. Even if you don’t sign-up for Stompernet (and most people won’t) their free educational offerings are amazing. This is stuff that you’d pay a lot for elsewhere. By giving away some of their material they hope to get people to sign-up. I plan to stay a member.

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Software Notebook: Mozilla striving for an awesome Web browser

The basic concept behind a Web browser is pretty simple -- to deliver and frame the online world. So how much better can a browser get, really?

That's the question facing Mozilla and the worldwide community of developers responsible for its Firefox browser. The first version, in 2004, took off based on its promise of better security and features such as tabbed browsing, for opening multiple pages inside a window.

With the release of Firefox 3.0 slated for next month, Mozilla's Mike Beltzner thinks they've come up with advances worthy of the same type of attention. He points, as an example, to a Firefox 3.0 feature known officially as the Smart Location Bar -- and informally as the Awesome Bar.

The feature gives the browser's address bar a mechanism for quickly returning to Web pages, without bookmarking them, even if users don't remember the address. As people type, it searches for that text in the addresses and titles of pages that they've visited previously. It also can search "tags" -- keywords that users associate with a particular page.

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How to Hire a Web Developer?

Today, most businesses want a website. Some already have one. Others want one. They don't want to hire IT staff and probably can't afford any. And in most cases, an in-house IT staff, especially for your typical small business, just isn't necessary. But, that doesn't mean that you have to go without or will be forced to use some cookie cutter website or a personal FrontPage experiment gone awry. You can hire a web developer/designer to create a professional website for you, set it up, and then hand it over to you for you to do what you want with it. But, how should you go about finding someone to do this? What should you look for? There are literally thousands of companies/individuals out there offering to do your website. How do you pick from this large group?

What Do You Want?

The first step is to decide exactly what you want on your website. This is very important as it will determine what the requirements are and, in turn, what skill set your web developer needs to fulfill your needs. Here are some questions to ask of yourself:

what kinds of information do you want to have on your site? Approximately how large do you envision the site (# of pages)?

• Will your site require regular updates? Do you want to do these updates yourself?
• Will you be engaging in e-commerce on this website?
• Will you need a database?
• How fast do you need the job done?
• What is your budget?
  

Start Your Search

Doing a web search for someone that has the skills you will need for your website will still give you a humongous list of possible choices. Referrals are often the best method of weeding people out. IF someone recommends a developer, it is because they are happy with the service they were provided. So, if someone recommends a developer to you, you should check that developer out and see if they have the skills you will need from them.

Often, the developers you are pondering are not located in your town. In today's day and age, this is not usually a problem. Yes, there are instances where a face-to-face meeting is really beneficial, and if you are the kind of really considers this meeting important, you should limit your search to developers within driving distance of your location. Otherwise, the internet and phone system provide all the communication you will need, regardless of distance.

The first thing to do when considering a developer is to check out their website.

• IS the site well-designed and attractive?
• Is it easy to navigate?
• Are there any broken links?
• Is the information complete (introduction to staff, company location, contact methods, etc.)?
• Does the site load quickly?
• IS there a portfolio? (Very important. A developer without a portfolio to display is a total question mark. You simply don't know if the people are good or are snacking on Doritos trying to figure things out as they go).
• What skills does the developer have? Do they do design only, or can they do dynamic web development and database design? Also, ensure that they do not advertise themselves as a web designer but focus mainly on print media. Internet design and print design are different ballparks with different requirements. Also, keep in mind that good use of Dream weaver or FrontPage does not in itself make a web designer. Check their portfolio and ensure the developer really knows his stuff. A person well-versed in internet development should know not only about creating the site, but also maintaining it, marketing it, and promoting it. Ideally, a web developer has successfully done all of the above on his own sites.
• Does the site offer customer testimonials? Read them. And, you might even contact those clients independently to ask them questions of the service you were provided.
  

Small Freelancers vs. Big Firms

You need to decide if you want to work with a large design firm or a small freelance company (or even single developer). There is more security for the client when working with a larger firm. The skills they offer vary widely because their staff is so large, and they often have a very large portfolio. The caveat, though, is that large companies often charge more money. The overhead costs for such companies are larger, so they will charge more. Additionally, larger companies often come with more beauracracy. With so many developers, often communication is just not what it should be, leading to inconsistencies in the project due to miscommunication. Also, sometimes you will find that these companies pay a little too much attention to process rather than simply getting the job done.

Freelance developers offer better value for the money, and because they are a single person, the communication flow between them and the client are usually much better (one-on-one). If there is a staff, usually the size is small, meaning communication will still be more tight-knit. This will lead to more consistent coding and coordination. Also, you know who is responsible for your project and there is more accountability. In larger firms, nobody is responsible in some cases. (Or so they say). The downside of freelancing is that their skill set is their skill set, and if you need something that they don't know how to do, they must research it. Also, freelancers are limited by their size. If they already have a high workload, then their throughout is limited and it may force you to wait. So, depending on the size of your project, a large firm might guarantee the job gets done quickly.

Rates and Guidelines

Check out the rates of the developer. Often, you will not find the rates directly posted on their website. This is usually because they like to do things by estimate, so simply contact them, give them a few specs, and go back and forth until you get a ballpark figure. When getting an estimate, make sure it is detailed and exact. Ask any questions that you have. If you think the price is too high, ask them about it. Don't be afraid to counter-offer. They can always refuse.

Check out the developer's contract. Make sure the client is protected. Pay attention to guarantees of response time. You want to make sure your developer is available for you. Also, look for their policy on project changes. Obviously, you cannot alter the specs of your project once an estimate is agreed upon without expecting additional fees. Ask them about this. Also, inspect the contract for warranty of work. Who will they handle bugs in the work they have done?

Talk With Them

Any developer you consider should have a method of being reached by phone. Call them and gauge their personality. Make sure they are good people who you can talk with and bounce ideas off of. See if they treat you right or act like they barely have time for you. Good communication is very important to a successful project, and if you can't properly communicate to your developer, you should not hire him/her.

Evaluate

Evaluate your potential developers using the advice above and you will be more likely to have successfully completed project with minimal frustration.

Did you find this article useful? For more useful tips and hints, points to ponder and keep in mind, techniques, and insights pertaining to web design, do please browse for more information at our websites.

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Source : http://www.designnewsnext.com/

Changing the Process of Web Development

All new or emerging businesses are rightfully cautious of the big investment required to launch a successful web presence. A new cost-effective and time-saving service enables companies to fast track their strategic and tactical web initiatives while still actively growing their user base. Unlike past methods of web development, rapid prototyping is a back-to-front development process that allows the product user interface to be fully designed before writing any code.

Rapid Web Prototyping is changing the process of web development and design. By designing the user interface first and making it extremely clear, developers are able to write the supporting code using the integrated screenshots as guides, thus, in most cases, avoiding written technical specs entirely. This is not to say that technical specs are not required for some complex functional architecture but rather that the development process no longer needs to be based entirely on a written specification document.

Reducing the requirement for a functional spec in preference to creating the user interface has advantages for both technical and business teams. Customer-facing teams can begin user testing before coding begins, reducing the risk of developing functionality that customers will resist or ignore. In both consumer and B2B web applications, having a visual reference for the exact user experience is a preferable investment of time over developing a text or matrix-only technical spec.

The intensely visual nature of the web means that functional specs are generally a waste of everyone's efforts. They cost time and offer no guarantees that the presentation of functional elements will be interpreted correctly. The problem is that simply writing down a technical process does not ensure agreement about the tool’s user experience. Using the complete visual interfaces and screenshots will help get everyone on the same page, literally.

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Do new Web tools spell doom for the browser?

As the static Web gives way to rich Internet applications, client software must continue to adapt and evolve.

Since its inception, the Web has been synonymous with the browser. Pundits hailed NCSA Mosaic as "the killer app of the Internet" in 1993, and today's browsers share an unbroken lineage from that humble beginning.

Today's Web sites are another matter, however. Gone are the static pages and limited graphics of 15 years ago. In their place are lush, highly interactive experiences, as visually rich as any desktop application. The Web has become the preferred platform for enterprise application delivery, to say nothing of online entertainment and social software. In response, new kinds of online experiences have begun to emerge, challenging old notions of what it means to browse the Web.

Take Twhirl, a desktop client for the Twitter online service. Double-click its icon, and the application launches in seconds. Its window is small and stylized, with an attractive, irregular border and configurable color schemes. What few controls it has are convenient and easy to use. It's sleek, fast and unobtrusive. In short, it's everything that navigating to the Twitter Web site with a browser is not.

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Oracle president Charles Phillips: Evangelising Enterprise 2.0

Oracle is setting up a dedicated Web 2.0 organisation, although president Charles Phillips admits there is still confusion in the market about the nature of Enterprise 2.0. So what is Phillips' Enterprise 2.0 pitch?

With all the noise surrounding Enterprise 2.0, Oracle is putting its money where its corporate mouth is and setting up a dedicated Web 2.0 organisation to evangelise to CIOs worldwide.

It's partly a response to confusion in the market about what Web 2.0 implies. Oracle president Charles Phillips revealed in London last week that he's been meeting a lot more CIOs than he has in the past but has found that there are varying levels of understanding.

“Every company has similar issues,” he said. “They are struggling to get to simplified computing environments. But in Europe they are not as far along the Enterprise 2.0 curve as they are in the US. Companies are building an architecture that is open and expandible and it's that architecture that most large organisations are evolving to.

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Rich Web development: Is the browser doomed?

The Web is evolving into a full-fledged app-delivery platform, calling into question the browser's ability to fulfill the needs of today's rich Internet apps

Since its inception, the Web has been synonymous with the browser. Pundits hailed NCSA Mosaic as "the killer app of the Internet" in 1993, and today's browsers share an unbroken lineage from that humble beginning.

Today's Web sites are another matter, however. Gone are the static pages and limited graphics of 15 years ago. In their place are lush, highly interactive experiences, as visually rich as any desktop application. The Web has become the preferred platform for enterprise application delivery, to say nothing of online entertainment and social software. In response, new kinds of online experiences have begun to emerge, challenging old notions of what it means to browse the Web.

Take Twhirl, a desktop client for the Twitter online service. Double-click its icon and the application launches in seconds. Its window is small and stylized, with an attractive, irregular border and configurable color schemes. What few controls it has are convenient and easy to use. It's sleek, fast, and unobtrusive. In short, it's everything that navigating to the Twitter Web site with a browser is not.

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10 Things to know about Web Design

1. Provide Samples of Your Preferences Send your designer several links or samples demonstrating what you like and what you don't. This will help articulate your expectations in regards to quality, layout, and the graphics of the finished product.
2. Always use Analytics Web analytics help improve your web site's audience response as it can provide you with valuable information on what content is working on your site. Google Analytics and unique 800#s are two of the simplest.
3. Designers VS. Programmer Many companies will have a different person for each function. Ask to see live examples of both design and programming skills especially when designing a more complex website.
4. Plan for modifications Businesses change so prepare for the future. When paying for a website, make sure it comes with a content management system, so you can easily change the text by yourself when updates are needed and ask for raw files of any graphics.
5. Hosting should be easy The vast majority of the time, it is best to use a third party web-hosting company to host your website. Ask for 2-3 recommendations from your web designer. You should expect and require a guaranteed 99% uptime.
6. E-commerce and shopping cart functions can be bought off-the-shelf for simple products or custom designed for more complex transactions. Most reputable companies charge a monthly fee for these services.
7. Pricing The price you pay depends mainly on the complexity of the site and the number of pages of content you require. Some basic guidelines: A simple website with around 4-6 pages of content should run around $400-900 for a web template (again, make sure you have access to a tool to make text changes on your own). For something a bit more customized, expect to pay around $800-3,000 depending, on, again, the complexity and number of pages. Sites with an especially complex functionality will usually be billed based on the number of projected development hours. These rates typically range from $40-200/hour. Complex database driven sites can cost approximately $50,000-$100,000.
8. Payment and Timing The typical payment arrangement includes a partial payment up-front with full payment expected upon delivery of the finished product. Always set a delivery time to be included in your proposals. If you don't specify at least a rough estimate of an expected project completion date, many companies will prioritize a client with a firmer deadline.
9. Who writes the text? Most web design companies will not write text. You could write the content yourself or hire a copy expert or marketing consultant to write it for you.
10. Ownership Make sure that you will own what you pay for. A designer may ask for ownership so be prepared to discuss ownership rights with them. It is often less expensive if the designer retains co-ownership (they will be able to use your design as a template in the future). Specify ownership rights in the contract, especially if you expect to be the sole owner of your design.
    

Source : http://www.gather.com/

Points to consider when designing a recruitment website in 2008

As tempting as it may be, our expert advice is not to get carried away with flashy, superficial gimmicks. Websites need careful planning and consideration of how they will be used to be effective. Here are some points to consider:

Adele Poole at Hotlizard believes that creating an effective web site presence in 2008 is the sum of many parts. She says: “Three to four years ago clients and suppliers would be focused on the creative design and/or functionality requirements but now it is imperative to focus more holistically on what will deliver. It is really about focussing on your target audience and looking at what traffic and results you are looking to achieve, so creating the basic framework for optimisation and accessibility is paramount and ensuring that this matches with the focus, theme and marketing message of the site.”

Kelvin Newman, Natural & Social Search Manager at Site Visibility Ltd advises very structured pages for easy jobsearching. He says: “I don’t think I’ve ever had a short job title in my whole career; and I’m not alone, it’s worth remembering when structuring your site. The search engines and candidates love ultra targeted pages, don’t just have a page just for management positions have one for senior management roles, trainee managers and any other way you divide up your sector. It helps visitors to your sites find exactly what they are looking for and at the same time helps you capturing the valuable ‘long tail’ search engine traffic.” He also suggests what to avoid: “Despite being the world biggest search engine Google still hasn’t worked out how to use the on site search tools on your job board.

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Why Web design is an IT-marketing tug-of-war

The use of search engines as a tool to leverage Canadian businesses could certainly be higher, agreed the panelists at a discussion on the future of search engine marketing at the Massive Technology Show in Toronto on Wednesday.

The use of search engines as a tool to leverage Canadian businesses could certainly be higher, agreed the panelists at a discussion on the future of search engine marketing at the Massive Technology Show in Toronto on Wednesday.

Part of that problem is the lack of education around the benefits of search engine marketing, especially among the small and medium-sized businesses, said Martin Byrne, national director of search marketing with Yahoo! Canada.

That lack of understanding around the approach likely stems from not being able to parse the results and visualize the advantages. Another panelist, Chewy Trewhella, customer solutions engineer with Google Inc., said the company recently launched analysis tools to help businesses measure the return on investment, and in turn drive that much-needed understanding.

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Professional Web 2.0 Design style makes your website perfect

Professional Web 2.0 Design style makes your website perfect

As we all know that creative website designing arena increases rapidly, the competition between affordable web design professionals gets enormously. Thus they are putting their total effort or you can say entirely strength into their designed websites, that these websites can easily catch the concentration of the market audience.

Nowadays web designers are vastly using web 2.0 design style due to various logical reasons. Previously web designers depending on web 1.0 method and nowadays those site are get ranked into almost all search engines and thus they receive popularity too. But what about those new site who are not reputed as them? The only way to get noticed by their viewers is their professional looks.

People are thinking about effective contents but recently an exclusive small business web design can boost your traffic ranking with its simplicity, matured looks, elegant features that delivers more with less do. Here we discussed some elegancies of web 2 styles over previous web designing styles.

Exclusive Logos

Recently logos play a different role in traffic ranking of your. If you have exclusive logos at your website and your site known by search engines then traffic gaining chances are automatically increased for your site. A web 2 design style provides fabulous logos that have been larger in size and tinted, effectual visual impact, integrating the trade name icon, attitude and ready to grab the concentration of viewers.

Superior Text Fonts

A web 2 design allows you to highlight the important parts of your web content by frequently putting bigger text fonts into the content. This is also a recognized way to put visual effect into your content to catch the viewer attention when they traveling through your site.

Image Representation

Some times graphical representation is much worthy for any site. People are just using normal texts to optimize them but this modern web designing style offers you bold text introduction into the background of that image to make more significance to the look. It conveys an effectual message for that site and swells the pleasant feelings of any visitors.

Innermost Layout and Pretty Icons

Innermost layout or you can say central outline and nice looking icons are added features of this professional web design style. Using web 2 design it is really easy to maintain the Innermost layout of any website. These days appealing icons are very common requirement of elegant web designing due to catching relevant internet surfer attention.

Lesser Columns

Previously it is viewed that sometimes 4 to 6 columns are used for different purpose or needs of any sites. But recently, using web 2 designs, you can easily construct your web page within 2 to 3 fulfilling all above requirements. With lesser columns; you can display your information more clearly in a smart manner.

Reflections and Effects

Sometimes a website looks cleaner with its own reflections, it looks effortless and rich at a simple go. In web 2 designing you can increase the clarity or qualitative feelings of your website by using the inner-glows, drop shadows, infusing color reflections, 3D affects etc.

Highlighting Top Importance

In a web 2 design, you are able to highlight top important parts or you can say most important sections by using fluorescent color blocks. It can easily put viewers into your targeted portion of your web page.

Clear Navigations

Navigation part of your website should be very clear from the visitor point of view. Clearly defined big and bold links with specified color and also tone and shape separately from the other part of your web page content will be the out look for all web designers.

Effortlessness

The one and only purpose in choosing web 2 design style is to design any website effortlessly. This design style provides us superb quality web templates with sophisticated simplicity. An eye soothing clean and simple design will easily catch any visitor concentration apart from other web templates.

When first impression will created for a particular website, viewers are automatically read all sections properly and try to rest on them for long time. Thus for fulfilling the business goal, a simple accessible web design can increase the traffic through a worthy manner.

Infuse Brilliant Colors

Infusing colors into a site is always a difficult task for any web designer colors plays a vital role in snatching the attention of any kind of web traffic. In this designing style web designers are playing with sophisticated influential colors to get noticed by their targeted traffic. In recent days infused colors can make a tremendous impact apart from using any kind of solid web content.

Source : http://www.promotionworld.com/

How to Build a Web Store

Many people think that it is easy to build a web store and launch their business online. After all, all there is to it is just getting a good idea, buying a domain name and getting a web designing and hosting firm to do the rest.

However, it is much easier said than done and it takes a lot of hard work, time and effort in order to build a web store that proves to be a success. Given below are a few tips that should help you in creating a web store that has a chance at making profit.

1. Create an extensively thought of and detailed business plan.
2. Once you have decided the product that you want to sell, make sure that you also have more than one supplier who gives you good prices and good delivery times.
3. Next, choose a good domain name for your site. Try to keep it relevant to what you are selling and as simple and easy to spell as possible.
4. Search extensively for the most used keywords when people are looking for products that you are selling. Try to incorporate the most relevant one into your url if possible, and use the others extensively on your web site in order to optimize it for search engine result pages.
5. Next comes getting a good host and designer for your web page. It is a good idea to contract a single company for designing, hosting and maintaining your website, since it will save you from a lot of hassle when your web site goes through the initial hiccups.
6. While your web site is being designed, keep the following things in mind. The site should be as professional looking as possible. It should not take a lot of time to open on a client computer. At the same time, it should not be dull or boring looking. The web site should be enriched with keywords and SEOs right at the inception. All the legal stuff regarding the privacy policy and the terms and conditions of sales, shipments and returns should be well taken care of before you launch your site online.
7. A good web designing firm should be able to develop content for your website that is rich with SEOs. At the same time, your web hosting and designing firm should be able to put in the appropriate meta tags and keywords on your web site to make it search engine friendly.
8. However, just making your website search engine friendly is not enough, and you will also need to post as many back links to your websites on forums, blogs and other related web sites as possible. Post your url in as many directories as possible.
9. Advertising with the relevant directories and websites should also lead to generation of some relevant traffic to your web site.
   

Taking care of the above points while you build your web store should definitely increase its chances of being successful. Remember that getting the right help and tools while you build your web store is extremely important for creating a profit making web store.

Source : http://www.huliq.com/

Adobe Opens Flash To More Development Across Devices

Adobe's Flash player is a common feature on desktop computers. Adobe hopes to make this the case on mobile phones, set-top boxes, and anything else that can run Flash formatted files (SWF< FLV/FL4) and content by opening up the application programming interface (API) and licensing to promote development.

The Open Screen Project

Dubbed the Open Screen Project, Adobe's goal is to have Flash become the write once/run everywhere type of environment for games and other applications.

In the case of mobile devices, Flash has not see the kinds of inroads that has made it a successful development platform for rich media and content-heavy applications. The Open Screen Project is an effort by Adobe and several other manufacturers to increase the presence of Flash-based software and its use.

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Web Page Layouts Shouldn't Use Tables

I've been focusing on CSS positioning and creating tableless (and frameless) layouts, but maybe you don't really understand why you want to do this. After all, there are still people using browsers that don't reliably support these types of layouts. Plus, they can be harder to build, and most HTML editors don't yet support them. But there are still many reasons to learn how to write CSS layouts.

Valid XHTML

This is the number one reason to use CSS for layout. If you use tables for layout, you are writing invalid XHTML. Tables are only valid in XHTML when displaying tabular data. For example, the data in the accompanying image is something that might be created from a spreadsheet or database. It is "tabular data" and should be displayed in a table.

Using CSS to position and layout your pages is the only valid way to get the designs you used to use tables to create.

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Microsoft releases new version of Web design tools

May 1, 2008 (IDG News Service) Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a version of its tool set for Web and multimedia designers that includes the first native support for its Silverlight technology across all of the products in the suite.

Expression Studio 2 includes five products: Expression Web for Web design; Expression Blend for multimedia and 3-D design; Expression Design for graphic design; Expression Media for storing and sharing multimedia assets; and Expression Encoder for video encoding. The new release marks the first time that Encoder is in the suite as a full-fledged product, said Wayne Smith, Microsoft group product manager for Expression Studio.

In the new release, all of the products now have support for Silverlight, Microsoft's multimedia runtime for running live and streaming video on the Web. Previously, only Expression Web had support for Silverlight, but it was very limited, Smith said.

In a sense, this is the first full release of Expression, as Silverlight is a key component of Microsoft's design strategy and overall plan to compete with Adobe Systems' Creative Suite and its Flash technology. Expression Studio has only been in the market about a year, but Smith said that the company is not sharing customer-adoption information. However, he said that judging from the interest in preview versions of Expression Studio 2, the inclusion of Silverlight should increase sales of Expression overall.

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