Web Design Company, Hampshire UK

Often, when making a website, it is best to use design influences that exist all around you rather than trying to re-invent the wheel. Over the last year, I have been introduced to many fantastic resources which will help you do just that.

You can also use these resources to see what designers are making now. Letting you know what up-to-date techniques to use and ensuring you are not left behind. I feel that sometimes, the comments that respond to the articles are just as important as the articles themselves, as they may point out shortfalls and mistakes in the article and save you lots of time.

My out and out favourites have t0 be:

tutsplus.com – They have number of sites specialising in web design and development. I especially like PSDTUTS and NETTUTS

csszengarden.com – To see just what can be done with design skill and CSS knowledge, check this out.

smashingmagazine.com – They are focused on design and web-development. Choosing to deliver useful information on the latest trends etc.

It is very important to not just stick to the same resources all of the time. Try finding the latest lists that other designers have put together, detailing their favourite content. A quick search of “most beautiful websites” resulted in finding this

sitesketch101.com/beautiful-websites

My old tutor once told me, “if it is in nature, it will go”. I think you can see that from the image above.

SEO is a sore point for many people. From those who own websites and view the top spot on google with envy, to those whose job it is to compete for that sought after position.

SEO can take a lot of work AND a lot of money to effectively manage, I will give you tips on how to avoid these issues.

The first and most important thing is to incorperate SEO into your site as you build and maintain it, not all at one go at the end. Google seems to take in to account how links are built and in what time frame. You may be penalised if your website goes live and within a week has 1000 backlinks, as this is obviously not organic growth. So it is best to build links in a structured manner.

ONSITE SEO hints and tips:

• Meta Tags

  Not as important as they used to be but still worth using. Work out 5 or 6 words or phrases which you would like to be displayed on google regarding.

• Good Content

As they say, ‘content is king’. Well written, regularly updated content which is written with keywords in mind, WILL improve your search     engine rankings.

• Keywords

A very important part of your SEO campaign. It is best to focus your SEO on 5 or 6 phrases otherwise your online presence may be diluted and you will not compete on any of your keywords.

• Htaccess and Robots.txt

Each search engine has robots who scan the web to find new and updated content. The easier it is for them to find your content, the quicker you will climb up the Google rankings. This is why links are so useful.

• Be Creative

Use your keywords effectively, for example, name your pictures as keywords and try to make use of the H1-H6 tags.

OFFSITE SEO hints and tips:

• Social Bookmarks

Make sure it is easy to bookmark your pages. Create accounts on Facebook, Twitter and any others you may use.

• Directory Submissions

High PR (Page Rank) blogs can really help you to build your online presence, however, it is better to have five PR 5+ links than one hundred  PR 0-1. Knowing this can save you a lot of time and effort.

• Blog Comments

Leaving blog posts on large, relevant blog sites can also help. Make sure they have a high PR.

• Adwords

Adwords provide you with a totally separate avenue of marketing for your site. Here you pay to have your site at the top of Google listings for certain keywords and this

About a year ago I was introduced to an amazing piece of software called firebug. It allows the user to monitor a websites CSS, HTML, DOM, Javascript and other tools. Infact, not only does Firebug do all this, which is a fantastic way to debug a page, it also enables the user to test solutions live within a browser and then get rid of them by refreshing the page.

Among the many features firebug possesses, one of the best is the ‘Net’ tab. It analyses the requests a site makes and works out the ones which take the most time to load. This can help you to speed up your site, which is especially useful when you consider your site may be penalised by the search engines if it takes too long to load.

Overall the Firebug tool is essential (imho) for any web designer.

Joomla is a fantastic framework. It allows the user the flexibility to make use of and manipulate technologies which would otherwise take many months if not years to develop. The reason behind this is that it is open source.

Whilst using Joomla I have come across this nugget of information which allows greater adaptability whilst designing Joomla sites. Sometimes, Joomla extensions are only available as modules, this trick will enable you to use a module in a content position.

Step 1..

Navigate to the module menu and open the module that you would like to display. Click on the ‘position’ textbox and delete the text, now add in your position name, something like ‘mypos’ for example. Make it something memorable. Now save the module. You will now have created a new position name for your module.

Step 2..

Open the article that you would like to display the module in and paste this {loadposition mypos}. This is all you have to write, no other text is necessary. Need any help with this, please let me know.

Whilst using DirectoryPress I ran across a small issue which took an annoyingly large amount of time to resolve. Though these holdups are usual when using new products, I thought it best to let you know. I was unable to find the WordPress post ID in order to use the featured items widget on my home page. I ended up with arbitrary records being displayed, one of which was a menu item!

After looking at a lot of code, I stumbled upon the easiest solution. If you navigate here –>Dashboard–>Posts and then hover over each individual post, the browser will display the post ID at the bottom of the screen. Easy!