Build A Website But Watchout Bandwidth?
When we learn to build or create our website, often there is warning that bandwidth (or the lack of) can break your website. This is true of course but again we need to look at the context for which it is given.
In short, there are different strokes for different folks.
If building websites can be likened to designing and building home improvements, then bandwidth is like opening your doors to visitors after the home improvements...except you cannot control the number of visitors coming to your home!
It is all well and good that we can use open source content management system to build our websites and the cost of hosting is reasonably fair. This is especially suitable for professional firms like lawyers. However is there enough bandwidth when our web home opens?
You can cleverly design your modest linked (web) home complete with (CMS) features/facilities like a barbeque section, an area for table-tennis, a small jacuzzi and a comfortable lounge area for cozy chit chats.
You invite your guests expecting 10 people but 200 people showed up at the door! This is a bandwidth nightmare.
Bandwidth should however be looked at under different context. To get a ball park feel for bandwidth, try this.
A page (all text) like this is about 10k. Do you think 100 pages of this page type is enough to define your site for (at least) initial period? That means your site totals about 1mb (100pages of 10K each).
How many Gbs do you have in a month? Say 3gb per month. Take this number divide by 30. You have 100mb bandwidth per day.
Assuming each visitor visits every page on your site. This means your web home can take about 100 visitors (100mb bandwidth divide by website 1mb) per day.
If each visitor only visits half number of (50) pages, then you can take up to 200 daily visitors. If each visitor only checkout 10 pages, then your site can take up to 1000 visitors per day.
1000 visitors a day and each views 10 pages is actually a very high number. It means there are 10,000 page views daily or 3.65million page views a year. As an indication, Malaysia Central, the leading online information resource relied upon by tens of thousands Malaysians daily, recorded over 20 million page views last year.
In reality, most personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month.
Just be a bit more careful if we have image files as this takes up more bytes.
James NK Khoo is the owner of Qwenkay Information http://www.qwenkay.com a company providing practical solutions and support for content management systems software and accounting software. Contact james@qwenkay.com
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Web Design Essentials
Websites are created for many different purposes, such as, selling products, offering services, or sharing information. The one thing all websites have in common is the need to attract visitors and keep them coming back on a regular basis. In order to accomplish this you need to have a web design that is pleasing to look at, easy to navigate, and offers good content.
The first thing any visitor to your website sees is the home page. This should be your design starting point. You can expand on it to create other pages, but you always want to keep the design consistent from page to page. In other words if your home page is black and gold, you don't want to do your other pages in red and green. Any graphics you use specifically for your site should blend with the color choices you make. Pleasant colors and graphics will help make your site memorable.
Easy Navigation is a must. Going from page to page needs to be as easy as possible. Each page should have a link back to the home page. Visitors want to know where they are and how to get back to where they were without having to use the back button. Nine times out of ten they will close the page rather than continuously using the back button to try and find their way back.
Content is the backbone of any website. Spelling and grammatical errors do not look professional. Have someone proofread all content before you add it. Offer content that is specific to the theme of your site. If I do a search for jungle animals and find your site, then I don't want to find content that mostly pertains to the Solar System.
Web design is ninety-five percent common sense. You know what you like to see on other websites. Be sure and use that same criteria when creating a website.
Stacy Hensley
Jaks Creations-Web Design and Graphics
The Truth About How to Make Websites More Attractive
In the physical world you can easily sell a product by your interacting behavior and your marketing tactics. But in the e-world where there is no face to face interaction and all marketing is totally a game of your site's interaction with your visitor which may desperate them to turn into your healthy customers. While designing your site you must know who your target people are and what are their needs and will your website turns to be beneficial for them. A website's form and content is what will determine if a visitor will stay just a visitor or turn into your next customer. Today we will discuss how to accomplish the later.
To succeed at your online business (whether you are selling your own product/service or are selling for other merchants as an affiliate), you need a Web site created just for that - a simple, focused site. One that is easy to build, maintenance-free, low cost, credible, and a powerful traffic-builder and customer-converter.
Having the right tool and the right product alone doesn’t insure the success of your website. There are many factors to be considered while designing a site. Unfortunately, most of these are easily ignored by Internet business owners.
Build It for Speed
It's a fact of modern life - people are in a hurry. This means that you have between 10 and 30 seconds to capture your potential customer's attention. To minimize your load time, keep graphics small. Compress them where possible. Use flashy technology (JavaScript, Flash, Streaming Audio/Video, animation) sparingly and only if it is important to your presentation.
Target your Market
Know who your market is and make certain that your site caters to their needs. It is critical that your site reflect the values of your potential customers. Is your market mostly business professionals? If so, the site must be clean and professional. Is your product aimed mostly a teenagers and young adults? Then your site could be more informal and relaxed. The key here is to know your market and build the site to their preferences.
Focus the Site
Make certain your web site is focused on the goal, selling your product or service. A site offering many unrelated products is not necessarily unfocused, but this is often the case. If your business does offer many products, dedicate a unique page for each instead of trying to sell them all from one page. Selling all products on the same page may annoy your customers and he may never comeback to your site.
Credibility Is Crucial
The most professionally designed site won't sell if your customers don't believe in you. A clear privacy statement is one way to build your credibility. Provide a prominent link to your privacy statement from every page on the site as well as from any location that you are asking your visitors for personal information. Provide legitimate contact information on line. Make them sure that their information is not disclose to anybody at any price.
Navigation should be simple
Make site navigation easy and intuitive. Your all pages should reachable within three clicks. Simple and smooth navigation adds to the convenience of the visitors. Add powerful search and catalog features. Many times a lot of visitors do not have the patience to navigate through the whole website to find what they are looking for. A simple navigation may hold your site's visitor for a long time and may create a chance of some more bucks for you to enjoy your weekend.
Consistency is the key
Make sure the site is consistent in look, feel and design. Nothing is more jarring and disturbing to a customer than feeling as if they have just gone to another site. Keep colors and themes constant throughout the site.
Make your site interactive and personalized
Make your website interactive. Add feedback forms as well as email forms that allow your prospective customers to ask you any questions they might have pertaining to a product. Personalization of your website is another key element that can lead to customer delight and can increase your sales. Personalization technology provides you the analytic tools to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the customer is buying online. It would give you an idea of what products to cross-sell and up-sell. For example, when a person buys a CD player, a disc cleaner can also be offered.
Content is King
Good content sells a product. Ask yourself the following questions. Does your copy convey the message you wish to get across to your visitors? Is it compelling? Does it lead your visitor through the sales process? Have others review, critique and edit your copy to insure it is delivering the intended message. Always double check your spelling and grammar. Well its contents that talks with your customers so make it to the point.
These eight, simple rules will go a long way toward the improvement of your website and most importantly, turn visitors into loyal customers.
Raamakant S. is Author of "The e Success Code". Discover the Newest, Hottest, Most Cutting-Edge Internet Marketing Strategies You Can Use To Earn a Fortune with Little or No Effort! If you want to earn a real Income from the Internet, read the rest in this book, visit: http://www.theesuccesscode.com
The Top 20 Things You Can Do to Make Your Website Accessible
In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed by Congress. The law was designed to protect people with disabilities from being discriminated against, because of a physical or mental disability. The act was put into place to help guarantee equal opportunity for people with disabilities in any public area – and it covers regulations for employment, transportation, state and local government services, telecommunications, etc.
But what about your Website? Have you done all you can, to assure that your Website is accessible?
Here is a checklist you can use, to determine if your Website is as accessible as it could be. (Note: These actions vary from fairly simple to complex, and this list is not meant to be considered the only options or actions you can take to make your site more accessible).
1. Have you provided a text equivalent for every non-text element on your site? Non-text elements include: images, graphical representations of text (including symbols), animations (including animated GIFs), image map areas, programmatic objects and applets, ASCII art, scripts, spacers, frames, images used for list bullets, buttons, sounds (whether automatic or by user interaction), video, audio tracks of video and stand alone audio files.
2. Have you ensured that any information conveyed with color is also available without it?
3. Are changes in the natural language of all pages on your Website and any text equivalents (such as captions) clearly identified?
4. Are all documents on your Website organized so that they can be read without style sheets?
5. Do you update all equivalents for dynamic content every time you update the dynamic content itself?
6. Have you eliminated any special effects from your Website that cause the screen to flicker?
7. Are you using clear and simple language in all content placed on your Website?
8. If you use images and image maps, are you providing redundant text links for each active region of your server-side image map?
9. If you use images and image maps, are you providing client-side image maps (instead of server-side) whenever possible?
10. When using data tables, have you identified the row and column headers?
11. If you use frames, have you titled each frame to make it easier for users to navigate your site and identify the frames?
12. When using applets and scripts, have you made sure that the pages are useable when all programmatic objects are not supported, or turned off? (If that isn’t possible, have you provided the information on an alternative accessible page?)
13. When using multimedia, have you provided an auditory description of the most important visual information on a multimedia presentation?
14. When using any time-based multimedia presentation (such as a movie or animation), have you synchronized the equivalent alternatives such as captions or auditory descriptions of the visual track to the presentation?
15. Have you made sure that the background and foreground colors on your Website have enough contrast so that when someone with a color deficit looks at it (or your Website is viewed with a black and white screen) they can still read it clearly?
16. Have you clearly identified the target of each link?
17. Have you provided a place to get information about your site, either through the use of a site map, or table of contents?
18. Have you clearly identified the primary language of your Website?
19. Have you provided information so that users can choose how they want to receive documents – by content type, language, etc.)?
20. Have you provided summaries for all the tables on your site?
Here are some simple steps you can take that don’t require much work or technical ability:
Graphs and Charts:
When working with graphs and charts, make sure you’ve provided enough information that any graphs or charts aren’t needed to understand the article, but are just supplements to it. You can also use the “alt” tag to provide information about them.
Image Maps:
Provide alternative text anywhere that the user must click on your Website, so that if they’ve turned off the graphics, or can’t view them, they can still understand what your site is about and can navigate around it. (Note: This method still doesn’t work with all browsers, but at least you’re trying!)
Tables:
When working with headers, use the “th” attribute so that users with a visual impairment can hear the table headers from their screen reader.
Hypertext Links:
When using hypertext links, use text that will make sense when a screen reader reads allowed to a visually impaired user.
Bold Face
When writing your sales copy, use the “em” instead of the “b” tag. By using the emphasis tag, a screen reader’s tone will change, adding emphasis to what is on the screen. If you use a bold tag, the screen reader can’t recognize the change, and all of the copy will be read in the same tone.
Multimedia (Video, applets, and Plug-ins):
Try and provide alternatives when using multimedia. If you’re using streaming video for example, which has sounds or dialog, your two best options would be to either provide closed-captioning for the video or provide a text version for the dialogue. (This actually helps non-visually impaired viewers who have dial up instead of DSL, or for the times when the amateur video sound quality is poor.
When you use applets or plug-ins, look for alternative methods of presenting information such as text links, without relying on the applet or plug-in for navigating around your Webpages.
So, how do you know if your Website meets the accessibility guidelines?
You can use the Bobby Program. “Bobby” is a free Java-based program that searches through your Website to check its accessibility. Although it can’t analyze page content, it can analyze coding and the readability of your Website.
If you’re interested in finding out how accessible your Website is already considered to be, you can go to: http://webxact.watchfire.com/
WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.
If you’re interested in learning more about web accessibility, or you know someone who needs information or access to resources for a disability, you can get more information from the following links:
http://www.gatech.edu/accessibility/
AWARE: Accessible Web Authoring Resources & Education
http://www.awarecenter.org/
Bobby Version 3.2
http://www.cast.org/bobby/
CSS2 Tutorial
http://www.dynamicdeezign.com/css/introduction.html
IBM Accessibility Center
http://www-3.ibm.com/able/
IBM: Java Accessibility
http://www-3.ibm.com/able/accessjava.html
Is YOUR Website Accessible?
http://www.janejarrow.com/tv_station/webaccess/
WAI (Website Accessibility Initiative) http://www.w3.org/WAI/
Rachael Willis is the webmaster of http://www.infoproductscentral.com and the publisher of "The Genuine Truth" newsletter. "The Genuine Truth" newsletter is full of freebies,articles and reviews of the hottest products. If you are tired of spending money on bad products then you need "The Genuine Truth". Join us today and let me spend my money to test these products so you don't have to.
The real need for original content
within websites.
With the new google jagger update. The one thing main key theme that has come to the surface is the need for a good span of original content within websites.
Sure I use within my website, free content articles, the good ones that deserve and are legally allowed to be reused. I write a lot of content as well for others to use within their websites, good clear content with a point, that contains information that is of a real value to others, with my url signature at the end. A great form of advertising to get others to my website.
But with the new jagger update, more than ever, individual site pages that publish this reuseable material will not be seemingly ranked overall. Not the whole website just the pages that contain this reused material. And I agree this is really fair. But website owners need to be totally aware of this fact.
For far too long reused material has been used for just the reason of google ranking and with a basic, not always though, drive towards google adsense revenue gain. Be aware of this fact, use good free content within your websites when allowed to do so, but use this material in balance with your own original written material as well. As an individual we do not know it all, but as a group we do. This is the idea in principle that I always use on my own website.
Everyone has something good to say, and pieced together, it really has the benefit to making a really exciting and informative website. But always remember to balance your website to reflect both the information provided by yourself and the information provided by others. The search engines want good clean original content, because this is what the users of search engines want as well. And as a website owner you have the sole responsibilty to give your users a website which at it heart really informs and enlightens.
Article Copyright (2006)
Good Web Design
Too many web designers get confused about what type of site they're creating -- witness the site that was up for a long time . If you're creating a site that's for a media company (movie, music, etc.), fashion company, art school sites where there's no accountability for the bottom line, then it's ok to use "wild and crazy" design techniques. But remember, "It's a temporary thing." This type of design is not supposed to be serious and last forever. Have fun.
But if you want your website to look reasonable and is functional, devote your energies to keyword rich content, site maps, privacy policies and the other standards that seem to be missing from a lot of websites. The things that the Search Engines like to see and will reward with higher rankings. A ‘crawler’ can’t see fancy flash gizmos or premium quality images over 100 kb each.
If you're creating a real web site for a real company, you have to choose a design that's not quite as exciting. Something more responsible and restrained. Something dependable. Something you'd marry
It would have to be to keep it clean and simple. There is nothing worse than a cluttered looking website and there is nothing that will repel visitors more quickly than a slow loading website. Take a look at a few of the ‘TOP’ Internet based company’s websites like Adobe.com. The largest image on their Home page is 6 Kb. There is no Flash, no music. Even Microsoft.com has one small, unobtrusive ‘flash’ component in the bottom left corner and their largest image is 18 Kb.
Many private Internet users are using ‘56kbps dial up modem’ connections (according to research firm Instat-MDR). So, by building a website that is only accessible in a reasonable amount of time to DSL users, you are effectively disqualifying yourself from visits by 80 percent of the people likely to be interested in your product or service. They will not wait.
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.
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. Very often simple designs are the best. For web design source files visit my site http://www.davbindu.com/
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.
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.
Cut down the use of animated gifs - 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.Or design simple icons icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This information is collected from number of sites and modified and reused, I will remain grateful to the respective original authors. Thus it is no way copyrighted and if you want, you can reuse these articles in your newsletter, web site or ebook. You don't need to take my permission for re-publishing these articles, as long as you display the resource box at the end of each article.
Mrs. Vaidehi Ghag is Web Designer in mahar - a unique Industrial online Business Directory.
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