There reaches a stage in many web site owner’s lives where their web design skill set is not at the level they need to fulfill their vision. As a frustrated web designer myself (i.e. I enjoy coding but I have zero eye for design) I have often thought about paying some one else to set up a site for me to get the ball rolling. But with every man and his uncle claiming to be able to design a website, what questions should you be asking a prospective designer; be it a friend, someone recommended to you or someone who advertises their services?

“Have you any examples of previous work and what was your contribution to that project?”
Never take anyone on blind, and nail them down as to what they actually did on that site. For big projects they may simply have added a new logo or added some code, but they put the entire site in their portfolio.

“Will you provide a content management system so I can add new content myself easily?”
You do not want to be in a position where every time you need to make the smallest change to your web site’s copy you have to contact them, and probably be charged for the change. Make sure they empower you through the addition of a content management system such as Wordpress.

“Will you set up the web hosting account and register the domain name in my name and address?”
This is a massive point and one you must ask. We get a lot of issues at 123-reg where a designer has bought the hosting and registered the domain using their own details and further down the line the site ’owner’ finds out they in fact are not the legal owner, the designer is.

“Will you give me all the source files?”
A web page is made up of multiple components and source files, e.g. logo, picture, CSS file(s), HTML, PHP etc which in a couple of years you may want to edit or change completely. If you don’t have the files that make up your site and don’t want to use the same designer again, you’ll have to start from scratch!

Read the rest of this entry »

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I logged into my RSS reader as usual today to check up on the latest industry news and information. And it’s turned out to be one of those days where every site is reporting the same story.

Google is launching its own web browser, to be called Google Chrome.

You can read about it on the BBC, the Register, TechCrunch and Lifehacker. Or you can go straight to the horse’s mouth, and get the official version from the Google blog.

The company let the cat out of the bag earlier than intended when it mailed a comic book to key websites and bloggers. It looks like Google Blogscoped was first with the news.

If you want to check out Google Chrome for yourself, it’s being released in beta (for Windows only) sometime today. I guess it could appear online any time after lunchtime here in the UK. Update: Google Chrome can now be downloaded from www.google.com/chrome.

Main features

Everyone’s got their own take on this, but from a quick flick through the comic, plus a skim of the other websites out there, these seem to be the new browser’s main features: Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week we grabbed the camera, balanced it on a chair (really) and filmed a couple more short videos for our series. If you haven’t caught them before, the idea is to give you an introduction to a subject.

In this one, Matt talks about how to build a horizontal navigation bar for your website using lists and CSS instead of tables. Take a look and please leave a comment to let us know what you think. There are some links to more information beneath the video too.

[Edit: Its been brought to my attention I am describing the <li> tag as a "line". <li> in fact means 'list item', oh well.... (Matt)]

The HTML described above:
Create a div area for your navigation and type in your content

<div id = "nav">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Blog</li>
<li>Store</li>
</ul>
</div>

In your CSS file create the rules for the “nav” div <li> tags

#nav li {
text-decoration: none;
display: inline;
margin: 5pt;
padding: 1pt;
text-align: center;
color; blue;
background-color: green;
}

#nav li a:hover {
background-color: red;
}
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The Rissington Podcast bills itself as a “web-geek version of Gardeners’ Question Time”. This isn’t a genre I’ve stumbled upon before, but presenters Jon Hicks (who, incidentally, designed the Firefox logo) and John Oxton make for an entertaining double act. They deliver quality internet and web design tips alongside irreverent banter and jokes (and some strong language).

It’s a must-hear for our in-house design team. The latest episode covers everything from comics, Lego and mojitos to rock music, telecommuting and Bounty chocolate bars … plus lots of CSS, HTML, design and accessibility tips, of course.

Much of the show is based around listener questions, so if you have a burning query about web design, code or even cheese (yes, really), you can fire a quick email off to the duo and wait to see if they answer your question.

One of the items this week was about choosing web hosting and a domain name registrar. As you can see from their homepage, they mentioned 123-reg during the piece. (Thanks for the plug lads, but next time could you remember it’s 123-reg, not reg-123?)

Anyway, if you haven’t come across them before, you can have a listen now.

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Custom search on your site
If you have a content heavy site with lots of pages and regularly updated content, keeping it all easily accessible to site visitors is tricky. Rather than having to code your own site tool, simply copy and paste Google’s custom search code in to your site and you will magically have a site search tool.
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

HTML editor
If you are ready to upgrade from WYSIWYG template software and you are frustrated with notepad, a great free HTML editor with built in FTP is coffeecup.com’s HTML editor 9.http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/.

Free images
Creating an interesting site with no pictures can be a pain, but it is not always worth shelling out for the license to use a picture. A great source of free pictures can be found through Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources

CSS templates
Just because I know how to use a paint brush doesn’t mean I can paint, and that’s true of graphical web design tools. Rather than hacking away for hours to make your website look presentable, leave it to the pro’s and download a free template that is ready to go.
http://www.opendesigns.org/
http://www.freecsstemplates.org/

Click on “Read the rest of this entry »” for links to:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Just a quick post for those of you grappling with coding a website

I have some basic HTML knowledge from one of my modules at university, for example I can start a new paragraph with p, I can make a font bold with strong, I can add different sized headings with h1, h2 etc, but I struggle if I want a hand coded page to look like anything other than it just came out of the mid 90’s.

Over the years this has really frustrated me but I have never done anything about it, until now. A couple of weeks ago I finally started to look for a guide to HTML for beginners and after reading a lot of good reviews for one in particular took the plunge with Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS by Ian Lloyd.

If you are in the same boat as me or you are just starting out, I would definitely recommed you read this book and follow the excercises. It presumes no prior knowledge but also doesn’t treat you like an idiot and delves right in to teaching you HTML and using CSS

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“Your business needs a website.”

In the past, perhaps this statement wasn’t true for every new company. But these days, virtually all start-ups should have an online presence from day one. There are plenty of things your business can do with a website: advertise your services, sell products online or communicate with existing customers. You can even send people there for more information and use it to gather sales leads.

No grand plans for your site? It’s worth creating one anyway, just so something meaningful appears when a prospective customer types your company name into Google.

Where to start?

As tempting as it may be, don’t rush in headlong and start building your site. You’ll end up wasting time and money. Instead, plan carefully, thinking about:

• What your site is for
  Come up with some clear objectives. Do you want to sell your products and services online? Will the site provide help for existing customers? Is it going to be a simple ‘shop window’ to provide you with warm sales leads? Read the rest of this entry »

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I have found that a good place to look for inspiration for topics to write about on this blog is Yahoo! Answers. Here I can see common questions people are asking along with a lot of the misused terminology which helps when you work in an industry and you presume everyone has the same level of understanding.

Some of the most frequent questions I see are “How do I advertise adsense?” and “How do I sell advertising on my website?” It’s clear what they are trying to ask, but the questions themselves show that not everyone is sure about the options available to make money through advertising on small to medium sized websites.

A lot of site owners think they need to contact advertisers to sell them space on their site. Only the largest of sites ever do this, employing dedicated sales teams, and even in these cases, most use a 3rd party to do it for them. To carry adverts on your site, you don’t need to have any contact at all with the advertisers.

Sign up with an affiliate network
Affiliate networks acts as a middle man between advertisers and website owners. All the major online companies are involved with at least one affiliate network and by becoming an affiliate you choose which company’s banners and text links you want to display on your site and if one of your visitors clicks on an advert and then buys something from the site, you earn commission for that referral.

Signing up to a network is free, and is a great way to gets adverts targeted to your site user’s interests. For example, if you run a site that publishes hotel reviews, you can carry banners that advertise hotels.com and so on.

Affiliate networks include:
Commission Junction
TradeDoubler
Buy.at

(Our affiliate manager would kill me if I didn’t mention 123-reg’s affiliate program here. To find out more and to sign up go to our 123-reg affiliate sign up page)

Amazon Associates
Amazon pretty much invented the affiliate channel, and their in-house affiliate program still leads the way in terms of customisation and targeting options. It works in exactly the same way as described above, however, it is worth a mention on its own thanks to the depth of products available for you to advertise.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/

Google AdSense
Google allows website owners to display Google adverts on their website, with the option to show text adverts, traditional banners, or video adverts.

The adverts are “contextual” which means the ads shown depend on the content of your website i.e. Google literally reads your website, and then decides which adverts are most appropriate. You earn money for every click or page impression depending on which option you have gone for.
http://adsense.google.com

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)
This is Yahoo’s equivalent to AdSense and works in almost exactly the same way. The advantage of carrying both AdSense and YPN adverts at the start is you can identify which network is carrying the most profitable ads for your site.
http://publisher.yahoo.com/

Terminology:
AdSense
This is simply the name of the service Google runs for website owners to sign up to in order to carry Google adverts on their website.

AdWords
Again, just a name of a service, in this case where advertisers go to write and publish their adverts

Contextual advertising
Ads are selected and shown automatically based on the content of the website. Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network use this method, and Amazon offers it as an option.

CPM: Cost per thousand impressions
How much an advertiser pays for their advert to be displayed a thousand times

CPC: Cost per click
How much an advertiser pays each time their advert is clicked on

EPC: Earning per click
This shows how much on average an advertiser pays out to their affiliates per click. Affiliate networks use this to show an advertiser’s performance to help you pick which ones to use.

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The BBC’s taken the wraps off its redesigned homepage and made it available to the general public. It hasn’t replaced their existing homepage yet, but you can see the beta version here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/ 

We’re not usually in the business of linking to websites just because they’ve had a redesign, but every now and then a site makes some changes and it’s worth taking notice.

The BBC’s site is one of those. Rightly or wrongly, it’s a real trendsetter online. Where the BBC goes, others tend to follow. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard “it’s how the BBC does it” used as justification for making a change to a website.

We’ve had a quick look in the office and a few things jumped out at us:

• The width of the page has grown, so now it doesn’t look like it’ll fit into a web browser window if your screen resolution is 800*600. If this change goes ahead, expect to see lots more sites dropping support for 800*600 screens too.
• The colours of the page change when you click the links under the main homepage image. It’s a bit disconcerting at first and I can’t quite see the point of it.
• You can personalise the homepage to see the content you’re most interested in. Try dragging and dropping the the white boxes or clicking ‘Customise homepage’ at the top to find more content.

As well as trying out the page, you can read a blog post from the BBC’s Acting Head of User Experience explaining the rationale behind the redesign.

What do you think of the page? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Eye tracking’s been a trendy way of testing the usability of websites for a couple of years. It lets you see how people view a web page - where they look and for how long.

I’ve just stumbled across a great list of ‘actionable lessons’ from eye tracking studies. It’s a set of 23 practical points that you can use to improve the design of your website.

Some of the ideas just seem like commonsense, but the list is a good summary of ways to make a website better. Have a read now.

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