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Trying to write the copy for product or service pages can be confusing at times.
You might not always know whether a specific section should be a hard-hitting sales pitch – or simple and direct, something to help your reader navigate through your site. Knowing how to use headlines and body text – and when to ease up on the sales speech – can help you create much more helpful product text.
Many designers believe the only way to reach your goals is to work harder and longer on a given project. This, to many, is paramount although to others simply working “smarter” usually has a more satisfying result in the long run, whether this is simply choosing the right tools or the best plan of attack when looking at a new project. Many designers get clouded by the curse of diving straight into a project, especially if the brief in hand is ideal to your set skills. This blog will hopefully enlighten you to the proper and decent forms of planning a successful, fast and at times enjoyable project. (more…)
Form spam is a growing problem for webmasters. Through our “contact us” feedback forms we’ve all received the ubiquitous emails advertising everything from the little blue pill to cut-price designer timepieces. Bloggers will also be used to receiving lots of comments linking back to the poster’s own website or advertising various wares. The vast majority of this form spam is automated, meaning that a bot comes along and submits the form rather than a human being.
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Websites have always had to make use of a pretty limited set of fonts and while there’s still no perfect solution, there are alternatives appearing all of the time. Well chosen typefaces can bring a design to life and give a designer another tool to make their creation stand out. Of course, it also works the other way, badly chosen fonts can make text difficult to understand and impact the usability of a site.
In this post I’m going to discuss some of the popular techniques used to allow more flexibility with online fonts as well as newer solutions that could be on the horizon (more…)
As a content management specialist, I’ve noticed that getting good text content for a client website can be difficult. Sometimes it seems like all the creative juices available have run out, long before the written content for a site is ready. And although quality photos and graphics, great site design and good solid programming are all necessary to make a site that represents a return on investment, without well-written content, the site isn’t complete.
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Every website on the Internet needs to be hosted somewhere. There are a vast number of web hosting companies offering various services, so which one should you choose for your website? The answer depends on your website: which technologies it is built in, how big it is, how much traffic it receives (or is likely to receive) etc… (more…)
Unlike traditional printed media, most websites are visited by people in a hurry; each individual page has very little time to make an impression on a user. Those users have a specific goal in mind, and little patience for a site that doesn’t make it as easy as possible to achieve it.
When building your site and writing your copy, be aware of the following time scales: (more…)
The long running problem:
One of the common problems facing web designers today is not so much the design and creation of the site itself but rather ensuring it displays correctly in all of the popular web browsers. Many issues can affect the way a designer creates a site, in some cases ambitious ideas and features have to be scrapped to make way for a “safe” approach making sure all browsers can display a page without errors. This blog post will hopefully provide you with an insight to the problems of cross browser compatibility and possibly a solution that could help you create a design that looks great and works in all browsers.
Bad bots can cause problems for your website. They can submit spam to your forum or blog, spam your contact form, or just use up your valuable resources such as bandwidth and CPU. If you use Classic ASP this article will show you how to ban bad bots from your entire website using the global.asa file.
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Having an online store that can be open all day, every day to take advantage of customers who want to shop from the comfort of their couch can open up new marketing possibilities for many businesses. But when designing that store, it pays to remember that the products must generally sell themselves. As a website developer, you should always ensure that the tools site owners need are available in your site’s product management system. (more…)
