Category: Web Design

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Are You Still Hung Up On Web Hits?

This blog post from the Microsoft adCenter blog says it best – web hits are nonsense when it comes to measuring web traffic.

Some website owners are still hung up on the big numbers that web hits convey, but in reality a hit is simply the number of images, files, and component items that a single page contains and not a measure of a real person visiting your website. One page can create hundreds of hits in your statistical results if it contains a lot of graphics as the browser downloads the components.

A much better measure of real success is to measure not page views, but unique visitors. Google Analytics and Urchin Web Site Statistics provide these important statistics. By measuring the number of unique visitors you can get a real view of how popular your website really is. Sure the number will be way less than hits but it will be an accurate measurement. On top of that measuring unique visitors is a web standard and one that professional webmasters talk about, dissect, and try to improve.

So don’t think that by saying you got 1 million hits on your website that it means anything, it simply shows unfortunately, your own ignorance of what is really important when it comes to measuring success on the Web.

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New Quick Launch Website Completed

We’ve just finished a new Quick Launch website for the Global Movement Against Radical Islam. You can view it at www.GMARI.com. Quick Launch is our super fast web presence program that allows you to cost efficiently have a great looking website completed in record time using pre-made website templates.

This template is from Dreamweaver CS3’s template library and has been customized to fit the client’s needs. The site was completed in one day – now that’s a quick launch! We’ve got lots of great templates to select from and some can handle more customization than others, but take a look if you need a budget website done fast.

 

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Our New Website Design

This past weekend I have launched a new website design for the parent website for The Web Authority blog. You can check it out at www.McCordWeb.com. The design is simply yet classic in nature and built in CSS. It features a menu from f-Source which builds complex CSS, XML, SEO friendly navigations.

I have moved my pages to a wider screen layout to accommodate the growing screen widths and have tried to simplify my design to keep the eyes focused on content. Additionally I have reorganized the architecture of the site.

Simply won’t appeal to everyone, but the layout is clean, uncluttered, and streamlined. In addition to a rework of our website, I have revised my firms business strategy to focus on what generates our income. We started out eight years ago doing web design, but have now grown into more of a web service provider than a designer.

That being said we’ve just recently launched a new website for a client. You can view the work at www.AMWarnerInsurance.com. This design is more complex and elegant. Take a look at both and let me know what you think.

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Five Website Killers

There are many things that you can do to benefit your website, but have you thought about the things that can kill your website? Here are my five top website killers – things you clearly should stay clear of doing to get good organic search engine placement and impress viewers.

  1. Don’t build your website all in Flash. It looks cool, but search engines cannot catalog the information contained in .swf files or for that matter .flv files. Google has just announced in early August that it is working with Adobe to try to rectify this problem, but that doesn’t help you now.
  2. Don’t ever steal your content from another website. You need unique content, don’t scrape someone else’s site. Not only will Google penalize you for duplicate content but you may get sued for copyright infringement. You can’t use the content even if you give credit – that’s still infringing.
  3. Don’t test your website in Firefox. If you don’t check, you won’t know and you really should. Firefox is an important browser and the browser of choice for nearly 25% of the browsing readers. If you don’t look good in IE AND Firefox, you may alienate a large part of your readers.
  4. Don’t make your web page layout too big. Although there are actually still some people surfing the web with 800 by 600 pixel resolution, the bulk of people are at 1024 pixels wide and larger. For my own site, still nearly 30% of my viewers are at 1024 pixels wide. Make sure you have website statistics that track this and then make sure to design your site to accommodate this important segment and not alienate viewers by having scroll bars at the bottom for 1024 pixel resolution viewers.
  5. Don’t use webmaster tools. Google, Yahoo and MSN have webmaster tools, make sure you are using them so you will know how the various search engines see your website. If you have problems, these tools can be invaluable in order to diagnose problems.