Ways To Speed Up Your Website Site

The load time of websites is one of the most important factors affecting its usability; most Internet users will just skip a site altogether if it fails to load within a couple of seconds. Below you will find the summary of the “Speed Up Your Web Site” series. Those are simple yet effective ways to make sure that your website is running fast. Also it does help for a professional Seo point of view.

Optimize Images: always use the “Save for the web” feature included on image editing software. Images represent the heavier load on virtually any website so make sure you are optimizing them. Alternatively you can also turn to an online image optimizer.

Formats: apart from optimizing images it is important that you choose the right format. JPEG format is suitable for photographs or true-color images. The GIF format should be used with flat-color images like logos or buttons. PNG works very similar to GIF but it supports more colors.

Optimize Your CSS: most websites are designed with CSS nowadays. Make sure to aggregate and clean your CSS. CleanCSS is an online tool that will merge similar selectors, remove useless properties and remove the whitespace from your code.

Use a Slash on Your Links: when a user opens a link on the form “http://www.domain.com/about” the server will need to figure what kind of file or page is contained on that address. If you include a slash (/) at the end of the link the server will already know that this is a directory page, reducing the load time of the site.

Use the Height and Width Tags: many people forget to add the Height and Width tags on image codes. Those tags will make sure that the browser knows the size of the image before loading it. The result is that it will reserve a spot for the images while loading the rest of the page, speeding up the whole process.

Reduce the HTTP Requests: when opening a web page every object (images, scripts and the line) will require a round trip to the server. This latency can add several seconds to the load time of your site. Make sure to reduce the number of objects and to combine CSS files and scripts together.

For further clarifications contact SEO Services India.

Top 10 SEO Tips To Follow For Website Design

It’s useless to have the best designed website which no one can find! Many web designers often ignore search engine optimization to improve their website’s search engine results page rankings. In this article, we’ve shared some quick and easy professional SEO tips all designers should be using in their layouts.

Tip 1: Employ SEO techniques right from the start of web design and development.

Tip 2: Designs must be given more importance, but it’s basically the back-end code that provides proper support. Therefore, try optimizing the code and checking for W3C compliance from the very beginning.

Tip 3: Don’t forget the basics including title tags, Meta tags, Meta descriptions, Header tags etc.

Tip 4: Don’t forget to optimize your website images using alt tags. Also make sure to optimize the image size and loading time to the minimum.

Tip 5: Search engines simply adore text and content, particularly the unique one. So make sure your pages have relevant content to boost your search rankings. Try not to overload your web design with so many graphic, but have appropriate text too.

Tip 6: Flash is cool and interactive feature to engage users, but it doesn’t work with flash. If you really want to put some flash on your website, use flash banners and slideshows, and keep alternative text versions for websites in full flash.

Tip 7: Competitive analysis is also crucial to know your competitor’s status. This way you can not only improve your own rankings, but also defeat them in areas where they are showing poor results.

Tip 8: Optimize your website URL’S with your relevant keywords. Assign a different title name to each page, and don’t repeat the same title throughout the entire site. Moreover, the page title must not exceed 65 characters.

Tip 9: Replace JavaScripts in navigation menu with CSS based navigation. Using JavaScript can make your menu less search engine friendly but you can some use of its features in a CSS menu and retain the fanciness of the navigational menu.

Tip 10: Use a SEO friendly design that does not block or hamper the indexing of important areas on your site. Also, to ensure both search engine and user friendliness keep your keyword rich content above the fold.

These 10 tips will help you design a website that works equally well on search engines and give your design the exposure and traffic it needs to survive in the online marketplace. For further information contact Seo Services India.

Basic Characteristics Of User-Friendly Websites

What makes a website user-friendly? There are probably an endless number of factors, but let’s look at these major characteristics according to professional seo point of view...

1. Page Load Speed

Although high-speed internet connections are becoming more and more common, there is still a large number of internet users that are on slower dial-up connections. Even with high-speed connections some pages just don’t load very quickly. Most of your visitors will be fairly impatient and pages that load slowly could chase them away. At the very least, slow loading times will reduce the number of pages that they’ll visit on your site.

Knowing your site’s audience can really help to know how your pages should be designed. A program like Google Analytics will show you the percentage of your visitors that are using different internet connections. Based on the numbers you can get a good idea of what type of impact page load speed will have on your overall audience. If your site attracts a high percentage of users with dial-up connections, you should be sure to keep pages loading as quickly as possible. If a very high percentage of visitors are using high-speed connections, you may be able to add a few extra elements to your pages.

Factors that influence the load times of pages include the number and size of images, extra items like flash, the amount of excess code (example, designing with a table-based layout instead of CSS), and the size of your pages. (Read more about website optimization).

2. Accessibility

If someone can’t use or access your website it serves no purpose for that visitor. Accessibility of websites has become a bigger priority for designers and developers in recent years, but there is still a long way to go. Even major corporations have struggled to achieve complete accessibility. Target was even sued over the accessibility of its website for handicapped individuals.

Some of the easiest things that you can do to improve the accessibility of your site include using alt tags for all images, use valid HTML and CSS coding, avoid frames, and allow text to be re-sized by visitors. There is of course much more to accessibility, which was covered in detail by 456 Berea St.

3. Navigation

All users want to be able to move through the website to find what they want. A huge factor in being user-friendly is providing simple and intuitive navigation. Major areas of navigation should be located consistently on all pages. Using common elements that users expect to find, like About pages and Contact pages will help as most internet users have come to expect them and will look for them at times.

A general rule of thumb is that any page on your site should be reachable with 2 clicks from your home page. For larger sites this probably isn’t realistic, but offering a sitemap and/or a sitewide search can really help.

Another important factor with navigation is that user’s shouldn’t have to guess where they will end up if they click on a link. Regardless of whether the link is part of a navigation menu, or if it is simply in the body of the text, visitors should understand where the link will lead them.

4. Information

Visitors are coming to your site for a reason. Whatever that reason may be, you want to provide them with what they are seeking. Are they coming to find basic information on your business’ services? Are they coming to read in-depth articles on a particular subject? Whatever the case may be, the information that your website provides needs to sufficiently meet the expectations of visitors.

A blog like this one will need to provide its readers with great, insightful articles in order satisfy its visitors. The website of a restaurant may need to provide hours of operation and a menu in order satisfy its visitors. Obviously, each situation is different. In order to have a user-friendly website you need to anticipate what visitors will expect to find at your site, and then put it right in front of them.

How To Design Web Sites Successfully

Basics of Web Design

Having a good looking and functional design is essential for any website or blog. Even if you are not a professional designer, however, there are some basic concepts that can drastically improve your understanding of this area and the layout of your blog.

Success isn't just restricted to professional seo or web designers. Anyone can easily learn the essential skills required to design sites to the new standard.

Successful design does not always depend on attractive visuals, though that can help. Success is primarily a result of good thinking. For me, this approach should result in a site in which everything -structure, brand, page layout, graphic design, and error handling - is deliberately geared to success.

The guidance on this site gives you everything you need to be a web design expert and create excellent sites, starting now.

The most important tool for designing to the new standard, is my "Golden Rule".

Every element that goes into your web site must have a purpose.

Every single feature must either

• Help your visitors achieve their goals, or
• Support the site's goals without obstructing the visitor's goals

Web Design from Scratch is a complete system for designing sites to the new standard. The processes help you build a complete web site from clarifying your purpose, and creating a solution in architecture, layout and page design.

Every step of the process rigorously applies the Golden Rule. The result will be a web site that really works.

Courtesy : Website Design Basics