To help you on your way, we’ve compiled 5 of the best YouTube clips revealing some of the common web design mistakes that people make – and how to avoid them.

1. Dr Dave Chaffey – Author of E-consultancy’s Best Practice Guides

2. Mikal Belicove – Author and Online Consultant

3. Gareth Davies – GSINC Limited

4. Christopher Merill – Chicago Web Designer

5. Ernesto Verdugo – Entrepreneur

An Example Scenario

If you work in a large company that maintains a high-traffic website, any sudden changes of activity would have to be easily explained if somebody comes asking. Instead of digging through server logs or scrappy notes, Annotations can be used to easily jot down a note regarding the reason of activity change (if known, obviously). Typical reasons might be because of server downtime or a new service launch, for example. The advantage of making these notes within Analytics is that anybody who has access can trawl back through the data to easily spot specific spikes and the relevant details/people involved.

Here is an example screenshot provided by Google:

As you can see from the example, Annotations have been used to explain new activity such as ‘Began new Adwords campaign’ and ‘Lava lamps on sale’. With these notes in place, spikes or changes in traffic can be clearly accounted for without the need to painfully think back to what might have caused it.

How to use Annotations

With this new feature now available throughout all Analytics accounts, using it is very straight forward. Simply log in to your account and click on one of the small circles on your traffic timeline (as shown above in the example). A small popup box will appear providing you with the number of visits for that specific day, and here you can click ‘Create new annotation’.

Find out more by watching this fantastic Google video:

To do our little bit to encourage users away from this awful piece of software, here some reasons to stop using Internet Explorer 6:

IT’S INSECURE – The biggest reason by far to stop using Internet Explorer 6 is security. IE6 has been a target for hackers ever since it was released, and continues to be vulnerable to a wide variety of security risks. Although Microsoft tried to release various patches and bug fixes down the years, the problems have never gone away – in fact, Internet Explorer software still continues to have security flaws in its latest versions.

IT’S INCOMPLIANT – From a web design point of view, this is the biggest issue. Internet Explorer 6 is renowned for being a pain to design for, with many things that work in other browsers failing miserably in IE6. A lot of designers have stopped supporting IE6 completely as their designs render completely different (or even broken) in it.

IT’S OUTDATED – Although this is similar to previous reason, it’s important to hammer it home once again. If you want to experience the complete potential of the web, then IE6 simply can’t cope. Some of the most popular websites on the internet such as Facebook advise you to upgrade your browser due to its lack of functionality and ability to deal with somewhat basic advances in web technology.

Companies who use Internet Explorer 6 throughout their offices can probably account for a lot of the usage statistics for the browser, but there is simply no excuse not to upgrade nowadays. Google brilliantly released Google Chrome Frame recently that allows you to bring Chrome’s web technology to Internet Explorer browsers (mainly aimed at IE6). If you previously thought that it would be too expensive to update your network of systems, look no further than Google’s free solution.

If you are using IE6, do yourself (and web designers) a favour, and upgrade to a better browser.

The Problem

Alexander Trailers design and manufacture custom made trailers for commercial and industrial use. The website they initially had designed had good basic foundations in place, but needed improvements in terms of navigation and coding. With a vast array of trailers assembled over the years, Alexander Trailers needed a solution to showcase their previous work and promote their expertise.

The Solution

To develop the new website, Mediaspin proposed the WordPress content management system (CMS) as an ideal solution for maintaining and extending upon the current content. With a CMS in place, Alexander Trailers would be able to easily add new content to their own website without the need for any technical know-how or coding skills. Mediaspin would redevelop the existing design to be search engine friendly, and restructure the content in an accessible and maintainable manner.

The Result

The redeveloped Alexander Trailers website incorporated features of the old design but improved and built upon the existing features. A sidebar menu was introduced to categorise the different trailers into relevant sectors, such as hydraulic trailers and industrial trailers. The old HTML table structure was stripped out and replaced with a DIV layout incorporating an external style sheet, and the image navigation menu was redesigned using HTML.

The site now validates to XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS Level 2.1 while clearly promoting key technical details and examples of past work.

Visit the Alexander Trailers website at: http://www.alexandertrailers.co.uk/

Looking for a new website? Get in touch!

If your business could benefit from a new website, or you would simply like a couple of improvements making then don’t hesitate to get in touch. All of our web design is done with SEO in mind, meaning that your website will be usable by users and found within search engines.

Call us today on 0161 903 8658 or email info@mediaspin.co.uk

Here is a list of the top 10 Chrome extensions for web designers:

1. Firebug Lite – Firebug is a fantastic plugin for Firefox that allowed you to inspect the HTML and CSS elements of a page to fix errors and stop any issues. A ‘lite’ version is now available for Chrome and we highly recommend it.

Install Firebug Lite

2. Eye Dropper – Although this extension needs a bit of work, it is still a very good tool to identify colours on a web page. You can either select from the colour picker menu or use the eye dropper on a specific part of a page.

Install Eye Dropper

3. IE Tab – Internet Explorer; the web designer’s worst nightmare? Maybe so, but this little extension allows you to quickly view a web page rendered in Internet Explorer from inside Google Chrome, which is very handy.

Install IE Tab

4. Chrome SEO – As every good web designer should know; search engine optimisation is very important, and this SEO tool allows you to quickly view some of the key factors on a site.

Install Chrome SEO

5. Webpage Screenshot – If you need to show a design to a client or simply just take a screen grab of a page, then Webpage Screenshot is perfect. You are able to save a screenshot of a page without the need for an image editor.

Install Webpage Screenshot

6. Lorem Ipsum Generator – At some stage in the design process you may need to pad out a draft page with sample text, and Lorem Ipsum has long been the standard. This tool allows you to quickly generate Lorem Ipsum text.

Install Lorem Ipsum Generator

7. BuiltWith Technology Profiler – If you want to analyse the profile of a website it can be a tedious process to visit many different lookup websites. This extension provides you with a means of viewing key information, such as whether or not the site is running Google Analytics and what web server it is running on.

Install BuiltWith Technology Profiler

8. MeasureIt! – This very handy chrome extension allows you to draw out a ruler on a web page to view the height and width in pixels. You can use it for measuring images, white space or just about anything on a page.

Install MeasureIt!

9. Window Resizer – Designing websites that are accessible by all resolutions is one of the key factors in web design, so Window Resizer really does help. You are able to resize the Chrome browser window to a set of predefined sizes, and the lists are completely customisable.

Install Window Resizer

10. Pendule – Pendule offers a host of useful features when on a web page, such as disabling CSS, hiding images and W3C validation. Much like the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox, this is one of the ‘must have’ extensions for web designers.

Install Pendule

A good metric for measuring how well your website is retaining visitors is ‘bounce rate’ – best monitored in Google Analytics. Although bounce rate can provide you with some key reference data for analysing visitor activity, it doesn’t hold the key to everything – here is why.

The percentage provided by the bounce rate metric refers to visitors who ‘bounce’ away from your website to another site without visiting any of the other pages or interacting in any way. Now although you may have a good (low) bounce rate, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the maximum potential of your visitors are being retained once they visit your website. What about the users who tried to access a page and failed? Or the person who searched for something and it wasn’t found?

Here are a couple of tips to help maximise visitor retention.

1. www/non-www – On a typical website there will be one of two ways the primary domain can be accessed, the examples of which are below.

- www.example.com
- example.com

Note the lack of ‘www.’ in the second example.

If you have set your website up so that the primary URL is www.example.com that doesn’t mean that you should ignore the non-www version. People are lazy, and if they think they know a domain they may try typing it directly into their address bar without the ‘www.’. The problem with this is that unless you have setup a redirect on that URL, the visitor will be presented with an error page.
The correct way to avoid this is to setup a 301 redirect on your secondary URL to direct people to the primary one. Read about URL canonicalisation on Matt Cutts’ blog for more information.

2. Custom 404 Page – The second tip to retain visitors follows along the same lines. If somebody tries to visit a link on your website that may not be working for whatever reason, then they will receive a 404 response from the web server. By default, the 404 error will present itself in the form of an error page in your user’s browser, which may lead them to find their information elsewhere. To avoid this, setup a custom 404 page that includes helpful links and perhaps a search box that encourages users to hang around.

Which leads us nicely onto our next tip…

3. Site Searches – If you have a search facility on your website then you ideally need it to be as helpful as possible. If a user types a search in that isn’t found, then providing suggestions may just help them find what they were looking for. If you are using WordPress to power your website, you may want to take a look Yoast’s article about search where he covers misspellings and related suggestions. To ensure you are monitoring what people are searching for on your website, track people’s searches using Google Analytics.

4. Related Pages – Providing visitors with related information or similar pages can improve user interaction significantly – especially in ecommerce websites. If you think of the Amazon website as an example, they provide many similar products throughout the site, including related searches, recommendations and items other people bought. Try including relevant links on your high-traffic pages to keep your visitors wanting more.

5. Load Time – Last but by no means least is the load time of your web pages. With page speed soon to become a ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm, there has never been a more critical time to make your pages load faster. If you have a page with great quality content, both users and search engines may be put off if it takes over a minute to load due to a large flash banner you have placed on the page. Ideally you should be looking for a page load time of 2 seconds (or under), but try to keep it under 4 seconds at a maximum.

Tips to improve load time include reducing the number of external files on your website, compressing images and having your site physically hosted in the country of your target audience.

If your website could benefit from a boost in traffic or you would like to find out more about SEO, why not get in touch with Mediaspin to see how we can help.

Call 0161 903 8658 today, or email info@mediaspin.co.uk

The website has been re-launched with a new search engine friendly design, with improvements made to the structure, code and navigation. A blog has been introduced to keep you up to date with the latest happenings in the world of web design, as well as our company and client news.

As well as enhancing the back end of the website, the services we offer have been more clearly defined. If you are looking for web design, content management or search engine optimisation head over to our enquiry form and get in touch today.

Let us know what you think

Whether you love or hate it, we would love to hear your opinions on our new website. Leave a comment on this blog post, send us a message or email info@mediaspin.co.uk with your thoughts.