Delta Biz Web Design, Web Hosting and Search Engine Optimization Articles

I get asked all the time to bring someone up to speed on the very basics of a website. In this short article I hope to help you understand the basic needs and components that are required to have a website.

A website is simply a collection of files that are available for people to see on the internet. These files are (for the most part) viewable just as you are now seeing them through a browser such as Internet Explorer. So how does one get a website up and running. Well there are a few key pieces that are needed to make this happen.

First thing you will need is someway for people to access your website. The most common way for this to be done is through the use of a Domain Name. A domain name is a reserved name such as delta-biz.com. There are many possible endings .com .org .net .ca .biz .web and the list goes on and on. I generaly recommend .com domain names if at all plausible simply because people tend to type .com in automatically when trying to access a website. To get a Domain Name you have to search to find out which are available, there are many websites which allow this, make a choice and reserve it which generally costs between 10 and 25 dollars per year.

So how does typing a domain name into your browser get you to a website? Thats the next piece to the puzzle. Web Hosting is simply put a fast computer connected through a fast and reliable internet connection that serves up your files when they are requested through the domain name. Basically, when you register the domain name you set something called Name Servers. Your web hosting company will tell you what those are, usually looking something like ns1.delta-biz.com and ns2.delta-biz.com etc. Once these name servers are set you computer will be able to send a request out asking about your domain name and it will recieve a response to look for these name servers. So when someone types in your domain name this will put your request into the correct computer where your files are stored and that computer will send back the requested files or if no specific file is requested it will normally send back your index or home page.

Where do these files come from? Well these files are normally a collection of text type documents and images, music, movie files that combine to show a nice beautiful website. Websites can be built yourself through software you can purchase, but generally for a professional looking website it is best to contract a web design company to help you with this. A professional web design company will ask you for photos, text, colour choices, sites you like sites you don't like etc etc. and work with this information to draw up a site design for you. Once you are happy with the site design, web developers will take the site and build the actual files etc and upload them to the web host so that the rest of the world can now see your brand new website.

I hope this article has proved helpful.

Cheers,

Shane

So you have a website. You paid to have a nicely designed website showcasing your products and services. So now your pricing has changed or you have added a line of services you didn’t have before. So how do you go about getting these changes completed without paying through the nose? Well the answer is actually simpler than you might think. There are really three ways to have changes made to your website. First, you can pay an hourly rate to a web design firm to make the changes. Second, you can have a company build an administration area for your website so that you could do it yourself. Or third, you can have a web design firm on contract to make changes on an ongoing basis.

So what’s the answer for you? It would be best to look at your needs and figure out which is the most cost effective. For example if you will be changing a couple words twice yearly, it would make no sense to have a full blown database driven website developed for you. Instead it would probably be best to hire a developer to make the requested changes and charge you an hourly rate. Changing simple text on a website is simple and takes very little time. If you needed to change a few words on one page of your website it would take less than 5 minutes and as such if you were one of my clients I wouldn’t even charge for it.

As the amount of changes escalates, so does the need for a better plan. If you are going to be changing products and services all over your website on a very regular basis it will probably make sense to have a developer convert your site into a database driven website with a content management area. This can be costly up front but over the long run it will no doubt save you a ton.

The third option is, for most websites, the best alternative. We offer updates packages along with our hosting products which allow clients to simply email the requested changes to updates@delta-biz.com and the changes are completed within 24 hours. This is an affordable way for our clients to have a web developer on contract without paying large sums of money at various times over the year. We simply charge a small monthly fee depending on how much time will be required to be ready, willing and able to make the updates whenever required. Our clients have been very happy with this alternative.

Simply put Flash is a technology that allows web designers to make a movie to be used as a component of a website or as the website itself. Flash allows designers to incorporate animation and music and video into a website easily.

Now for the second question. Do you need flash on your website? In short very few websites actually require flash. Most of the stuff designers use flash for (fading and movement etc) can easily be accomplished with some good old fashioned javascript and CSS (cascading style sheets).  Now don’t get me wrong, flash is not all bad and can be a very useful tool especially with video and music as it has been developed to work very well with both elements.

This being said I definitely favor using flash as small components of a website where necessary and not as the website itself.  Why you might ask. Well, I like to think of the web in its traditional roll of sharing information. This is using the graphics and video to ENHANCE the text. The text is framed nicely, has accompanying video, music and pictures and is easily readable, by everybody including search engine robots, and other information gathering tools. This cannot be done with a purely flash website as flash runs as a sort of movie and doesn’t have actual text to index.

One of the major reasons designers like to work in flash is its very easy to make things move around open and close, change colours, fade in and out. I completely understand these design requirements and agree that sometimes the can really enhance the visit to a website. What I would hope to see developers choose to work with is Javascript and CSS as it makes for a faster loading website that is completely indexible while still reaching the design goals. If you would like to see examples of using scripts to accomplish movement etc feel free to email the author at shane@delta-biz.com.

Cheers,

Shane

Websites can be designed in a variety of ways. This is usually addressed right at the beginning before the website is ever started as it can be tremendously difficult to alter later on. Basically there are three rough design layouts in common use across the web. We will call them: The 800 X 600, The stretch and The movie site.

The 800 X 600.

An example can be found at msn.com. This style of website is built to a specific width to ensure the website will look the same on every computer. Designers often want elements of a site positioned with exactness to ensure the website will always look and feel as it was intended. Being that there are a huge range of screen resolutions (the # of pixels displayed on your screen) and a ridiculous # of monitors out there this type of site is a great way to ensure the website alwasy looks the same.

There are a few negatives to this style of website. Most importantly, when using a large screen with very high resolution settings there is often a ton of blank space within the browser window. If however you try to design the site for the really large screens, the people on smaller laptops or old 15 inch monitors may have to scroll both horizontally and vertically to see all of your content.

The Stretch.

When you want to make the most efficient use of all available screen area you would most likely look at developing an elastic website design. This type of site, (example http://www.w3.org/), is extremely usefull for displaying tons of content compartmentalized and is really flexible with lots of different additions etc. These websites seem to be generally less 'designed' and more fluid thus allowing constantly changing content and screens.

This type of site is a bit trickier to have look great all the time as it can look really cramped up on small screens and stretched out with all sorts of gaps etc in text when the screen resolution is set really high.

The Movie Site.

This style of design is most often seen in pure flash designed websites but we are seeing more and more of this design use. A movie site is a fixed size and position both horizontally and vertically with no scroll bars. An example of this type of website can be seen here www.bellissimaweddings.ca and has the same benefits as the 800 X 600 style website in that it will always look exactly the same. Without the scrolling developers have to look to alternatives for adding lots of text such as the internal scrollbar and inline frames to include lots of text.

Designers and developers have their favorite type to use but to be sure it should be your choice when you have a website built for you. Just keep in mind that the more text, the more space you will need. A massive portal of articles and columns would not fit nicely into a movie style site and just the same reversed. A website showcasing a few products or services will not look tightly designed if it stretches all the way across 10000 pixels of screen. Just some thoughts to keep in mind.

Cheers,

Shane

It usually happens about 2 months after we finish developing a  website. We try to explain how the search engines work during the quoting process but it doesn't really become clear how important Search Engine Optimization is until a few months down the road when no one can find your website in the Search Engines. The Search Engines are tricky beasts that no one ever truly tames moreover these creatures of the web are ever changing their methods.

Search Engine Optimization is the method of preparing your website for the search engines which, for the most part, spider their way about the internet indexing data. By placing valuable keyword rich text in appropriate and important places throughout the pages of your website you can help the search engines properly index your website for valid keywords and phrases. I will not go into the ins and outs of SEO here today as it is much outside the scope of this article but suffice it to say that work NEEDS to be done on a regular basis to ensure there is fresh and valid content for the ever hungry search engines to gobble up.

As a precursor to my next post, optimizing your website will help the Engines index things correctly; but will not get the Search Engines to actually visit your website regularly or ever for that matter. More work needs to be done to ensure the Robots can get to your site and inhale all that beautifully optimized code you have created and maintained.

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Delta Biz Web Design, Web Hosting and Search Engine Optimization Articles