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Posts and articles about company news, projects and web design.
From Vasilis van Gemert
Responsive design is about more than just layout; it's about designing for the Web, which means, mostly, for people with browsers. And that's just about everything we know about the people who visit our websites: they are probably using a browser. All the rest we just don't know. Up until not ...
| May 9, 2013 | Sitepoint.com
Ready to take your new service to the world?
Over the last few weeks, we've looked at a handful of techniques you can use to communicate more clearly about your product or service as you launch it:
And we've seen how you can build all these into a concise but compelling launch website.
Now, you may have done all these things as well as you can. But does that mean the copy you've written about your new product or service is guaranteed to communicate what you want it to?
Well, no. But there are a few steps you can take to get an idea of how well your copy succeeds. The first one? A copy review.
Did you just roll your eyes? Don't worry: the copy review is less hassle than you think.
| April 26, 2013 | Sitepoint.com
There are few reasons not to use a Responsive Web Design. Unless you have the time, budget and inclination to develop a separate mobile site or app, RWD techniques can assist your users on mobile and older devices.
But what if a user doesn't want a mobile-optimized view of your site?
This question has been discussed by industry giants including Bruce Lawson and Roger Johansson. The possible reasons include:
| April 24, 2013 | Sitepoint.com
Image gallery lightboxes have been around for many years. They generally provide a great user experience until you attempt to load an image which is larger than the viewport dimensions. Developers often forget this important check and you’re presented with a centered image which is difficult to remove. The problem can be exacerbated on mobile devices.
Until recently, image lightboxes would need to implement several equations to determine the viewport and image dimensions then size and center accordingly. Fortunately, we can now rely on CSS3 media queries and transforms to do the hard work for us.
| April 16, 2013 | Sitepoint.com
In my last article, I said that you can easily mimic the practices "Big Box" SEO companies have used to make themselves into such effective sales organizations. One of those practices is prospecting for new business.
Prospecting is contacting people with the sole intention of drumming up business immediately. Every industry has a predictable sales cycle—that is, the time required to take a client from first meeting to final handshake. The higher the cost and the more complex the sale, the more time involved. The sales cycle for a box of nails is around 30 seconds. For multi-million dollar enterprise application software, it's more like 30 months. The goal of prospecting is to find someone who's likely to buy your product or service within your typical sales cycle.
Traction is the ultimate car enthusiast or garage website. Great features like a custom background image, custom highlight color, dynamic module title colors, and custom fonts, allow you to easily adapt this template to any type of site and totally transform the appearance in seconds! Its responsive design also allows your website visitors to view your site on any device with no problems at all!
This month we have heavily customized the S5 Image and Content Fader module and S5 Tab Show to match the template's design perfectly. In addition to that you can set the background of the page to any image that you want and set it to be either fixed with the page or scroll with the page. This template is packed with many amazing features so be sure to check out the demo!
Don’t you just hate it when you visit a site a few months after the hand off and see all your hard work has basically been destroyed?
We’ve all been there. Our clients might have the best of intentions, but their limited understanding of web development tends to wreak havoc without their knowledge.
Here is a letter you can give your clients the next time you present them with the finished product. Hopefully, at least some of this information will sink in!
After you have read our ever-so-polite explanation of what they should and shouldn’t do, sound off in the comments section below. Let us know if you have any additional suggestions or pet peeves.
| April 3, 2013 | Sitepoint.com
If you’re looking to track the effectiveness of your pay per click campaign, Google Analytics has you covered, no question. However, there’s much more to Google Analytics than just checking PPC management or your website visits. That is just the tip of the iceberg.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how you can effectively use Google Analytics’ goal setting tool.
Ask yourself these five key questions and let Google Analytics guide you to an evergreen path.
Written by Hannah Kaufman | Monday, 01 April 2013
Your website is finally finished! You have added great content, cool images, the whole nine-yards. Now that your site has been done for a while, you've been doing data analysis for your site and realize people don't seem too interested in downloading your content. Most likely this isn't due to the content on your site, because you have been getting heavy traffic on your blog. Have you ever thought that there could be something wrong with your call to action?
Jay Taylor, March 12, 2013
As smartphone and tablet adoption rapidly increases, so does the importance of mobile-friendly websites.
If SEO is a core component of your digital marketing strategy, having a mobile–friendly website is becoming essential.
Mobile sales have already overtaken desktop sales, and mobile Internet usage is predicted to overtake desktop internet usage by 2014. It is only logical that mobile search will overtake desktop search at some point in the near future as well.
Since 67 percent of users claim they are more likely to purchase from a mobile-friendly website, companies that rely on SEO are wise to begin making the transition to mobile-friendly websites, and responsive web design specifically.
The argument between whether to choose a responsive website or a separate mobile website is a highly debated topic. However, the truth is that both options have their pros and cons.
The option that is best for your business depends on many factors, such as the purpose of the website, the intended target audience, and whether SEO is a factor.
If SEO is a factor, here are three reasons why responsive web design is the best option for your mobile SEO strategy.
| March 5, 2013 for Sitepoint.com
In 2012, nearly $300 billion in sales was processed via online payments. In an annual study by Javelin Strategy & Research, current trends in the online space indicate that total online sales will be pushing toward $500 billion by 2015.
Some of Silicon Valley's hottest startups in the last few years have been companies that are seeking to make the online and mobile purchasing experience more convenient, a prominent example being Square, Inc. The recent boom in mobile and online payments is demanding all entrepreneurs and business owners to move fast and meet market demand by accepting online payments.
The good news is that setting up a merchant account is not difficult. The onboarding process with most providers is very straightforward and painless. The challenge lies not in setting up an account, but in choosing a merchant account provider. There are literally thousands of options available for small business owners.
At Merchantseek, we aggregate information about merchant account providers – both fact-based data and user reviews – to give site owners and developers the best chance of forming the right partnership with the right provider.
In this article, I'll raise a few key points for you to consider when shopping for a new merchant account provider, and then consider the pros and cons of five leading merchant account providers.
By Radu Chelariu for Smashing Magazine, March 21, 2013
This post should be titled "Getting Ahead of Yourself." "...By a Few Years," actually. Here's the deal: at the time I'm writing this, early 2013, there's no way to accurately design for the Web using physical units, nor will there be for a very long time. But there is a way to design while knowing the physical characteristics of the device — or, at least, there will be in the very near future.
It's called the "resolution media query", and it's been in the specification for media queries for some time. However, while it has been in the spec, that doesn't mean anyone has actually implemented it yet. Fortunately, WebKit is leading the way and pushing for this feature to be implemented. So, how will we use this nifty little feature, exactly? Here's how.
By Jarrod Wright, sitepoint.com, March 14, 2013
Perhaps this article has caught your attention for one of two reasons. You might be on the verge of a big life change – ready to quit your full-time job and strike out on your own. Or maybe you're already a freelancer who is struggling to make ends meet.
If you are new to this business, there is something you need to understand right away: freelancing isn't always easy. It requires quite a bit of flexibility, creativity, patience and motivation.
However, if done properly, freelancing can be a huge success. Your job satisfaction and earning potential could me more than you ever hoped for.
This is part 5 of a 6 part series written by Mark Atkinson for Sitepoint.com. We’ve made it! Over the past five weeks we have taken an in-depth look at the two most popular content management systems currently available. We have critically analyzed both WordPress and Joomla in a number of different departments. We have discovered the strengths and weaknesses of each system and figured out that neither one of them does everything perfectly.
Today, I’m going to summarise the conclusions we’ve reached each week in this series and provide some final thoughts on the CMS war.
This is part 5 of a 6 part series written by Mark Atkinson for Sitepoint.com. Let’s face it, an open-source content management system without a thorough user base, support system and community is destined for failure. We are comparing two giants in the CMS game here, so we already know they must be doing many things right in these departments. In this part of our series, we’re going to be covering exactly what Joomla and WordPress have to offer when it comes to the support community.
What more apt place could there be to begin a post on support and communities than with the “homes” of each CMS? All the documentation, forums and community engagement for WordPress and Joomla stem from their websites.
Each CMS seems to have a very different approach when it comes to their websites. WordPress has opted for a minimalistic approach, whereas Joomla seems to have put a lot of effort into its design and functionality.
After its recent design update, I have to say that the Joomla website is much more appealing and user-friendly than WordPress.org, which comes across as bland and doesn’t seem to have any focus or direction.
Personally, I feel that WordPress is resting on its laurels. The people behind Joomla, on the other hand, seems to realise they are the underdogs and are making a conscious effort to grow the community and support base for their CMS through their website and various components thereof.
When it comes to an open-source system, support is crucial. Both WordPress and Joomla have adequate documentation, so I’m not going to be focusing on that area. The main focus of the support base should be the CMS’ community support. There are a couple areas to look at within the broader topic of the support community.
This is part 4 of a 6 part series written by Mark Atkinson for Sitepoint.com. I’ve been looking forward to this part of the series; we’re going to compare WordPress and Joomla in the SEO department. We will be discussing the capabilities and limitations of each CMS when it comes to SEO, as well as linking you to some of the best SEO plugins and extensions.
We’re going to order things slightly differently in this post. Here’s how:
WordPress wins.
In my opinion, there can be no real argument against that assertion. Unfortunately, when WordPress junkies end up in metaphorical bar fights with Joomla junkies, the WordPress enthusiasts really end up flogging a dead horse on this point. It’s painful to see, guys — please don’t do it.
Yes, WordPress is generally better when it comes to SEO, but it has its limitations. Joomla isn’t horrible when it comes to SEO. It’s not the best, but it’s not as bad as I’ve seen some (usually biased) individuals suggest.
So you’ve got the verdict; now I’ll explain how I reached this conclusion.
Joomla can be an absolute nightmare to perform proper on-site optimization on if you’re a newbie. With Joomla 2.5, however, some attention was given to improving the SEO capabilities, which has helped somewhat. If you’re in a competitive niche, though, you’re still going to need to look to Components to do the bulk of your SEO work for you, and that’s where things get messy.
Joomla contains basic SEO-optimization functionality. You can turn on SEF URLs, take it a step further by enabling URL rewriting and also choose whether you would like to enable URL suffixes or not.
You can also add a global meta description and meta keywords, as well as define the meta tags and title tags at a page level, despite it not being as user-friendly a process as it potentially could be.
Something that some Joomla users may not know is that you can also choose to noindex and/or nofollow a specific menu item. (You can find the option in the Metadata options menu on the right when editing a menu item.)
If you’re wanting to do more than basic optimization for a Joomla website, I would suggest you be prepared to do some debugging, because those bugs will be there.
This is part 3 of a 6 part series written by Mark Atkinson for Sitepoint.com
Welcome to Part 3 of the most comprehensive WordPress v Joomla analysis on the internet! In this post we’re going to be covering an important area of comparison between these two popular content management systems: the customization of Joomla and WordPress websites.
When I think of Joomla and WordPress extensions, each one carries significantly different connotations.
The feeling I get with WordPress is that the vast majority of their plugins are created with the implication that you’re running a blog/content website. What I mean by this is that the plugins are created simply to tweak WordPress’ native functionality and optimize your content. This could be in the form of SEO plugins, content syndication, social media integration, etc. They are all there to add value to your content rather than to revolutionize your website.
Joomla, on the other hand, seems to provide extensions of a completely different nature. A lot of components are written to add massive chunks of functionality to your website, rather than just tweak certain areas of functionality. For example, you might use a component to turn your Joomla website into a full e-commerce store, or add an online reservation system.
Don’t get me wrong, there are extensions available that add great functionality to WordPress. Likewise, there are also extensions for Joomla that will just provide certain tweaks to content. I feel, however, that the extensions for each tend to conform to the above generalizations.
This is part 2 of a six-part series on SitePoint.com
Written By Mark Atkinson
Welcome to Part 2 of our series covering all major aspects of the WordPress vs Joomla debate. Today we’ll be covering templates, frameworks and themes for Joomla and WordPress.
At face value, Joomla templates and WordPress themes seem similar. There are a few minor details to take note of, however, that may affect your decision when choosing between the two content management systems.
A trend I’ve noticed with themes and templates is that Joomla templates seem to be designed and developed with versatility in mind, whereas WordPress themes are designed with a specific purpose in mind — usually content-oriented.
Premium templates for Joomla will contain all the bells and whistles which will help you tailor your site to a specific purpose. WordPress themes, on the other hand, mostly seem to be limited to a single purpose. If you aren’t a web designer, this makes it a little difficult to customize the theme to suit something that isn’t quite what you are aiming for.
Either way has its pitfalls, but I have to say I prefer Joomla in this department. I’d rather have too much choice than be limited by design.
This is a six-part series from SitePoint.com
Written By Mark Atkinson
The WordPress v Joomla debate has been an argument — no, an all-out war – for years now. The issue with this war of the CMS titans is that it’s largely being fought by biased individuals, rather than debated from an objective standpoint.
I’m not the first person to discuss this topic and I certainly won’t be the last. I feel, however, that there has been no really good comparison between Joomla and WordPress in recent times. For this reason, SitePoint is going to bring you a series of articles discussing every major area of comparison between WordPress and Joomla as they stand in 2012. This is what you can expect to see throughout the six blogposts:
What is SEO? It is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. What exactly does SEO do? It is the method of analyzing and constructing individual web pages, as well as entire sites, so that they can be discovered, analyzed, and then indexed by various search engines.
SEO can make the content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling and indexing software.
Why would this be of great importance to you? Would it be important to you if customers were unable to find your telephone number or find the address of your business? I do not think that many businesses could survive for very long in this situation.
This situation could apply to a web site. Can potential customers locate your current web site easily? Traffic to your web site could be extremely low. Potential customers might not even know that your site exists.
"Wait a minute!" you say. "We have a beautiful web site, and we include the web site address in all advertising campaigns. Why would people be unable to find our site?"
Of course, your current customers and persons already acquainted with your business would be likely to find your web site without difficulty. Wouldn’t they?
