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July 3rd, 2010 admin Posted in Web Design No Comments »
by Mike Hallaron, MH1 Web Design
Small business owners planning a new company website need not worry about copying the look, feel, and function of larger, corporate websites. Instead take advantage of the uniqueness that is your small business venture.
In 10 Things Customers Want on a Website, Entrepreneur.com’s Monte Enbysk explains, “small businesses have a personality, flavor and sensibility that big company sites can’t match.” So, don’t join them them, revel in your smallness.
February 1st, 2010 admin Posted in Web Design 1 Comment »
This blog topic could also be called “Avoiding Paralysis by Analysis”. On occasion we sign on a new web design client who wants to monitor the course of their website project by committee. Composed of some four or more well intentioned employees, each feels they must contribute their fair share of criticism. This scenario often breeds a nightmare where no one gets what they want and our designers are left spinning in confusion. Our advice will help you prevent this train wreck when managing your next web design project.
In small companies and non-profits, owners and managers sometimes appoint a committee of staffers to oversee these projects to avoid making their own decisions or taking responsibility for them. In theory, the committee members will each bring some experience or value to the process. In reality, this is only true before the design or development of the website begins. Afterwards, it is a simple case of too many cooks spoil the soup.
The best time to put your committee to work is before you begin working with your web designer or developer. The committee should look at website examples, competitors websites, hash out goals, features, colors, and other aspects of the new site. This information can be distilled into a very effective design brief that will guide your web team to your final goal. A goal that is agreed upon after much argument, exploration, and debate.
Once the web designer has your design brief to serve as a guide, the committee’s work is done. Then the decision-maker or a liaison assigned to the project can make sure the project meets your organizations goals and design criteria. The design brief is the rich culmination of your committee’s hard work and preparation. It will keep your website project on track. It is impossible for a designer or developer to be effective when facing a flurry of repetitive changes from several different and usually contradictory voices. So, make sure your company speaks with only one voice.
And if the owner or final decision-maker appoints a liaison to oversee the job, be sure they are frequently shown progress updates. Their buy-in is critical at every stage of the development as they will sign the final check.
Save yourself time, money and heartache by using your committee to your best advantage.
Here is MH1 Web Design’s Design Brief template for your use: http://www.mh1webdesign.com/files/design_brief.pdf
January 2nd, 2010 admin Posted in Web Design No Comments »
Most of the business world uses PC but when designing your company website you cannot neglect the 8-9% of the market that surfs the Web using Apple’s Mac. These visitors will view your website using some browsers unique to the Mac operating system.
Understandably, MH1 will build your new website and optimize it for use with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, however, we also suggest taking a look during every stage of development at how your site will appear in these alternate Mac browsers. If you do not have a Mac available to do some “local testing”, we suggest visiting http://www.browsrcamp.com.
How it works
Simply type in the URL address of the website page you want to test and Browsrcamp.com will produce a FREE 800 pixel wide jpg image of your page in the latest version of the Mac Safari browser.
For more extensive testing, simply sign up for an account and buy some credits. You can get unlimited testing in all of the Mac browsers for two days for only $3 or a week for $7. It’s worth the low price to ensure your site will load properly and look right to Mac users.
For more information, call MH1 Web Design at (281) 362-2884 or toll free (877) 354-5898. Email us at info@mh1webdesign.com.
December 16th, 2009 admin Posted in Web Design, marketing 1 Comment »
by Christina Warren
Having a mobile-optimized web site can really make your site stand apart from the pack. Even though smartphones like the iPhone and Google Android devices can display “the full web,” having a web page formatted for smaller screens and with features that can take advantage of a touch screen, geolocation, or address book functionality can make the mobile web browsing experience that much better.
Even just a few years ago, optimizing websites for mobile browsers was a painful and difficult process, in part because of the limitations of most mobile browsers. Today, thanks to the proliferation of WebKit (which powers the browsers on the iPhone, Android and webOS devices, with BlackBerry expected to join the mix next year), it’s much easier to decide on a strategy for making your website pop on mobile platforms.
We’ve put together a toolkit of resources for the designer and non-designer alike to get you started. Did we miss your favorite tool or service? Let us know in the comments!
If you don’t have experience with HTML and CSS (or you don’t have the time), there are a number of services that can create mobile versions of your website for you.
MoFuse and MoFuse Premium — MoFuse has been offering a simple way for bloggers and businesses to easily create mobile versions of their websites for quite some time. For bloggers or smaller sites, the company offers MoFuse for Blogs, which is a free and easy way to quickly mobilize your web site (it uses your RSS feed to generate the new site) whenever it is accessed by going to “m.yourdomain.com.” For businesses or larger sites that want a little more control, MoFuse Premium offers more customizable options.
Disclosure: MoFuse powers Mashable’s mobile website.
Mippin — Mippin is another free service that can create a quick mobile version of your website using your RSS feed. The options aren’t extensive, but the version that Mippin creates should be viewable on almost any WAP compatible mobile phone.
mobiSiteGalore — mobiSiteGalore can create quick mobile versions of websites, offers users some customization options, and can take advantage of the .mobi TLD. mobiSiteGalore will let you create your mobile site from a computer or from your phone.
Having a WAP-formatted site is fine, but if you want to be able to offer visitors from an iPhone or Android device some really great optimized mobile features, you want to consider creating a separate stylesheet for your website. For users of WordPress and other publishing systems, there are a lot of plugin options available that make adding a mobile theme to your site extremely easy.
WPtouch — WPtouch is a fantastic plugin available for WordPress.org users (WordPress.com users can also take advantage of WPtouch with the recent addition of mobile themes) that automatically makes your site easy to read and access from an iPhone or Android device.
The plugin is extremely robust and even offers backend features like the ability to set an iPhone Favicon (so that when users add your web page to their iPhone’s home screen, it has a great looking icon), the ability to work with other WordPress plugins like FlickrRSS and Blip.it, support for AJAX, customized headers, and more. What I really like about WPtouch is that users can choose to turn it off and access the full version of a website at any time by flicking the mobile on/off switch at the bottom of each page.
WordPress Mobile Edition – Crowd Favorite created this plugin that allows users to easily define what type of devices should be shown a mobile web page (and what shouldn’t — for instance if you want BlackBerry users to see your mobile page but you want iPhone users to see the full site) and it comes with Crowd Favorite’s Carrington Mobile Theme which is easy on the eyes and also fully customizable.
WordPress Mobile Pack — The WordPress Mobile Pack is from the dotMobi team and it is a whole suite of tools for mobile web optimization. It includes a base mobile theme, which is very attractive, a mobile admin panel, mobile ad support and the option for visitors to switch between the full and mobile versions of a website.
WPtap — WPtap is a plugin for WordPress, and the site also offers up some alternative themes for users who want a more customized look and feel to add to their sites. WPtap looks very similar to WPtouch, but the emphasis seems to be on offering pre-built mobile styles.
WordPress Mobile by Mobify — This is a plugin for the Mobify service (see description in the next section). It handles automatic redirection of mobile clients to your Mobify mobile view page.
Mobile Plugin for Drupal — Mobile Plugin offers Drupal sites a mobile optimized view, comes with a mobile version of the standard Drupal Garland theme and includes device detection, hooks for adding mobile-specific features and automatic YouTube mobile replacement.
OSMOBI — OSMOBI is a service and plugin for Joomla and Drupal users that makes it easy to customize your blog for mobile visitors. The service is free for 150 page views every day but premium plans are also available.
Mobify — Mobify is a really interesting service because it makes it easy for designers or users who know HTML and CSS to painlessly modify and optimize their website for mobile access. The service is free (though paid monthly plans are available for more features) and it works extremely well with systems like WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine and any other system that has predictable URL patterns and well formed HTML.
Mobify has a visual editor that lets you see what your content looks like on different device types and you can then modify the CSS and see the changes in real-time. Some sites that have used Mobify to create mobile optimized versions of their content include A List Apart and revered web developers and designers, such as Jonathan Snook and Veerle Pieters.
iPhoney — iPhoney from Marketcircle gives Mac users a pixel-accurate web browsing environment that is powered by Safari. Why does this matter? Because when crafting the mobile version of your site, it’s important to be able to see how the final product will look on your phone. iPhoney hasn’t been updated in a while but is still a really useful tool.
iWebKit — iWebKit is a framework of sorts for creating iPhone-optimized websites or web apps that can take advantage of the iPhone’s UI elements and other features.
jQTouch — jQTouch is a really innovative jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone and iPod touch. With it you can create websites or web apps with animations, support for forms, customized UI elements, additional extensions, swipe controls, and more. The developer is really active with the project and some of the stuff you can do with it is amazing.
iPhone Compatible CSS Layouts — Matthew James Taylor created a bunch of liquid CSS layouts that are iPhone and iPod Touch compatible and free for anyone to use. If you’re looking for a starting point for building a mobile optimized site, you might want to give these layouts a look.
CSSiPhone — CSSiPhone is a CSS gallery dedicated to iPhone optimized site designs. Like Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal!”
Opera Mobile Developer Community — As some of our commenters pointed out, the Opera browser lets you see what a website will look like on a mobile handset by pressing Shift-F11. Also check out Opera’s developer documentation for optimizing pages to be viewed on mobile devices. Opera Mobile and Opera Mini is a common browser on many cellular phones.
October 18th, 2009 admin Posted in Google Products, Web Design, marketing No Comments »
There are many ways to enter your website… whether through search engines, typing in the URL, or links from other sites. No matter the size of the business, management often does not have a clue how many people visit their website. Far too frequently, web design customers are very involved during development, but turn into no-shows after launch. Shopping sites that sell online can gauge effectiveness loosely based on sales. Other B2B and B2C firms that depend on their websites to generate qualified prospects might receive leads through web forms. But in either case, these businesses are missing out on the big picture if they neglect to analyze rich traffic data.
Start with your web host
Most commercial hosting providers include some web traffic application that uses web logs to measure monthly, weekly, daily and even hourly visits to your website. These metrics include hits, page views or impressions, unique visitors, and other vital information. MH1 Hosting includes this service on all of our Linux with cPanel host packages. Even when customers know where to locate their traffic reports, they find the terms and metrics confusing. It’s important to your Internet marketing effort to understand your traffic statistics. It lets you measure who is visiting your web site, where they came from, and what they do when they get there. To make better use of this data, we refer some clients to Google Analytics.
What is Google Analytics (GA)
In short, GA is a traffic measurement application that emails results to you every Monday. It is free, convenient, and easy to manage through Google’s web interface. GA requires registration for a free Google account and some copying and pasting of html code on the pages of your website that you wish to track. The simple presentation of key information is a pleasure to use compared to most hosting web traffic applications. The layout is easier to follow and links to help, definitions and related Google content makes GA superior to many competitors. As an alternative, also consider some of the leading paid, commercial metric services, such as Haveamint.com that offer still more advanced features and customization.
Advantages of Google Analytics:
How can you use this information?
GA emails you a detailed report in PDF form every Monday or you can login anytime to your account to study your website metrics. Use this newly generated information to:
Whether a small one-person venture or a large business enterprise, you must know how your company website performs as part of your overall marketing strategy. Accurate, informative web traffic statistics give you the hard evidence you need to be successful. Google Analytics offers one budget-friendly solution that can help many marketers reach their goals. Let us know if MH1 Web Design can help you implement Google Analytics today.