News
Archive for the ‘User Experience’ Category
5. Your website is Flash based
- As a best practice your main business website should not be completely in Flash. Now, this does not mean you have to swear off using any Flash within your site. Having Flash modules to add interactivity to your site is perfectly appropriate if you want to simulate how a certain product functions or a process. A couple issues with having an entirely Flash website are:
- Search engines view an all Flash site as one file, meaning there is not the same opportunity to optimize different pages for different keywords, titles and descriptions.
- Flash files, particularly those using sound effects, embedded movies or bitmap images, may take some time to load. How fast it takes your website to load is a factor in how Google will ranks your page.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Alternatively, I could go look up your restaurant on Yelp and not get fooled at all.
Yelp is a website with social aspects that allows people to rate and write reviews for stores, restaurants, bars, hair salons, barbers, dentists, doctors and pretty much any business I’ve missed. You can look a place up to find reviews and leave a review after you’ve been to a place. That’s the whole premise.
If you haven’t noticed yet, we designed and developed a new Media Genesis website. As you already know, we are a website development company, so keeping up with trends and new technology was a must for this site. Our goals were to have more collaborative content, the ability to easily update the site and simplicity in design.
So, want to find out how we accomplished these goals?
(more…)
Go ahead, Google your company‘s name — do you like the results?
Organizations undergoing redesigns recognize the importance of their online presence, and managing it has become a full-time career for many. What’s the advantage of rooting social media directly into your website, anyway? Shouldn’t it be enough to show up in Google search results?
One advantage is centralizing and confirming all sources of your company’s online presence. This recognition enforces an image of complete transparency. Users need to know if they can trust you. They want to see how you interact with the public. By placing links to Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. on your site, you’re showing you’ve got nothing to hide.
You’re afraid the average Internet user – a slightly attention-deficit, click-happy web surfer – will never pick up on what your website is all about. Their eyes are dashing around, judging whether or not your site is worth their time.
Unfortunately, this fear leads to the desire to cram every bit of significant information onto the screen as it pops up. A bit of classic newspaper journalism terminology, above the fold refers to exactly that – the content area above the creased fold of a printed newspaper.
The time has come. The time is now. Internet Explorer 6, will you please go now?!
Much like Dr. Suess’s beloved Marvin K. Mooney, it is getting to be about time that IE6 went. It will be a solemn passing of once a mega-browser whose life has spanned much longer than we could ever imagine.
It seems like just yesterday that IE6 came packaged with Windows XP. It was a savior. It was newer, faster and prettier. Who didn’t love that default “Luna” theme that came with a shiny new install of XP? It wasn’t just good looks and that little extra zip that made IE6 great. At the time DHTML enhancements, content restricted inline frames, a fancy media bar, Windows Messenger integration and automatic image resizing made IE6 the darling of web. Well, until 2003 that is. (more…)
In the second half of last year, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer series continued to fight it out with Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari (among others), web giant Google quietly but confidently waded into the fray with their new browser: Chrome. And while Microsoft and the other competitors fought for supremacy to view the web, Google’s intent was significantly larger – to change how you use your computer.
Cloud technology – that is Google’s aim: The idea that your applications and programs do not need to be hosted, supported and run by your operating system from your personal computer any more but rather, that they can exist on the web. The concept that you no longer have to buy, install and run a word processing – or any other – program when you can go to a website and write/save/print/publish everything on the spot.
It would be easy to make an argument that development of a mobile website is a frivolous endeavor, considering the advancement in mobile browser capabilities. However, the reality is that even with the ability of some smart phones to view web pages intended for desktop browsing, it is still a necessity to have a mobile-friendly aspect to your website.
Phone-based browsing is becoming too much of a presence to ignore. On-the-go connectivity isn’t just knocking on the door of technology, it’s letting itself in.
A war is raging with new lines, territories and allegiances being created every day. It is the Browser War, the fight for “usage share,” or what particular browser people are using the most. The browser war traces its roots back to the start of the Internet with Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – once the overwhelming choice, finds itself under attack from all sides.
Internet historians consider the battle today the second ‘browser war.’ The first is generally accepted to be the rivalry that exploded in the mid to late 1990s between Netscape and Microsoft. Microsoft’s development of Internet Explorer (IE) versions one through five (and its subsequent addition to all Windows platforms upon installation) nearly eliminated the competition. By 2002, IE had 95% of the user share. The war had ended.
