Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.

However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case..

(author unknown)

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The post Just Build Me a Great Website appeared first on Web design in Virginia, since 1999.

They’re visual spam, and only serve to distract and annoy your visitors. Imagine if you walked into a store, and the clerks handed you flyers as you walked in the door, out the door, and up and down every aisle. Pretty darn annoying, no? Would you go back? I sure wouldn’t.

So why is it suddenly OK to do it to your website visitors? It’s not – it reeks of desperation. “Please, PLEASE, look at this special offer – if you don’t buy NOW, we’ll be out of business!!” Not someplace I want to establish a long-term relationship with.

And it confuses a lot of people who don’t realize that extra windows are popping up all over. Instead, put your specials in a well-created graphic on your home page (or every page). Write compelling copy, and draw visitors to your specials by offering them all the great benefits of your products or services.

If you’re so desperate for advertising revenue from these third-party services, you should probably not be in business, as your own services are not compelling enough. Take your website out back and put it out of its misery, and then call in a professional website development firm, who will craft a website that informs, entertains and drives sales to you, all without those damn pop-ups!

The post Popups, Unders and Overs appeared first on Web design in Virginia, since 1999.

Pilgrims turned out to be quite a disruptive force, from the Native American point of view, and one they did not see coming.

10 years ago, Google was a yet another search engine in a sea of engines (alta vista, yahoo, excite, hotbot, AOL, Microsoft, etc). Now, they own the market, and websites need to follow their lead and guidelines if they want to achieve relevant rankings.

5 years ago, Facebook was yet another social profile site, along with mySpace, Friendster, Bebo, various dating sites. Now, it too owns its niche market, despite the best efforts of Google and others.

A year ago, no one heard of Pinterest – now it’s the new, hot, darling of the social sharing world.

Disruptive technology changes come out of the blue, and hit hard and fast – and leave a lot of carnage in their wake. You need a great web design and development firm to help you see what’s coming, understand how it will affect your website and business, and plot a course to ride the wake!

I know I can create a great website for you – but you need to call, to get the ball rolling. And you don’t have to ask ‘Mother May I’ – yes, you may!

The post Mayflowers! appeared first on Web design in Virginia, since 1999.

If you’ve ever found yourself asking any of these questions, you’re not alone. After building a great website, one of the first things people start asking is ‘Ok, now what? What’s happening?’ It’s a fair set of questions, and we’re going to help with some common vocabulary and descriptions for all the terms you might encounter when looking at web traffic statistics.

First off, in order to track visitor usage patterns on your website, please don’t use one of those external counter things (‘hosted by some other company!’) since they slow down your website load times, and can leave you with an ugly red box (or a broken page) if they don’t load properly. Plus, why reveal your visitor count to the world? That’s for your eyes only.

In fact, you don’t need any external counters – your web server (the computer that ‘serves’ your website to the world when people click on your pages) keeps track of a lot of details for every visit of every page of your website. This information is very hard to interpret in its raw form (lots and lots of numbers and special codes). But that’s server talk, and we don’t speak ‘server’ – so we rely on software to massage and collect all that information into reports we mere humans can understand. A great website host will provide you with a link to these humanreadable reports as part of their hosting package. Make sure you have a great host for your great website! (hint hint)

So once you have access to these reports, what are they telling you? In short, they provide a lot of information, some of it quite valuable, and some of it completely ignorable.

The goal here is to explain what’s important, what you can ignore, and what value these statistics can provide to you as a website owner.

To get started, let’s provide a few definitions of common terms you’ll see on a typical traffic analysis page:

Hits

This is the smallest measurable unit of action in the world of web statistics. It’s also the most overrated and confused, and actually can be ignored.

A hit is any request by a web browser (the software used to see websites) for any piece of your website. For example, if your home page has 5 graphics on it, plus 3 other extra files, anyone visiting your home page would cause 9 hits to be cataloged (one for the page itself, and another 8 for all the assets and pieces of that page).

So a website with many graphics on any page could register thousands of ‘hits’ a day, while the same website redone with just a handful of graphics might show a lower ‘hit rate’.

In short, ignore this – there’s no value to you.

Files

The next step up from a hit is a call for a file. Most of the time this is one and the same (a request for a file, like a photo, or logo, or an acrobat document) causes both a hit request and a file request to be logged. Sometimes, a hit is for a nonfile item, (and we’ll avoid that level of detail for another day, just trust me on this), so ‘hits’ is usually a larger value than ‘files’. But both are equally worthless in determining traffic patterns and usage, so again, feel free to ignore.

Pages (a.k.a. Page Views)

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere!

A page request (or page view) is a call to the server for a specific page on your website. Your home page is one page, your about us is another, and each of your product pages all count as separate pages. This is great information to know, because now you can see how many pages people are looking at over time. More importantly, most online traffic viewers will show popular pages (most requested) from highest to lowest number of requests. This tells you what sections of your website are most trafficked, and what areas might need to be worked on (better content, more exposure in the menu or from other popular pages).

By looking at page popularity, you can focus in on what works and what doesn’t for your visitors (they vote with every visit!). From there, you can improve (or drop) the underperformers, and increase your return on investment.

Are the popular pages trumpeting your special offers, or linking to other areas you want people to know about? Are your underperformers in need of fresh new content?

Entry / Exit Pages

Now that we know what a page is, and can see the top visited pages, another area to look at is entry and exit pages. If you had an actual, physical building that represented your business, this would similar to the first (and last) product someone looked at when they arrived (and left) your store.

Popular entry pages are good to know, since you can tailor your message or specials or content for the people just arriving to your website, while exit pages can be reviewed for bad performance, or as the endjourney on typical visits, and again, your special offer can be reiterated on popular exit pages (one last chance before they leave to get them to take action on your website).

Visitors (Unique and Repeat), (a.k.a. Sites)

Every web browser that visits your website comes with a unique identifier, known as an IP address. We’ll skip the complexities of what that means, but they look something like this: 192.168.34.5 (four sets of three numbers from 0 to 256).

Some visitors have static IP addresses (they remain the same across all visits), while others are assigned IP addresses from a pool that their service provider has when that visitor logs into the internet (EX: AOL and other ISPs do this for their members). So the same AOL member could visit your site 5 times in a week, and each time would look like a different person, since their IP address is probably different. Conversely, people browsing from their office probably all share a common IP address (their connection to the internet, or Site), so they all look like the *same* visitor to you.

(sigh)

But that’s OK – we’re looking for trends, not pinpoint accuracy. We want to see that the overall visitor count is rising over time, and hopefully that corresponds with an increase in revenues from your website.

Referrers (a.k.a. Referring Sites)

Referring sites are those that send you traffic. Most of the time, it’s your own website (when someone clicks from one page to another within your site). The rest are from other sites that have your website link as part of their pages – usually a search engine, or perhaps a website you traded a link with, or one that linked to you because they liked your content or a specific page.

Links from other *quality* sites (especially the search engines) are quite valuable and great for traffic, since they’re a recommendation or ‘personal referral’ from the website they came from. And search engine traffic is always appreciated.

Search Strings

When a web visitor uses a search engine (like Google or Yahoo) to find your website, they type in a phrase (‘great web sites’) that reflects what they are looking for. If the search engine matches a page in your website to the entered phrase, you show up on the search engine results page. If the visitor then clicks on that link, and winds up on your website, the traffic reporter will show that visit as coming from the search engine (the referrer) and the Search String will be the phrase they typed to find you.

This is very valuable information to know, since it shows you a few different things:

• what are people using to find you – which might be very different from how you view your own website content.
• how search engines have indexed your website.

You might be surprised at what search strings appear in your results, since you might not have optimized for those terms in your content. Or conversely, content you did optimize for does not show up, since people are not using the phrases you think would work. And search engines only index on the content they can see, so if you want to be found under a given search string, but never mention that string in your content, keep dreaming!

Browsers, and Operating Systems (a.k.a User Agents)

A few other more ‘techie’ statistics are what browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, many others) people are using to view your website, and what operating system they have installed (Windows, Mac, Linux). Only the hardcore techies really worry about these values but it’s a good idea to eyeball them once in a while, to make sure your website looks great in the more popular browsers (Internet Explorer commands a large percentage, but others are growing market share every day) coming your way.

Also, here is where you can see which search engine spiders (the software agents that visit your website and index your content) are visiting, and how often. Good to know.

In Summary:

There’s a lot to look at, and a lot of terms to consider. But don’t let it all overwhelm you – once you understand the terms above (print this out as a handy guide) and review your statistics on a weekly basis, it soon becomes easy to eyeball the report and spot the trends.

• What sections are popular, or not? Can we fix the underperformers?
• What search engine terms are people using to find us? Is that what we expect?
• Is our traffic coming from other websites, or search results, or directly entered in the address bar?
• Is our traffic trending upward or downward? How does that correspond with revenues (or followup calls for more information) over the same time period?

The post Website Statistics Explained in Plain English! appeared first on Web design in Virginia, since 1999.

The solution is simple – don’t use an image in the background of your web pages. Or, if you must, make sure your text is readable on top of the wallpaper. Some images won’t work, as is, no matter what color text you try. This is because the image itself has so much contrast within its colors – they’re all over the spectrum.

If you want to use an image as a background, either fade it out, to the point where it becomes a watermark, or darken it to where it’s almost a shadow of itself. This created a low contrast image, and then you can find a text color that complements the low-contract background (if the image is faded to white, a dark color text will usually work, and vice verse).

The post Textured Backgrounds appeared first on Web design in Virginia, since 1999.

With millions of websites available today, web surfers need help finding sites that are relevant to whatever topic or subject they are looking for. These potential customers turn to search engines millions of times a day for help. If you are not listed in the top 30 results for a given keyword or phrase, you probably won’t be found by your potential customers. Achieving those top rankings is the Holy Grail of search engine placement. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of confusion, misinformation and outright deception going on in the marketplace today.

Search engine placement is a weird science at best. There are lots of myths and rumors and no one can say for sure where you will wind up ranking, except the snake oil salesmen…. You’ve seen the pitches: sites that promise to submit your site to 5,000 search engines for just $79.95 a year, or that guarantee top 10 placement in all the popular engines.

It’s all false statements and inflated promises, and also an easy way to get on the spam mailing lists of thousands of unscrupulous companies!

That said, here’s what we’ve learned through careful but commonsense research and study:

There are two types of search engines out there: robot-based indexes and human-fed directories. Ask, Google and Bing/Microsoft are examples of robot driven sites; they have software robots, or spiders, that find your site and index the content, and attempt to classify your site based on the keywords and phrases they find throughout your site.

Human-fed directories are populated by human editors who will review all sites submitted to them by web owners, and then decide where to place a given site into the categories that they think best apply. Yahoo Directory & About.com are 2 examples of the latter.

Search engine submission used to be free, but in the last few years , the economics of the Internet have shifted, and now almost all relevant search engines charge some sort of fee to be indexed (with no guarantee of any high ranking, the fee is just to be considered for inclusion!). Considering the costs involved, it makes sense to have a professional service review your site, and optimize your chances of achieving a high ranking in the engines. There are a lot of valuable tweaks and adjustments that a knowledgeable firm can provide to a given website that will provide the engines with a better understanding and access to your site’s content. Why waste your time and money on submission, if you have a site that’s not optimized and ready to be indexed?

Also keep in mind there are only a handful of truly relevant search engines – those other 5,000 (or more!) engines some “submission experts” mention are little more than email address gatherers, set up to capture spam targets. Think of your own experiences – how many search engines can you name? And how much more spam do you really need?

No one can guarantee you any position or ranking, as no one has any control over how a given search engine will view your content and relevancy. Too many dirty tricks have left the search engine systems very wary and very sensitive to any attempts at manipulating their rankings. And if any trickery is detected, your website could be banned for life!

Meta Tags mean nothing!

Or at least the keyword metatag, which so many ‘experts’ claim to be the Holy Grail of placement. What is a metatag? It’s a small bit of code that is added to your web page, which visitors to the site cannot see, but search engine spiders can. These meta tags were supposed to be used as summaries and keyword directories for the content of a page or site.

Since visitors cannot see them, a website programmer could put any terms they wanted into the meta tags. Imagine looking for a site on Brittany Spears, seeing a link in a search engine, click through, and finding yourself at a site about gardening, or worse, a porn site! For this reason, almost all quality search engines ignore meta tags, and instead index what regular visitors see: the content of the site! Doesn’t that make a lot more sense? We think so.

Please read ‘Death of a Meta Tag’ for more information about the Keyword metatag.

The only meta tag worth mentioning is the ‘description’ tag. While in the same boat as the ‘keyword’ tag (unseen by visitors, defined by website owner), it has some value to an engine, in that it is this description that a search engine uses when returning a result back from a search. You know the sentence you can click on after you enter a search term, which takes you to a given site? That’s usually the description metatag for the site, or if not found, the title of the site. We’ll help make sure your description and title tags are set up properly.

The best way to get good rankings is to provide good content that is helpful to your visitors, and is keyword or keyphrase rich for the search engine spiders. Think about how you would ‘find yourself’ (find your product or service if you DID NOT KNOW YOU EXISTED – how Zen!) in a search engine, and lookup those phrases – see what other sites appear, and what content they present to the visitor. From there, you can figure out how best to approach your own content and search engine preparations.

For more great information about Search Engines, you can visit searchenginewatch.com or seomoz.org Here, you’ll find links to all the popular search engines, and submission guidelines for each, as well as articles, tools, SEO marketplace – all sorts of great resources.

The post Search Engine Snake Oil appeared first on Web design in Virginia, since 1999.

What’s optimization, you say? It’s the process of making the image as small in filesize as possible (smaller filesize = faster download) while still maintaining a certain level of clarity and crispness. This is usually done through compression, which almost any image editing software will do, if asked nicely.

Too many times, I have visited websites where the images are scanned in lifesize or photos are dumped directly from the digital camera to the web. Beginner web designers don’t realize the images are so large, because they seem to appear instantly when testing the website on their own machines. Well, of course they do – they’re already ‘downloaded’ to your hard drive! And to make matters worse, a lot of drag and drop website software will allow you to place an image on a web page without optimizing it. The image may ‘look’ small, but all you really did was ‘virtually’ resize it with web code (HTML), not actually resize it with proper compression and optimization.

The key here is to learn how to use your graphics software (PhotoShop, Fireworks, anything that edits images), apply the proper amount of compression and select the proper resolution.

JPG compression is as much art as science – there is no set value that works for all images. Play around with the compression settings, and look for the best combination of compression percentage (higher percentage means ‘less’ compression) and clarity – If you apply too much compression, the image will become very blocky or blurry.

With careful planning, compression and resolution changes, you can achieve huge savings in file size (and subsequent bandwidth / transmission costs) for your website. Smaller sizes mean faster downloads, and faster downloads means a more responsive and customer-friendly website. That almost always turns into higher profits, as people stick around to see your info and don’t click away while they wait for an image that will never appear!

The post Non-optimized photos appeared first on Web design in Virginia, since 1999.