Websites & SEO
Do make me think!
15 years ago a book called Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug became THE book about web usability and human-computer interaction. Its idea was to simply explain how good programs and websites are direct and easy to use. It was in the mandatory reading for all the web designers, from beginners to advanced ones as well as it was sold as the book to give to your boss for reading. The book became incredibly popular and the second, updated edition was published 2005, which I happen to own myself. The third edition seems to have been published last year. Krug is a usability professional and the b...
Speed up your website
Speed is amongst the most important issues of a website. The performance of a site is especially important when using web with mobile devices outside full speed Wi-Fi connections is getting more common. Faster websites are much more user friendly and speeding up your site is one of the easy ways to improve its search engine visibility. Begin your process by testing your site with Google's PageSpeed Insights. It will give you two scores, one for mobile and one for desktop, between 0 and 100. If it happens that your score is above 85 it means your site is performing very well and anything ab...
Does bounce rate affect search ranking?
When you search information about bounce rate you will sooner or later stumble upon an article claiming it affects your search ranking and is a search engine optimisation (SEO) issue. These stories always point out that yes, Google folks have said bounce rate doesn't affect search ranking, but they are probably lying. At this point you are thinking, yes, they must be lying. Those data mining bastards who keep bombing you with adverts which don't interest you. Of course they are lying about this, because uh I don't know. I'd say Google has nothing to gain by saying bounce rate doesn't affect...
The human factor in analytics
It's the beginning of a new year. Your website has had a bad bunch of weeks, your sales are low and you are getting very little contacts about your services. You panic and ask if you are in trouble. Maybe you should shut your site down, make some changes or hey, perhaps you had made some changes and now nothing's working. Yeah, you got to change things back to how they were. If you are a blogger you know how easy it is to get too involved with the measurements. You look at the bounce rate and misunderstand it terribly, you compare your success to yesterday, day before that, or the previous...
Choosing colours for a website
One big part of web design and web based branding is the colour palette of the site. I see lots of "web designers" creating websites for their clients using the same theme: White background, black text, simple black and white logo and maybe one accent colour. They probably use a (bought) WordPress theme as a base and just slap the design elements on it without really doing any design work. This results to a huge bunch of websites which look the same, feel the same and generally don't really stand up from the crowd. Colours are an easy way to set a website apart, at least when they are used tho...
Quick SEO tips for bloggers
Search Engine Optimisation is the thing. Half of bloggers seem to think they are SEO experts and the other half want to be better with it. Since before googling became something we do when we search for things online we were already playing the game of trying to get our sites on the top of certain searches. Then it was easy. Only using a word or expression on your site was close to sure way to get it to the top of the searches. But things have changed. Now there are multitudes of websites and they have tons of articles and pages on them. The search engines are now "smarter" and they use comp...
About 404 error pages
One of the most overlooked aspect of website design and development are the error pages. Common errors on otherwise working websites are 403 and 404. The first one happens when a website visitor tries to get into a page to which they have no permissions. It's a status code 403 Forbidden, which the server sends to the web page. For instance they could try and access a page in the administration area without being logged in to the administration. Or perhaps they have logged in, but don't have the required access to certain parts of the administration. The latter error, 404 or Not Found...
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