Websites & SEO

Your website is the hub of your online presence

Today you can have multiple different web profiles and pages. Facebook and Twitter are only a couple of examples of platforms which you can use to solidify your online presence. Sometimes I see brands using mainly a Facebook page or Etsy sellers having their shop and profile as the main source of information. Using these services may seem as a good idea and a way to save money and other resources. There are several problems with this approach. For one there are lots of people who don't want to use certain services such as Facebook. Using your Facebook page as the main source of information e...

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Anatomy of a website: Kauneustoimittajien yhdistys

The website of the association of Finnish beauty journalists was badly outdated. It had been built on WordPress but unfortunately any of it parts hadn't been updated in years. It was running on old version of WordPress and the theme looked old. It was time for a dust up. The original colouring which included pink and purple didn't fit the wishes of the current members of the association. Most of the basic content was already there, only some of the structure was to be changed. The members listing and advertisement section needed to be rebuilt. The original members listing didn't include phot...

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Using sliders on websites

Browsing around websites, especially commercial kind, you are likely to see sliders, carousels, rotators. They are those areas which have usually images, sometimes text and the content rotates automatically. Sliders are most often used to promote the website owner's skills, services of the company or the products of a web store. I think sliders are a really bad idea and they are most often used for all the wrong reasons. Accessibility and usability issues As with any content that relies on images, sliders create issues with accessibility. Especially for people with any scale of blindness a...

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Create your own Tweet this and Twitter follow links

If you have a Twitter button or widget on your website you are already using Twitter Web Intents. Also if you are using a third party service or plugin to create a Click-To-Tweet or Tweet this link on your website they most likely are created using something called Web Intents. But you don't have to use a Twitter widget or a service or plugin to create your own Web Intents. You can create them very easily by creating simple text (or image if you like) links on your blog posts, sidebar and more. The reason why you might want to consider using these "handmade" intents instead of using the widget...

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Use the words, not images

Using images in place of text content is one of the mistakes I see constantly on websites designed and built by someone who's not that familiar with web design and it's techniques in general. Very often the calls of action are made to look pretty by turning the whole thing, including the text, background and the button, into one image. Testimonials pages tend to be the biggest offenders. Making them look the way the website owner hopes may be a bit over the league of the person who built the page. And then there are the about pages, which the website owner wanted to look really fancy. The prob...

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The poor misunderstood bounce rate

Quite popular and highly valued bloggers keep sharing misinformation about bounce rate. According to them it means the time your audience members spend time on your site. Bounce rate has very little to do with the time and in most cases it has nothing to do with it. A person can spend half an hour on your site and still create a bounce. I have wrote about this subject before, and I guess I'll have to keep writing until people stop spreading the misinformation. In reality bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter your website through one page and leave the site through that same p...

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Merged

Last night I worked until around 5 AM to merge my blog and work site. As a result the blog is now also Made In Helmikuu. You can find it, the extras, my portfolio and information about my services easily from the same site. Due to this change I also changed the blog post urls, but the old ones will redirect to the new addresses. Additionally all the urls of http://mervi.helmikuu.net are now pointed to http://helmikuu.net. The blog is on it's on section on the site and the front page is concentrated to my web design stuff. I'll add other things there as soon as possible, but right now that'...

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