CT Website Design

The CT Website Design Blog Has Moved To:
http://www.ct-website-design.com/CT-Website-design-blog/

Essential Tips for Effective Website Design

Here are some essential web design tips that every website should follow. Design your website by following the list below and I guarantee that all visitors will have a terrific first impression of your website.
•Fast Loading website designs:
The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load. Try out our tips to build a great looking web site that also loads fast.


•Clear Navigation :
Once a visitor has come to your website you need to make want to go through it. To do this you need to have clear navigation. If your main navigation is unclear, there is a good chance that a reader will not be able to find other topics that they may be interested in. Use a clear and concise navigation, with no more than 7-10 categories. Once you go past 10, it gives the reader too many options to choose from and can get confusing.


•Design For All Monitor Resolutions:
Today, there are computers with all kinds of resolution. They range from 640 x 480 to 1920 x 1080 and can go even higher. Designing a website to fit all screen resolutions is a very important web design principle. Perhaps you’ve noticed that most websites are designed for only one resolution. They may look perfect in 800 x 600 resolution but if viewed in 1024 x 768 resolution, the pages look a little empty with a lot of wasted, empty space surrounding the main object on the page.


•Browser Compatibility:
Make sure your website is browser compatible. Your web site should look good in Firefox as well as in Internet Explorer. Don't stop designing your site as soon as you find that it looks great on IE. Usually Firefox gives some problems, especially when you try doing complicated HTML designs. But don't give up too quick, usually with patience these problems can easily be fixed.


•Readability:
Avoid dark backgrounds and fancy font styles, if you have a lot of stuff to read on your web pages it's better to stick to a white background with black print as that will be less tiring to read. Arial, Verdana and Times Roman are the most common fonts to use and the easiest to read. Oh and yes one other thing - not everyone has 20/20 vision, make your font size is big enough for most people to read comfortably.


•Check for broken links:
Always check for broken links within a website before uploading it to your web server. In Dreamweaver you can check for broken links by right clicking on any file in the Site Files Window and then clicking on Check links -> Entire Site. If you don't have this program then you need to upload your site and then check it using online tools like:◦Xenu Link Sleuth (free download)
◦w3.org (free online)
◦NetMechanic ($60 per url/ year 1-100 pages)

•W3C validation:
To make standard compliant website, I always validate my markup and CSS on w3C.
http://validator.w3.org/ – Validating markup
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ – Validating CSS


Connecticut Website Design

The best thing about the Web is the fact that anyone with an idea and some spare time can create a website for practically fnothing. A simple Website costs about $1 a day to operate. This means that there are millions of different ideas out there being tried every day. Websites can reach a gigantic world-wide audience almost instantly -- at no other time in the history of the world has a single human being been able to reach so many people for so little money.

So you have an idea for a website. What do you need to do to get started? There are a couple different types of websites so Let's take a look at them.

Let's say that you have an idea for a Web site, and you have a great domain name that you want to use. You aren't sure when you will be able to get started on the site, but you want to make sure that nobody else gets the idea and takes that domain name. For example, let's say that your domain name is MyDomain.com. What you want to do is check the domain name registry and make sure it's not already taken. If it is available, you will want to register that domain name (also known as "reserving" or "parking" the domain name). Registering the name gives you ownership of it. In order for you to park the domain name, it has to actually live on a server somewhere. It will usually have some sort of "Under Construction" notice that shows up when people try to access your domain.

You need to register your domain name. There are many companies that will park your domain name on a server, and a number of them charge a fee. GoDaddy is one of the companies that will park your domain name, and it provides a nice form that makes it easy to check for domain name availability. It only takes a couple of minutes to check and reserve a domain name.

Let's say that you have a great idea for a content site and that you want to get started right away. A content site is a site that contains information for people to read or look at. The information might be words, pictures, links, etc. Yahoo! is essentially a gigantic content site. To create a content site, you need to learn HTML so you can create your pages, and then you need to find a company to host the site. That is, you need a company that will operate the Web server for your site:

Or maybe you have an idea for an e-commerce site. An e-commerce site lets you display the things you want to sell, take orders, process credit cards, etc. An e-commerce site is a bit more involved to set up because you have to apply for a merchant account and other commerce-related services. However, it's not that much trouble.

Good luck and happy coding!

Connecticut Website Design

What Is Google Page Rank

Google's most mysterious ranking influencer, the Google PageRank, has been the topic of to many discussions and observations. The way that Google PageRank calculation works is still not 100% clear, but I thought it might be useful to translate the concept of the original mechanism down in plain English and show it using a simple example. For the remainder of this article we will refer to Page Rank as "PR"

Google PR is calculated for every webpage that exists in Google's database. It's real value varies from 0,15 to infinite, but for representation purposes it is converted to a value between 0 - 10 ( low - high). The calculation of the PR for a page is based on the quantity and quality of webpages that contain links to that page.

According to Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page, Co-founders of Google, the PR of a webpage is calculated using this formula:


PR(A) = (1 - d) + d * SUM ((PR(I->A)/C(I))

Where:
•PR(A) is the PageRank of your page A.
•d is the damping factor, usually set to 0,85.
•PR(I->A) is the PageRank of page I containing a link to page A.
•C(I) is the number of links off page I.
•PR(I->A)/C(I) is a PR-value page A receives from page I.
•SUM (PR(I->A)/C(I)) is the sum of all PR-values page A receives from pages with links to page A..


In other words the PR of a page is determined by the PR of every page I that has a link to page A. For every page I that points to page A, the PR of page I is devided by the number of links from page I. These values are cumulated and multiplied by 0,85. Finally 0,15 is added to this result, and this number represents the PR of page A.

To illustrate how this calculation works we defined the following simplified example.

Example:

In this example we use an imaginary Google database containing four pages that all have an initial PR value of 1 (above formula needs an assumed start PR value for every page). The four pages have the linkstructure as shown in the first picture. In practice Google calculates the PageRank for billions of pages. Our model is simplified to show the evaluation of a PageRank.




To determine the PR for pages A to D the formula has to be executed several times. For every calculation we use the PR results of the former calculation. In this example the final PageRanks are found after 20 iterations. The next picture shows the calculated PR for every page in our model.



Have a look at this spreadsheet to find the calculation model.

Dmoz.org and Yahoo

Finally I would like to mention two special sites that influence the Google PageRank of your webpage. Inclusions in the Open Directory Project and Yahoo! directories (www.dmoz.org and www.yahoo.com) seem to offer your site an extra boost in the PageRank calculation. A clear explanation for their influence is unknown to most of us, but it is obvious that a top-10 listing shows many sites that are included in the Google Directory. And this Google directory is a copy of the Dmoz.org database. Therefore I recommend you to get listed in both directories.

PS: Use the Google toolbar to determine the PR of webpages.

CT Website Design

The New "Connecticut Website Design" site is finally done. You can visit it at http://www.ct-website-design.com. Your feedback is welcomed.