Web Development

1) Usability testing doesn’t have to be a huge task. Having five users test your site will catch most of the problems on your website before launch. The biggest issues are usually caught by the first one or two users and the rest of the users will usually confirm their findings. Any testing is better than none.

2) Users make purchases from websites based on perceived security, privacy, quality of content and design, in that order. Make sure if you’re selling a product or collecting any information about a user that your site is visibly secure with a privacy policy in place, then you’re free to work on the content and design of the site. This is particularly true in commerce, medical and insurance sites where trust has a lasting effect.

3) Modern Eye-tracking software has discovered a variety of useful information related to usability issues. For example, users tend to focus on faces and eyes when viewing a website, but if a face is looking in the direction of your content we will follow its gaze. This is an effective tool to drive users to information on your site.

4) First impressions count. Quality of design is a huge factor in establishing credibility. While content is king, packaging that content in a nice wrapper can give that content more credibility than it would have on its own and allow you to make certain pieces of information more prominent than others.

5) Most users still don’t scroll down a homepage, so make sure the most important content is “above the fold” which currently is around 768 pixels high. Some important content to include in this area are: the name of the website, benefits of the website, and the navigation elements relevant to the user.

6) Separating product pages from marketing pages helps you stand out. This allows each page to achieve its task efficiently. The marketing pages sell to the user while the detailed information pages provide additional information letting the user compare products. Provide detailed information on your products, but make sure you the information is easy to digest. Don’t use jargon your users aren’t likely to understand.

7) Most users will avoid anything that looks like an advertisement. Make sure your important content doesn’t look like an ad, because most users will treat it like one. The reverse applies too, people will click on ads that look like content, but this usually results in short-term revenue instead of long-term trust.

8) Forms are useful for communicating and collecting information from your users, but forms should be carefully designed for ease of use. Most forms are vertically oriented and read from top to bottom, so labels should generally be above the fields and left aligned. Try to keep the required fields to a minimum and if you must require certain fields, validating that information on the fly can be very helpful.  Most users find it annoying to fill out a form and have to go back and change information after an unsuccessful submission.

9) Icons aren’t as important as you think, in recent studies it was found that initial performance on a link is best with text alone, but frequent users can use either equally effectively. Icons are not faster relative to text links alone, but if you’re going to use icons make them as large as possible and collected into a taskbar area in a horizontal layout for to make them most usable. This is because users have to discover what the icon means on their first visit, while text links tell the user what the link is immediately.

10) According to recent studies an ideal search box is 27 characters wide. Making your search box 27 characters wide, much like Google’s search box, will accommodate 90% of user’s searches. This can be highly important depending on how much information is on your site. If you have clear and concise navigation, it is more useful than a search box, but if a user can’t find the information they are looking for in the first few seconds, the search box will become their primary navigation.

The customer management system lets you manage your leads by searching customer information, managing activities, and tracking all communications with your contacts so that your company can grow productive business relationships.

When using the customer management system for multiple employees you can track the progress of each person, view reports on the contacts made daily, or see a report on the activities made by the employee

A customer management system or a business management system will help you run your business efficiently and productively.

Have you ever met a really well dressed person with no personality to back it up? That’s a good example of how it feels to find a well-designed website without quality content to keep you interested. You can’t gain long term customers with just a pretty face. Your content is the best way to build a long term relationship with your customers, but that’s not the only reason “content is king”.

Search Engines look at the content of a website more than anything else. A search engine can distinguish the quality of the content and use that rating as the most important value when placing your site. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engine’s main job is to find the best and most useful content for a given search term. If you want to rank high in the search engines, you have to provide the most useful content for your customers. 

Speaking of customers, a user may be initially impressed by the look and feel of your site, that “wow” factor, but it’s not enough to keep them there for long, or to keep them coming back. Providing information that your customers can use is the main way to make people spend more tim e on your site. Integrated Webworks can advise you on the content of your site and, if needed, even outsource your content needs.

It’s also important to keep your information up to date. If you ate the same meal every night you would eventually get tired of it. A frequently updated site is necessary to stay on top of search engines and keep customers interest. Integrated Webworks can provide tools to update your site easily, allowing you to provide your customers with quality on-the-spot information.

In today’s social media landscape, good content is more important than ever. People are more willing and able to pass information around the web than ever before. If you can provide content that people are interested in, they WILL share it with the world. Services such as Twitter, Facebook, and a variety of mobile phone applications make sharing your information easy. When your customer shares your content online with a friend, that friend will share it with another, and soon your one customer will have multiplied to 10, 20, or more. Integrated Webworks provides social media integration to make it as easy as possible to share information with your customers.

Your team at Integrated Webworks would like to thank all of you for your loyalty and good will throughout the year. Thanks to you our customers and partners we have been able to grow even during an economic slump. We are continuing to expand and grow our capabilities so we can provide both expanded services and exceptional websites, and applications. We pride ourselves on our client’s success. Your success literally means we've done our job right. 

We are looking forward to working with you to make sure 2010 is an exceptional year.

Integrated Webworks Holiday Schedule

Integrated Webworks will be closed on December 24th-27th and December 31st-January 3rd. If you have an emergency during this time please contact John Padgette at 904-279-0279 ext. 708.

Sincerely,

The Team At Integrated Webworks

 

 

How do you know if the web development firm you've chosen to represent your business online has your best interests at heart? There are signs that can help you spot companies out to take advantage of you and choose the right one. Integrated Webworks has some tips to help you find the right company that can best bring your project to fruition.

The company should be interested in your business more than closing the deal.

If a company is too hungry then they'll do whatever they can to wring every last dollar they can out of your pocket. Go with a company that is calm and collected in their dealings and can provide you with the security you need to know you're getting a good deal.

Look for a "One-Stop-Shop" that can handle all the aspects of a project's development.

There's nothing worse than getting to the middle of a project and finding out that you have to find another company to complete the job.

Does the company handle your project in-house or outsource part or the entire project?

Some companies are just sales offices and the real development is done overseas. Much needed changes can sometimes take days to finish in this kind of company. You need a development firm that can product quick turnarounds and has the needed staff in-house to handle your project.

Does the company take time to understand your project and give you THE solution rather than a possible solution?

In the end there is only one solution that fits YOUR project. If a company is giving you a grab bag of possible solutions, then they aren't doing their job. Why should you have to do the job you're paying them for?

Does the company give a detailed proposal, take the time to explain it, and answer any questions you have?

If a company is hiding behind legal and technical jargon and is afraid to explain a proposal so that you can understand it, then it's not the right company for you.

Does the company provide a detailed process on the execution of the project?

You should know every step of the way how a company is doing on your project. You should know what phase of a project you are in and what each phase means. It's their job to provide you with a schedule and a plan for your project and update you promptly if something has changed.

Does the company provide referrals from past clients?

If a design and development firm is afraid to stand behind their past clients, do you think they will stand behind you once the job is done? Companies should provide a portfolio of past projects as well as references and referrals from past clients.

Follow these few tips and you should have no problem making your next project an easy-going, stress free, and successful venture.

The web is always growing and changing and people are constantly coming up with new ideas to help make things better both for the user and the developer. HTML5 and CSS3 are the newest changes to come to the web. There are a ton of new features that will make it easier on your users to both find and understand the content on your site. Some of these features add functionality like Video and Audio, some help with search engine optimization like the new structure tags, some help understanding like the new form tags and some just make the web look better like CSS3 drop shadows. In a series of articles we’ll go over these new functions and how they can help you and your visitors.

Lets take a look at HTML 5 first…

Page Structure

HTML5 introduces some new formatting tags to control the organization of a web page. This will help search engines and browsers understand the content of the page leading to higher search engine rankings for your site. These include the:

• < header >
  Typically a headline or grouping of headlines, but may also contain other information about a section.


• < na v >
  Defines the navigation or menu area, typically a list of links and should be contained in a section, header, or footer.


• < section >
  A section is a group of content that is related and can be nested inside of each other to organize information.


• < article >
  An individual entry in a blog, magazine, compendium, etc.


• < aside >
  An aside indicates content that is tangentially related to the rest of the page.


• < footer >
  The footer of a page typically containing information like copyright, who created or wrote the document, links to related documents, etc.

You can see how this new organizational framework would work in the chart below:

As you can see if it’s that much easier for a normal person to read, Google and Yahoo’s complex search engines should have an even easier time finding the appropriate content on a page.

Forms

HTML5 also added new functionality to forms. Most browsers do not support these functions yet, but we’ll show you on an Apple iPhone, Opera browser, and Safari browser how useful these new functions can be.

The new form functions include:

• Search
  When you start to type in the search field a small X appears to let you clear the field.




• Tel
  You’ll notice in the example that the iPhone’s number keyboard is enabled when the field is clicked.




• url
  You’ll notice in the example that the iPhone’s keyboard is enabled when the field is clicked.




• Email
  This field will check for certain characters like an @ and a . to make sure the email address is valid.




• datetime, date, month, week, time, and datetime-local
  Depending on your options this will either show a date picker, or a field to select a time or a combination of the above.




• Number
  This field only allows you to input a number or select the number by increments.




• Range
  This field brings up a new slider allowing you to select a certain range.




• Color
  This brings up your browsers color picker allowing you to select a color, but is not supported in any browser at this time.

In addition to these new fields there are also some improvements to how these fields work such as:

• Autofocus
  This allows you to set which field you want the users cursor to appear in when they enter the page.


• Placeholder
  This tag allows you to inset placeholder text into a field explaining what the field is for, when clicked this text then disspears.

Video and Audio

The < video > element is probably what most users are going to be excited about in HTML5 and as you probably figured out, it allows you to play a movie in your website. This tag can also contain images or audio associated with it in addition to video.

You may say, but I already have video on my website using flash! Well, that’s in the past now and to be honest, Flash is kind of clunky. First of all your users have to have a plugin to even see your flash video. To deal with the second, lets take a look at how the video is called into the page.

Here’s the old way:

Now here’s the new HTML5 way.

Not only is it easier to implement and much cleaner, but utilizing some of the options for video in HTML5 we can have a screenshot of the video appear and some text telling them where to download the video if their browser doesn’t support HTML5.

The HTML5 audio tag works in much the same way enabling sound on your website. Just think, you won’t have to worry about telling all your visitors to download multiple plug ins to see the content of your site. They’ll have everything they need already!

Coming Soon: CSS3’s new features

If someone was to come up to you and tell you that every person will own a cell phone, would you think they were crazy for asking that? What if that happened ten, maybe fifteen years ago, how would you have responded? Today, it is very hard to find a person without a phone or portable device of some kind that isn’t connected to the internet. We need to stream our content on the fly when were not at home, and our phones do this for us. Our phones are incredible little devices but have nowhere near the computing power of their larger cousins. When we want to pull up a webpage on our computer, it can take mere seconds to download thousands of bytes of information through text, pictures, videos and applications. Due to the limitation of the screen size on these smart phones, we came up with mobile versions of our favorite sites.

Popularity in mobile devices like Blackberries , iPhones and now Android powered smartphones are increasing daily more companies are now looking into their websites and services to be viewed on these devices without any hassle. Today's advanced mobile phones come with fast processers, significant Internet capabilities and unique interfaces like large touch screens or a mini keyboard. These phones have become a favorite with those who want quick access to information at their fingertips while still on the move.

Mobile website designs are becoming increasingly more popular in recent times, companies and businesses around the world are increasingly tapping into gaining information on the move. This creates a large number of people trying to access the Internet via their mobile devices. Here at Integrated Webworks, we are now offering mobile website design as a forefront technology.  Whether the mobile site is just a slimmed-down version of their site where only some links or articles are displayed or near recreations of the desktop version, Integrated Webworks is looking into bettering your experience.

Are there any benefits for my business that a mobile website can offer? Tons. What if it’s not for me you ask? Of course it is. Any business can benefit from the use of a mobile website. Banks can allow their clients to gain access their accounts and make changes. Restaurants can post their menus to help someone see what type a food they offer, they then link to something like Google or Bing maps that can give the person the location and directions to the restaurant. Not optimizing for mobile web access is ignoring a huge potential customer base; businesses are becoming increasingly aware to have mobile-friendly websites. Your business cannot ignore this change in technology either. Having an inferior mobile web-face, or lack of, can damage a business and cause any potential customers to move on to a business with a more accessible site.