Web Design & SEO For Small Businesses

You have been at sites where you wait to website to load within couple of second and gets frustrated and leave. Click and refreshing multiple times for the page to load and still doesn’t load full. Sometimes the images doesn’t load or the styles of the page isn’t loaded. Users expect your website to load fast or within couple of seconds then you will lose those visitors. To avoid these hurdles we have few tips on how to optimize and speed up the web page to load fast.

1) Compress your graphics
Recently there has been an explosion in do it yourself kind of web site programs out there. Add your text and upload your images, but the problem with these kind of programs are these images are not optimize to load fast. Use image editing program like photoshop and other online image editors to compress your graphic before you upload from to your website. Uploading your images straight from you camera might not bigger in file size and too big for the web.

2) Remove unnecessary fancy stuffs
Removing unwanted flashy flash movies and animated gifs which takes every to load your website is key to make your web page load fast. Also generate unwanted javascript and ajex files for cool and animation can cause delay in pulling the website quick.

3) Use your content wisely
Don’t use PDF, images and flash for your content in the web page. Present your web page content in standard HTML. It loads faster and is user friendly and easy to download.

4) Use Clean Code
One of the reason for slow download of your web page is because of the junk code in your HTML. The advantage of building web pages with HTML complying to the latest W3c standards is it elimnate most of the junk code as well as your web page would be compaitable with all browsers. The other advantage is it is search engine friendly which allows the search engines to index your web pages faster.

5) Pick Good Hosting
Most of the time when a web page takes time to load is due to their web hosting server. Host on a server which has fast processors. Looking for cheaper hosting always end up in bad server where tons of websites are hosting. Check with your hosting provider if you have a web site slow loading problem and move to a better ones.

6) Use Efficient web programs
Often most of the web designers and developers pick the wrong web program for their website like ecommerce and Content management system.
These programs are created to make the website functional easily and faster. For example the CMS you choose d to run the website has a lot of junk code in it, then the loading of the web page will be slow. Apart from these drawbacks most of these programs are not search engine friendly. Check out the online reviews of these programs before you buy it.

The bottom line is a fast loading website don;t make your visitors leave fast also it is a user friendly to your users.

while designing and developing a website a web designer need to several tools to maximizing the effectiveness of the website. There are a wide range of different tools which is been presented here. Each of these tools is so important for a web designer.

1. 
   Web Page Analyzer Tool – This tool can be used to test the loading time of your web page. It gives a detailed report on how many objects and size of the objects on the page. These tools have several rating for each object like Green ratings is for good, Yellow for caution and Red for warnings.
2. 
   W3C CSS Validation Services – This W3C CSS validation Service is a web based tool helps web designers to check Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) are validated. The CSS can be validated here by three ways one is typing the URL, second is by uploading the file and finally by inputting the direct CSS code in the input box.
3. 
   Browser compatibility testing tool – By using Browsershots you can test your web designed pages in different browsers. As we all know the importance of checking the web pages with different multiple browsers. Browser compatibility testing is a critical element in the web development practice.
4. 
   Website Wireframe Tool – Wireframes are a basic visual guide for any web page layout design. Wireframe also allows maintaining design consistency throughout the site. Wireframes are very important part in the initial stage of the design process. Gliffy is a free web-based diagram editor. Gliffy free wireframe software makes it easy to create website wireframes and to share web mockups with anyone.
5. 
   Web color picker - This color picker will help you fine tune the hex color codes for your web page. These color picker tools are great for exploring colors and color schemes for your web design project.
6. 
   Screen Resolutions Checker – Quickly and easily test any Website in various Screen Resolutions! This tool allows you to check any web page in different screen resolutions. As web visitors uses different screen resolutions web designers need to check their web page design in different screen resolutions and make sure it looks in all of them.
7. 
   Dummy Text Generator – A dummy text generator will come handy to any web designers because when they wait for the content. Web designers can use dummy text generators to fill up that space.
8. 
   CSS Menu Generator – will generate both the CSS and the HTML code required to produce a text-based yet appealing set of navigation buttons. Menu generator makes it easy to create custom CSS menus without having to know all the complicated HTML and CSS
9. 
   Broken Link checker – Use this tool to check for Broken Links on a website. Broken links are links that lead nowhere; Clicking on the link will show an error page.
10. 
    Browser size checker - A nifty online tool for setting your browser size while doingWeb design.
11. 
    Robot Control Code Generation Tool – The only reason you might need to use a robots.txt file is if you want to prevent someone else from using this search engine to index your site
12. 
    Http header checker - Check your server to make sure the proper HTTP Status Codes (200, 301, 302, 304, 307, 404, 410) are being returned in the server headers.
13. 
    URL rewriting tool - This tool helps you convert dynamic URLs into static looking html URLs.
14. 
    htaccess tool – These tools will create .htaccess and .htpasswd files for you, without having to build these manually.
15. 
    Rounded Corner and Gradient Generator - This generates a basic box with rounded corners. It will create four image files and the necessary HTML and CSS code for you to put rounded corners around your content.
16. 
    Strip Generator lets you make your own comic strips. Users can even create their own Strip Blog, which combines the art of creating comic strips with blogging.

CSS Shorthand techniques are used for condensing and shorting your CSS code which makes your stylesheets small which will enable your website to load faster and easier to read. One of the greatest advantages of using CSS shorthand properties is to specify several properties by using only one.

So here are some 25 extremely useful CSS shorthand tutorials to make your CSS code more Concise.

1. CSS Shorthand Guide – The syntax for declaring the background shorthand values are excellent.
2. CSS shorthand properties – This tutorial explains on how using CSS shorthand properties you can reduce the size of your CSS documents even smaller.
3. An excellent source for Introduction to CSS shorthand properties.
4. Efficient CSS with shorthand properties.
   
5. CSS – Shorthand V Longhand.
   
6. Introduction to CSS Shorthand from Sitepoint
7. Free! – CSS shorthand properties – Shows some excellent examples of list shorthand rule.
   
8. Useful CSS shorthand properties
   
9. CSS Shorthand Properties
   
10. Use shorthand properties in CSS to shrink your style sheets.
    
11. CSS Shorthand, Step by Step How-To
    
12. Advantages of using CSS Shorthand properties
    
13. What is a CSS Shorthand Property?
    
14. CSS Shorthand Cheat Sheet
    
15. Detailed guide to using shorthand CSS in your cutups
    
16. Minimizing and creating efficient CSS code
    
17. How do I write Shorthand CSS?
    
18. A good collection of links to CSS shorthand articles
19. Shorthand properties
    
20. Writing CSS Shorthand
    
21. Writing Efficient CSS Shorthands
    
22. CSS shorthand tips
    
23. Using CSS shorthand for fast-loading websites
    
24. Basic CSS Shorthand rules
    
25. CSS Shorthand from WordPress
    

Feel free to comment and add your thoughts on these tutorials.

Firefox Plug-in are great perks for social media addicts, which make social media more productive and focused, reduce distraction and improve your social media experience.

Digg Firefox Plug-ins

Digg Sidebar 0.5.1

Smart Digg Button 1.01

Digg Toolbar 1.0.1

Digg This! 0.7

Digg Firefox Extension 0.6.4

DiggThumbs

Socialphile

Groowe Search Toolbar

 

Stumbleupon Firefox Plug-in

StumbleUpon 3.26

 

Twitter Firefox Plug-in

TwitterFox 1.6

Twitzer - Twitter long text 1.2.1

Twitbin 1.1.2

TwittyTunes

Twitter Line

Twitzer - Twitter more! 1.3

 

Facebook Firefox Plug-in

Facebook Toolbar

Boost for Facebook

Facebook Photo Album Downloader

Facebar 1.5.1

Facebook App Filter 20070710

Facebook Chat Notifications 0.1

Facebook Auto-Colorizer

 

Delicious Firefox Plug-in

Delicious Bookmarks

SimpleDelicious 1.1.0

GrApple Delicious

Delicious Delicacies 0.5

 

Flickr Firefox Plug-in

Better Flickr 0.3

Flickr Sidebar 0.2

Uploadr for Flickr 1.0

 

Myspace Firefox Plug-in

Ultimate MySpace Toolbar

MySpace Blog Editor 0.3

ToolbarMS (The MySpace Toolbar)

MySpace Friend Renamer .86

 

LinkedIn Firefox Plug-in

LinkedIn Companion for Firefox 3.1.2

LinkedIn 20080326

 

Shared Firefox Plug-in

Shareaholic

Socialphile 1.0.3

Yoono - Socialize your browser 5.0.6

Others Firefox add-on for helping your social media

TinyURL creator

 

Feel free to comment and add any other Firefox plug-ins which you might need to add to the list.

 

 

 

Competitive analysis is a form of evaluation of your competition directly or indirectly with your business. The Good Advantage of Online competitive analysis is because you have access to your competitor’s business information and their website online which might not be able to gain similar information offline. This gives us a better opportunity for marketers to analysis the competitive data for their advantage.

Some of the benefits of conducting a online competitive analysis is it help to identify with whom you are competing against in the market and also to find what’s your strengths and weakness. Through Competitive analysis you can identify your unique selling proposition which your competition is not offering.

Here are the 10 best ways to identify your competitive analysis:-

1. Using a variety of resources to find where your competitor is bidding on Pay Per Click. If you think your competition is bidding on certain search engines and not on all then they are getting a good ROI from that pay per click, may be because of low competition in that particular pay per click search engine.

2. Identify who is coming up in the natural search results, because for a site to come up under natural search results means they have a well optimized site. So you need to focus in the same area they are focusing on your website from the optimization point.

3. Identify whether your competition is utilizing partnerships, outsourcing, and relationship with other websites and is it beneficial for your business to have these kind of relationship with other websites.

4. Need to find your competition is a member of business and trade associations, and registries and join them if it benefits and if possible to get a referral link on their websites which helps in your link popularity and online visibility.

5. Identify how your competition is making money from the website and their revenue model. Also look for more potential area where your competition is not targeting tap those areas.

6. During the course of analysis Use Practical method by ordering online and make use of your competition services to find how good is their customer services, how is their online sales process and identify what they are doing right or wrong and take advantage of their mistakes.

7. If your competition is offering free mailing or newsletter subscription join them to identify their marketing strategies.

8. Using search engine analysis from where they are getting backlinks, any bookmarks in social media sites. After identify from where they are getting these links try to get link on those web pages.

9. Analyze your competitors PPC ads which will give you how to modify your PPC campaign ads.

10. Use different online tools like Alexa, Compete, Ranking tools to find what are their rankings and ratings are and do that on a regular basis to find who they are doing compared to your website.

An effective competitive analysis gives you a lot of information about your competition and will discover your business strengths and weakness and improve your rankings online.