| LED Digest 2219: Re-designing from Scratch |
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Site Re-designs... from scratch! Also in this issue: a busy discussion
on Font Sizing. Plus - the Anchor Text and Linking debate rages on...
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=========== NEW ==================================The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................. August 7, 2006 Issue no. 2219 ............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== --== Site Re-design from Scratch ==-- ~ Nancy Schettler "...it's probably time to start from scratch." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Font Sizing ==-- ~ Richard Dudley "[How much longer are we] going to see lower monitor resolutions..." ~ Ronni Rhodes "...more and more news sites are now giving the user the option to [change] the font size..." ~ Mary Johnson "For every one that does report problems, imagine the hundreds that don't!' ~ Judith Baar "The fad seems to be lots of white space and teeny-tiny text." --== Anchor Text & Linking ==-- ~ John Barendrecht "How do you prove there are no Unicorns?" ~ Michael Martinez "The 'miserable failure' search...is influenced by thousands of links." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Problem with CSS Hyperlinks ==-- ~ Tom Aman From: Nancy Schettler Subject: Suggestions on re-doing a website from scratch? Ok, I give up. I've hosted my two websites at Homestead.com since I built it five years ago. Since then, my sites have grown, business has grown (e-commerce), and I've come to realize that I made some critical mistakes early on, and so it's probably time to start from scratch. Mistake number one: my domain name is registered at GoDaddy, but the site is hosted at Homestead. Now, I have nothing against Homestead, but since the domain name is registered elsewhere, my sites look like they are part of www.homestead.com instead of independent, separate domain names. This causes various problems. I could move the domain name registration to Homestead and solve some of these problems, but the websites might be inoperable for up to two weeks, and, well, I am not willing to deal with two weeks of lost revenue. Mistake number two: I built the sites using Homestead's SiteBuilder. Well, five years ago it was the best "free" site-builder I could find. So I went with it. But now with two sites and hundreds of pages in each site... I'm pretty sure that there are HTML editors / web design software packages that could make maintenance lots more automated than what I have now. Hey, even something that would identify all the bad links would be a big help! Plus the site is not quite portable the way it is. Mistake number three: procrastination. I've stayed so long with what I have, knowing that the time will come to move on... LED Digest readers, if I provide my "wish list" could you come up with some recommendations? I think I will need to buy a HTML editor... but which one? - The websites aren't anything fancy. Basically, lots of images (products), lots of text descriptions. Lots of links from page to page. - Right now, we have e-commerce through www.mals-e.com . For future growth, it would be super if we could have something that would interface with our order / accounting software. Maybe not to actually charge the credit cards, but just to cut down on data-entry? We're using Quickbooks at present, but we will probably outgrow that in 2008 (but that would be a whole new post). - It sometimes happens that two people are working on the website at the same time. - It would also be nice if we could interface with a catalog / database somehow. (I know nothing of how to do this, of course, but it would be nice!) One thing that I think my (fabric sales) website is better at than the competitions', is that we show a (large) picture of the fabric, and then several smaller ones of all the other fabrics that match. (This automatically answers the question "what matches that fabric?".) There might be nothing that matches, or there might be a dozen or more. So it wouldn't do to just show, say, four or six coordinating fabrics. I think this is called cross-selling or showing related products? I'm not sure this could be fully automated because the number of related products can be so large, and we want to show them all. - Site search would be nice! - Site stats are a must. Otherwise, how will I know what I am doing *wrong*? - We usually ship through the Post Office (sometimes FedEx) and would love to be able to automate the label creation process. Not sure that applies to this discussion, but this is a wish list, after all. I know the basics of site design (thanks to reading LED): make navigation easy and intuitive, write good descriptions, tend to those meta-tags, figure out what your keywords are for a given page and make good use of them, provide nice sharp pictures, use alt-text over the images, link using appropriate text. But much beyond this, as to serious SEO jargon, I'm clueless. Readers, please give your input as to what HTML editor / web design program you think would be best! Gratefully... Nancy Schettler www.favoritefabrics.com www.awelldressedkitchen.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Richard Dudley Subject: Font sizing > From my experience... people who have trouble > reading simply utilize a screen resolution that allows > them to see everything larger on screen anyway. - Kerry Branham, LED 2218 I have the same experience in the corporate world. If people have vision problems, then they have as much trouble reading JD Edwards screens as they do a website or even the cards in solitaire. I'm not sure the font sizing buttons on the LED's site will be used that often. Therefore, I think it's more important to debate how much longer we're going to see lower monitor resolutions than user selectable font sizes. Richard Dudley www.rjdudley.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Ronni Rhodes Subject: Font sizing Personally, I leave sites where the font size is "pre-determined" for me. Usually it's much too small, and my baby boomer eyes protest.:-) I've noticed that more and more news sites are now giving the user the option to make the font size smaller or larger. I heartily approve of this practice and wish more designers would do this. I agree that many users don't know how to use the "View" option to adjust font size. Giving the user the choice right on the page is thoughtful and useful. Kind regards, Ronni Rhodes Ignite Your Site with Sound and Motion! Make Your Marketing Memorable with Rich Media http://www.wbcimaging.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mary Johnson Subject: Font sizing It is often easy to fall into the trap that just because we don't do something one way that nobody does it. I often see postings by programmers who say that nobody ever prints web pages (which couldn't be farther from the truth) just because they don't. As a result, they don't bother to handle the cut off of text on the right margin when printed using default printer settings -- one of my personal pet peeves. Let me give you a more personal example. I recently started designing my new websites to handle adjustable text using ems instead of fixed pixel sizes. I pride myself on my testing abilities and was pleased that it worked across all browsers. Several weeks later, someone reported experiencing extremely large (4") text. A few days later, another person reported extremely small (unreadable) text. This got my attention, and I was able to recreate the problem and fix it. It was related to a simple menu option in IE that lets users change the font size. I personally did not use that setting myself, was not aware it existed, so did not test it. My CSS did require some special coding to accommodate this feature in IE. To summarize: 1) For every one that does report problems, imagine the hundreds that don't! Failing to accommodate differences can result in lost website sales. 2) Deviating from "fixed" anything in web design increases the complexity and requires more skill and experience and time to test. But the benefits are worth it to the website visitor in making their experience more enjoyable. Mary Johnson Web Site Helper LLC www.websitehelper.com "Web It Up to the Next Level" -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Judith Baar Subject: Do Visitors Adjust Font Sizes? > ... other than very techy people, who really knows > how to change font sizes on a site anyway? It would > be an interesting study to see how many people > are really affected by this aspect of websites. - Kerry Branham, LED 2218 I don't know that I'm 'very techy" but I am affected by the text size so much that I don't visit sites that are too small and unscalable and thus unreadable. If it's something I really need to read I will copy the text (copy command or Ctrl-C) to Notepad for a readable version. Some news sites used to be scalable and are not now, so if I see a headline of interest I note it and then go to a news site that has scalable text and look for the story there. There are even a couple of websites that for some reason make me a bit nauseous I have to strain so hard so I don't go to them anymore. The fad seems to be lots of white space and teeny-tiny text. The problem with adjusting the monitor and various font sizes is that often the web sites are not set up for that and I find overlapping text and text that runs off the screen. Even setting the font larger will give a message that some programs will not appear correctly. I also note that web pages that are fine on Windows can be really scaled down on a Mac so testing is needed there too (if you have that option). I'm guilty of that on my web pages which are done under Windows. I hope to make time down the road to correct that. Any suggestions are welcome. > I know how to change font sizes in one > keystroke, but I never use it. I can change it in a couple of keystrokes how do you do it in one? Thanks for listening to my opinion. Judith Baar JBsImages.us P.S. This is my first post here, I hope I did it correctly. -------- new post - new topic -------- From: John Barendrecht Subject: Linking > You mention one link. That's not proof > there were no other factors. - Michael Martinez, LED 2217 When doing some analysis on a keyword, I noticed I misspelled it. I wondered how many other people would do same? Not wanting to misspell a word in the visible text, I purposely misspelled the 'alt' text for an image. Now I am ranked #2 for a popular term, #1 for proper spelling. This site has no outbound links and no link exchange, so any inbound links are accidental. SEO is a complex issue and for almost every hard and fast rule, there is an exception. Lately one of the car companies is running a TV ad where the people are discussing the rule "i before e except after c". Now I can't remember the car company but I can remember some of the 250 exceptions. So the ad is helping with learning English. You're sometimes going to find a site that has a "perform storm" of other factors and this one link drives it to #1 position. Most of us on this list have neither the time nor resources to "scientifically analyze" and are merely stating opinions. I would almost go so far as to say since no one has reverse engineered the Google algorithm that most SEO are stating facts and rules that they could not prove (absolutely). How do you prove there are no Unicorns? Does that make SEO useless? Absolutely not. Skilled SEO companies develop rules and facts that work 98% of the time. Hire them or follow their rules and your site will probably increase it SE visibility. However, since this is a discussion list, we should be able to state contradictory opinions and UFO sightings. Best regards, John Barendrecht http://www.centralhome.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Linking > My point was that I have seen the anchor > text of one link carry enough weight... - Bob Gladstein, LED 2216 > And my point is that you have not demonstrated this. - Michael Martinez, LED 2217 > I think Bob has done an excellent job > of demonstrating this. - Greg Watson, LED 2218 Really? Let's look at what Bob said about his "demonstration" again: "I can't prove it, since it's no longer in the top 50 for that search,..." -- LED Digest 2214 (OFFERS NO PROOF) "...Maybe there were other links I wasn't aware of. Maybe there were thousands of them. Maybe it was a glitch that wasn't fixed for a long time...." -- LED DIGEST 2216 (He grudgingly concedes there may have been other factors he didn't bother to look at) So, you may think Bob has done an excellent job of demonstrating something, but he hasn't done anything like that in LED Digest. I might as well point out for the record that his original UNPROVEN point, "A site I run was #1 in Google (searching from the US) for over a year for the term [mannequin Parisien] because of a single link", was irrelevant to the discussion anyway. I was responding to comments from Detlev Johnson and Brad Waller: > ... Google and all the search engines take into account link > text for rankings. Google "failure" and visit the cache for the > US President's Bio. You will see a message that reads: > These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: failure. - Detlev Johnson, LED 2212 > I can find quite a few of these examples where the anchor > text puts an irrelevant page in the top ten search results. - Brad Waller, LED 2212 And I wrote: "But don't mistake the weight of link QUANTITY for the weight of link anchor text. Those abnormal searches don't occur because of one or even a handful of links. They occur because of a large number of links." The "miserable failure" search, which propels pages for Presidents Bush, Carter, and Clinton (as well as Michael Moore) to the top positions, is influenced by thousands of links. Not one link. Thousands. These sites have been positioned by the quantity of links pointing at them. Michael Martinez "Cuando Maria canta, canta para mi" http://www.michael-martinez.com/ http://michael-martinez.blogspot.com/ ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Tom Aman Subject: CSS links I recently had a friend visit one of my websites (www.therapeutic-grade.com) and comment to me that my links (which are not underlined, but are in a teal color) were not recognized as links. Since I've wondered about this anyway, I decided to make the change on one of my other websites that uses almost the same CSS. On that site, I added unlines to links, but removed the underline and added a grey background to hovers. The result was a little unexpected. (You can see it at www.essential-vitamins.com). - Tom Anson, LED 2217 On some of the hovers, the page, or part of it, tends to jump when you mouse-over the link. Something about the size changes. Not a deadly flaw, but somewhat disconcerting. One *big* problem with links that are not underlined, but change color when the mouse goes over them is that they are not always obvious links *unless* the mouse moves over them - you cannot tell what is a link otherwise. Suggested reading from Jakob Nielson: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html Item 1 on this list is "Legibilty Problems", getting almost twice as many votes as the #2 mistake, where "About two-thirds of the voters complained about *small font sizes* or frozen font sizes" Item 2 on this list was "Non-Standard Links" where it states "Violating common expectations for how links work is a sure way to confuse and delay users, and might prevent them from being able to use your site." Also have a look at: The Ten Very Worst Web Design Mistakes of all Time http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html Remember Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend most of their time on other websites." You can try to justify a variety of design approaches and being different all you like but, ultimately, users do spend most of their time on other websites. If yours is too different, they may well leave in frustration. Worth thinking about. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com
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