Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

The need in optimizing websites for mobile users

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

A Verizon iPhone is set to be launched anytime soon and users are anxious to get their hands on one of these products. In fact, that isn’t just all that is being talked about in the blogosphere. There are also rumors about two new versions of the iPhone. These are called the iPhone 4G and the iPhone HD.

So where does this sets the webmaster? With the recent advancement of mobile phones, visitors are bound to come and visit through the mobile phones. Websites that are more mobile friendly will prevail. Sites that have features that aren’t making them good for mobile phones on the other hand, may suffer.

Optimizing a website for mobile users requires the webmaster to modify a few factors of their website with one of them being the Flash contents in the website if there is any. The iPhone doesn’t support Flash and neither do most mobile phones. In fact, there aren’t many mobile phone browsers equipped with Flash making everything go to waste. So, it is best to change a Flash content into a HTML.

In addition to that, frames should not be available as well. Their fixed width and height means that everything will look cluttered in a mobile phone. Nobody likes a cluttered content. It makes the task of finding information very hard.

The best way is to create a lighter version of the website so that it will be browsed by a mobile phone. Those that use CMS such as Joomla or WordPress can use some of the mobile extensions available.

Know where it matters in a website

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

Right now, analytics has gone up a notch and instead of having everything in a graph or in maps, they now have heatmaps to pinpoint the place where visitors are paying attention the most and how far the visitors would go into scrolling the article or content in the website.

One great website that offers such as service is called Crazy Egg. It is one of the most famous audience visualizing system and does what it has to do. In short, the data it gives are highly valuable and is essential for any marketing strategy or optimization that a webmaster wishes to do.

There are four plans in total for Crazy Egg with the lowest costing a small amount of $9 per month and the highest plan costing the user $99 per month. In short, it is definitely a worthy investment for any serious web developer or webmaster.

A small or a new website can definitely opt for its cheapest plan. The difference between each plan is the number of visits that can be tracked in a month and the number of pages that can be tracked at any single time. All paid version has advanced feature turned on but only the Plus and Pro version have the hourly reporting feature.

Optimize the website to load faster

Monday, April 12th, 2010

With a new algorithm being added by Google which involves the site’s speed, it is important for a website to be able to load fast. Making a website load faster involves a lot of work and it is essential that everything is tweaked properly without sacrificing security.

The first factor would be no other than the site’s hosting company. Be sure to use reliable webhost that has minimal downtime. Host the website in countries where the website’s visitors are flocking at. If the visitors are mainly from the U.S, host the website somewhere in the U.S.

Some content management systems such as Magento and WordPress have a caching feature. What this does is that it creates a static website out of a dynamic one and as a result, it significantly improves the site’s loading speed as there will be fewer burdens on the server.

In addition to that, use tools such as the Pingdom tool to see the files that are making the website load slowly. If it is an image that is making the website load slowly, reduce its quality. As for JavaScript and CSS files, compress them.

These are just some of the many factors that needs to be taken care of while optimizing a website to load faster.