Archive for February, 2009

Hispanic small business owners represent nearly half my clients for custom web design. I’m pleased to announce a valuable resource by Juan Silvera including his Hispanic Small Business Blog at HispanicSMB.com. El Blog de Juan has been online since 2006 providing valuable insight for Latino small businesses.

Some of my clients contact me for a quality custom website that is designed with bilingual content. Once the English version is launched, site owners have the option of translating all pages for visitors who prefer reading content in Spanish.

In addition to announcing the HispanicSMB site, a link has been added to the Small Business Resource Center blogroll for the benefit of my clients interested in learning more about business trends for US Hispanic businesses. Visit their main site for more content including a Latino small business forum, how-to videos, directory, and library for Latino small business owners.

Besides offering custom web design services, I create custom matching graphic artwork for print, as well. Over the weekend an incoming email with a time sensitive marketing offer for a “printing special” was poorly handled, and the mistake is a good reminder of how automated email messges can affect credibility.

In an email received dated 14 February at 7:53pm a weekend printing promotion that began at 5:00pm on 12 February was announced with an expiration at midnight on the 14th. Where was the email for two days before arriving 50 hours after the start time? Obviously the automated mailing broadcast date and time were improperly set.

Learn from the mistakes of others. For a business that depends on automated email campaigns be certain that time sensitive marketing offers are sent early enough for recipients to react. Besides annoying the prospect, your reputation and credibility as a professional source for your product or service could be at stake.

You decide your site design in xhtml code will be tableless. The term tables in a database and tables in xhtml are different. One refers to content and the other presentation, or how that content is displayed on the actual web page. Data belongs in columns and rows, so tables are an exception to the concept of a tableless xhtml web design.

If you have a dynamic site that uses tables in a database, that is different than tables for layout. Don’t be confused by the difference. A MySQL database happens to use tables to store data hidden on the server and extracted as needed. That is content. Think of those as storage bins for data necessary to drive the engine if your site uses a cms system. That use of the word “tables” is entirely different from the xhtml method of table layout using a matrix of rows and columns to present content.

The use of tables for layout in xhtml does not refer to the content. That is presentation. If your site will be tableless yet is a cms web design, that means the system extracts data from the database table where it is stored, and it is automatically assembled into the xhtml document which is what search engines and visitors see. For my custom cms web designs there will not be any tables code in the xhtml unless it is required for presentation. That conversion of data from a cms database to a tableless page means pages will not be presented with the outdated technique of bloated code using a table matrix of columns and rows.

Would a design in xhtml that I create ever use tables for layout? Not for the entire page, but perhaps sometimes for a portion of page content, yet rarely, and only when actually displaying some type of chart. For example, if a page needed a matrix displaying prices by quantity presented in rows and columns, in that case using a table for layout for just that section of the page would be appropriate. The mistake designers make is trying to precisely control the layout of a page by putting everything in “boxes”, or table cells, in columns and rows.

The clients I service for custom website design who return for changes or upgrades “get it” when I advise people to add orignal quality content often.

Having a website with over 650 Google page one listings for web design related phrases in less than a year since consciously optimizing my site last June, I share how-to with clients for duplicating that success, and in a phrase the secret is “add original quality content often”.

A strategy of launch a site and forget it violates that principle for success because Google rewards websites with better ranking in search results if they update continually to provide an improved visitor experience.

If you don’t track statistics for your site visitors and let your service provider update you, those stats could be misleading. A client I first met had one of those reports stating their site had “over 1500 hits a week”, yet the client was surprised having zero new prospects contact them.

The important number is not hits which is a call to the server for content including graphics, but the number of unique visitors. One page with 10 graphics visited by 10 people gets 100 hits just for those graphics. If you can’t make the time to track stats, at least insist on reports of page loads and unique visitors.

Measuring effectiveness of an advertising campaign compared to your website traffic requires metrics with factual data. Knowing how people found you allows you to make decisions about the best way to allocate your advertising budget. If your website draws the traffic print ads do not, the focus and budget may be better spent on adding new content to your website.

Search engines treat sites differently than 4-5 years ago, and how people find you has changed, too. Today the majority of people looking for a product or service search online first. Business owners who routinely ask “How did you find us?” can measure site performance compared to print advertising. Tracking trends, a major local newspaper downsized the layout and number of pages and the pinch in ad revenue goes beyond the current economy.

Know what works. If the return on investment for print ads is less than you pay, and your website brings new prospects, it is time to invest those dollars into expanding your site to avoid the pitfalls of a launch and forget web design.