It must be able to fulfill all that visitors would to like to know and in the manner as they may prefer. In addition to this, it must be borne in mind that search engine visibility matters a lot in making site reach its target audience. Therefore, in this article, we are going to dwell on certain important considerations that help creating quality Portfolio sites.

Points to Consider While Designing a Portfolio Site

Understand the Target Group

It is not always possible to cater to every type of customer. Every designer has a niche and can serve a particular segment of clients efficiently. It is important to first understand what your target audience is and then analyze their expectations to design the portfolio site so that it appeals to them and your chances of getting work are eased out.

Design a Unique Logo and Develop a Catchy Tagline

A logo is such a powerful tool in creating an identity that it must be utilized to its true potential for a portfolio site. Adding a star to the logo is an effective tagline that best describes your work in a simple way. The logo, even if it consists of the initials of your name, should be designed to catch the visitors’ attention.

Take Care of Navigation

Navigation is one such aspect of web design that is bound to find mention as it allows users to easily move back and forth on a site and helps them to locate the required information. For a portfolio where you wish your clients to know about you, go through your work and then place the order, it is essential to offer them a smooth way to navigate.

Categorization of Work is Important

If you wish to give a clean presentation of your work and prevent users from getting confused, then categorizing your work is important. This will help them know the kind and scope of work you have done. Allow them to view samples category wise and facilitate a better understating of the service you render. Also make sure that you display the best of your work. What else do you require to do for striking a deal.

Updating the Site should be Easy

As you need to showcase more of your work and replace the older samples with new ones, your site should allow carrying out these things in an easy manner. Updating the site from time to time is a healthy practice and it must be designed to include those features which make it quite simple to undertake changes. For this you can use a quality CMS which suits your requirement.

Optimize the Site for Search Engines

To reach the target customers, the site must be visible in search engines for which it is essential to optimize it. Use the necessary keywords wherever applicable in the content, chose appropriate titles for different pages, take care of the site’s speed. These are useful from SEO point of view and will help the site in attracting traffic.

Carefully Choose the Typography

Stylishly written but difficult to read content cannot serve the desired purpose. It is often seen that designer in their effort to be different, try stylish fonts. However, the right practice is to use suitable fonts and sizes to ensure that the content is legible as well as readable. This increases the usability of the site, again an important consideration from SEO’s angle.

Highlight Call to Action

Unless you make prominent the action that you desire your customers to take, they are not going to buy or hire the services. Customers always require a push factor and for this effective Call to Action buttons can be well utilized. These buttons must be clearly visible and designed to grab the users’ eye.

Lastly, Allow Visitors to Easily Contact You

There is no use having an excellent Portfolio site but which doesn’t allow the visitors to establish a contact. Make sure that in addition to a contact/order form, you provide a valid phone number and an email so that visitors can contact you. You can also mention about your profile on social networks to get connected to your clients and earn work.

We hope that you find the above information useful and in case you have some more suggestions for creating an attractive and effective portfolio site, feel free to share them with us.

Lack of visitors has a direct implication on the success of the blog for then it will not be serving its intended purpose and will soon lose its value. The crux of the matter here is that the content on the blog must be effective enough to attract visitors and make them read the complete post. At the same time, all posts written for the blog should be quality driven to turn visitors into regular followers. In this write up, we are going to highlight certain areas that bloggers need to focus on so as to write traffic attracting content.

Writing Effectively for the Blog – Useful Points to Remember

Write Well Researched Posts

Research is a crucial part of writing, no where should it appear to the reader that the post is written on a periphery and doesn’t contain anything new. He/ she should not feel that he could find the same information everywhere else. Rather after reading the post, it must appear to him/her that it is backed by a thorough research. Therefore, it is vital to undertake research, collect points from reliable sources and then compile them to prepare comprehensive posts for the blog. Provide them with links and references as this helps building credibility.

Prepare Yourself Before Writing – Study What Others are Doing

Having said that research is important but even it will not do any good if you are not prepared to write to meet the expectations of the readers. Have a look at other relevant blogs and observe the manner in which content is written over them, what style is being adopted by popular blogs and read the comments provided by the visitors. Such preparation is necessary for writing effectively and in accordance with the readers’ expectations, who will then be paying regular visits.

Select a Niche and Stick to the Relevancy

Whatever niche or theme does your blog have, make sure that the content is strictly relevant to that particular category. Blogs are generally made on one specific subject and users visit them when they wish to gain information related to that subject. Therefore, to develop and retain the interest of the visitors, it is essential to write on a selected niche and get frequent visits from them.

Know Your Audience

You must have heard about the importance of understanding the target audience thousand times and the reason that it is again being mentioned here is its relevancy to effective writing. Only when you have a sound understanding of the readers of your blog, you can write content matching their taste. Content written from the users’ point of view is likely to get more response.

Adopt a Conversational Type While Writing for Blog

As a Blog is an interactive medium, its content should be written in a conversational style because it becomes easy for the visitor to grab the information and also it helps gain familiarity. This is an effective form of writing and is favored by the readers. Content written in dull style and text book manner may not appeal to the readers and make them leave the blog out of boredom.

Ask Readers to Provide Comments and Feedback and Do Respond If They Do

No matter how beautifully you have concluded a blog post and there is nothing left to say, still one thing you not forget is asking your valuable readers to provide their inputs. It increases the interaction and gives them the liberty to express their views and opinions; some might even suggest some important thing. Also, do respect their time by responding well to their inputs as it will keep them going back to the blog thus driving continuous traffic.

Remember, Becoming an Efficient Writer is a Gradual Process- Learn and Apply to Get Refined

As a blogger, you must be aware of the trends keep on changing and one has to write according to the changing environment. Similarly, writing is an art that has always room for improvement. So writing effectively for your blog will come with time as you acquire and practice good writing skills. Learn from your mistakes and apply new styles to become a good writer and an effective blogger.

The above mentioned are not rules but suggestions with the intention to help bloggers write effectively for their blogs. We hope you find them useful and if you do have something to share based on your experience, we will be glad to come across it. Your comments and inputs are valuable for us.

Check Symptoms

Continuously test your Website in different browsers on daily basis and note down each aspect like loading time, scripts being loaded, and Website performance. If you detect any change then inspect your Website with inbuilt Developer Tool of your browser. Currently, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer have this option. We suggest you to use Firebug Add-on in Mozilla Firefox with its extensions like Yahoo! YSlow, Google Page Speed, and Firecookie for this purpose.

Test Website at Online Scanners

If you observe any change in the behavior or performance of your Website then it is the time to test your Website for infection at following security Websites:

Unmask Parasites

Visit the Website and enter the URL of your Website. At the time of writing this article, this service was under beta version and still it worked. We’ve tested our Website, and it displayed the following report:

After testing, you can use the additional test tools provided by the Unmask Parasites. Just click on the link “Reveal hidden spam links” and it will find out hidden links on your Website. It also informs how to search for spammy or possibly infected keyword links on the Website.

McAfee SiteAdvisor

Visit its Website, and enter the URL in the right sidebar widget saying “View a Site Report”. We tried it for our Website and found it safe. The SiteAdvisor Report also informs you whether it has been linked with secured Websites or not.

AVG Threat Labs

Visit the Website, enter URL and click the Check button. This easy service from AVG scans your Website for infection and shows the report.

Sucuri Site Check

Sucuri LLC provides this online testing service to scan the Websites. In fact, it provides a premium Website testing service in free. Not only    it checks for infection but it also provides you the list of links found, list of JavaScripts included, Blacklisted status by Norton Safe Web& Google Safe Browsing, and lists out the malware as well, if any.

Screenshot of scanning at Sucuri Check

Norton Safe Web

The antivirus giant, Norton, provides the online testing service – Norton Safe Web to check your Website for infection. It scans your Website, detects and reports these infections: Viruses, Drive-by Downloads, Malicious Downloads, Worms, Suspicious Applications, Suspicious Browser Changes, Security Risks, Heuristic Viruses, Adware, Trojans, Phishing Attacks, Spyware, Backdoors, Remote Access Software, Information Stealers, Dialers, Downloaders, and Embedded Link to Malicious Site. You can also Sign up for the Norton Safe Web.

Norton Safe Web

Google Safe Browsing

Google Safe Browsing API provide interface to create applications to test your Website, but you do not have to create a tool to do so. Just type following URL and replace “Your Website Name” with the URL of your Website.

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=<Your Website Name

Other tools

Following are the other tools to scan your Website:

• TrendMicro Site Safety
• Amada Malware Database
• URL Void
• VirusTotal
• PhishTank
• Online Link Scan
• Browser Defender

Detect the Culprit

If you found infection in any of the tests listed above then it is the time to trace the culprit code and remove it out from the Website. Following three things can infect the code of your Website:

Malicious Scripts – These are used to redirect the visitors to a phishing Website or load badware from other sources. If your selected test tool list out this script then remove the code as soon as possible. These scripts are often injected inside in any file like XML, JS, Image, PDF, or any other file available on the server. Most of the scripts make use of mystification code and makes it difficult for any antivirus to detect them, whereas others use name of phishing name of popular sites like below

<script src=”http://www.mcaffe.co/sideadvicor.js”></script>

.htacess redirects – If your Website is being redirected to an unknown page or site, then it is the time to check the .htaccess file. Download it and check for any suspicious code in it. Remove the code and then check whether it is still being redirected. Following is a sample suspicious redirected code: -

Rewrite Engine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERRER} .msn.$ [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .* http://73.158.901.80/in.php?s=ips2 [R,L]

Hidden Code - Most of the times hackers or virus inserts the hidden code, which is not shown to visitors but bots and scanners can detect it. You can make use of above online tools and lynx – command line browser to track the hidden code.

Locations Prone to have Infected Code

We request you check for any unknown code in following files:

• index.html or index.php (Index file)
• header.php or header.js (Header file)
• footer.php or footer.js (Footer file)
• main.php or main.html (Main file)

To detect the suspicious code, you should know about the default/safe code of your Website added by you, developer, extension, theme, or Content Management System at the time of launching the Website. We suggest you to download the files of your Website and check for the suspicious code in each file manually. If you have taken a backup of your Website dating before detection of infection, then you can compare the backup files with the new one using WinMerge Tool. This tool will list out the differences in each file one by one. You can either check this code manually or search at Web search engines for it.

You can search for any part of the code in Web search engines to know more about it. You can also take help of Website developers or coders to detect & remove the suspicious code from your Website.

Conclusion

The World Wide Web is full of uncertainty and you do not know what is going to happen next moment. You should take the backup of your Website weekly and test it on above listed tools to know whether your Website is still safe or not. Trace out the culprit code, delete it, and be ready to take necessary actions in order to recover your Website.

Tease the audience with effective Coming Soon Page

Unlike earlier days, where a Coming Soon Page was either simply stated as “The site is under Construction” or “We will be live soon”, the scenario has much changed and webmasters have realized that they can develop the interest of the visitors right from the very beginning by offering them an interesting Coming Soon page. The page can be made to act as a Teaser and drive the users to make a visit time and again to find whether the site has become operational or not.

It is a common observation to find visitors making a quick exit, the moment they land on an under construction page because of its dull and boring appearance. But if it is build in a manner that makes visitors stay and offers  a brief introduction of what the site will be all about, then it in some way assures that they will come back. Therefore, over the time, designing a Coming soon page had undergone many changes and now designers make it a point that it is attractive, effective and contains the right set of information.

In this write up, we are going to mention some of the ways that help build effective Coming Soon pages.

Must To Do Things To Create a Good Coming Soon Page

Establish the identity for audience to remember

It is highly beneficial to create your identity even before the site goes live, for the users will be able to remember you. Many may doubt the possibility of this but it can be easily accomplished by having a logo designed and placing it on the coming soon page. A logo is an effective element with the potential to create a strong impression.  The biggest advantage of a logo is that users can easily memorize a logo and they often identify a business/service with it. Thus, logo must form a part of the coming soon page.

In addition to this, colors also have their impact and users also associate them with a company. It is thus, important to select a color theme in advance and use it in the page.

Provide Brief introduction

It is a great idea to welcome visitors with a message that introduces you and your business to them. Here, it must be noted that a user should be given just a glimpse so that they become curious to know more. It is an important consideration, for if you divulge all details, they may not come back. But if you leave them with certain questions, they feel bound to come back.

It can be said that curiosity is a major factor that drive users to action and thus, this element should be a part of coming soon page.

Link to social media

The scope of social media cannot be sidelined even while designing a coming soon page as it can play a significant role in popularizing the site even before its launch. There are several social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, Delicious, Myspace, StumbleUpon, etc) and social news sites (Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, Fark, etc.) that can be linked to. This can create a social circle and drive visitors to the site.

Make them subscribe

It is mentioned above that it is important to develop the interest of the visitors and once it is achieved, the next thing to do is make them subscribe. This can be done easily by including a sign up form.

The Sign up form should be adequately designed matching the overall design of the page and must ask necessary information from the visitors. It must not take too much of their time so that visitors can eagerly fill to know the updates.

Mention Contact Details

Though it may appear a bit out of place, but adding contact details, to a coming soon page, whether it is address, phone number or an email id, can serve many purpose. It establishes that you really exist, provides a chance to users to verify and in a way helps build credibility even before the official launch of your site.

Contact details also play a significant role in those cases where a business has long presence but is entering the Web world now. In such a case, by providing these details, the business offers its users to make direct enquiries without making them wait for website’s launch.

Examples of Coming Soon Page

SimartPixel

SmartPixel

Hyperlingo

Hyperlingo

Johnny Walker Plumbing

Johny Walker

Birdbox

Birdbox

FiveSecondProjects

Five Second Projects

Accentuate

Accentuate

Upstate Design Collective

Upstate Design Collective

Irava

Irava

ClockMeIn

ClockMeIn

MyNiteLife

MyNiteLife

Statnip

Statnip

BetterBlogger

BetterBlogger

SquidChef

SquidChef

ChkChkBoom

ChkChkBoom

FavMovie

FavMovie

Hosteeo

Hosteeo

Dialed Tone

Dialed Tone

PotatoMice

PotatoMice

Moses Mehraban

Moses Mehraban

Wuit

Wuit

Evert Slagter

Evert Slagter

Bluebird

BlueBird

Sprocket

Sprocket

UniquePayments

UniquePayments

Uooo

Uooo

It can be concluded that an effective Coming Soon page can create a positive impression and give the required boost to a site before it goes live for the users. Thus, it must be made effective enough.

We hope that you find the above ways useful. If you have some other suggestions, kindly do us a favor of dropping a comment. We would be delighted to come across your ideas.

FAQs Page – Why Include it in Your Website?

Extended Support to Customers

By providing the answers to common issues users face, FAQs page is an extension of the support that every service provider wishes to give to the customers and satisfy them.

Helps Users Reach a Decision

Again by providing the information generally sought by the users, the page aids the decision making. This is because they are able to sort most of their queries using this page. Thus, it helps increase conversions.

Saves Users’ Time

The absence of this page will require the users to contact the owner even to enquire about a small thing and it may happen that they may not do it as some other site has answered their queries through its FAQs page. Therefore, to save their time and offer them instant information they would like to know, it is advisable to have an informative FAQs page.

Despite the above mentioned advantages, webmasters don’t pay much attention to this page and as a result, most of the FAQS pages that we find on the sites are not up to the mark. Here therefore, we are going to mention some ways to increase the attractiveness of the page and make it more effective.

Effective FAQs Page – How to Achieve this Goal?

Keep the Focus on Information

Given the basic purpose of the page is to provide an answer to the users; it is the right practice to keep entire concentration on information rather than design. The design should be appealing but not such that it diverts the attention from the questions.

Select the Questions with Users in Mind

Don’t put in questions that you would like to answer. Instead think from the users’ angle, figure out the questions and place them in the page along with suitable & short answers.

Categorize the Questions

A user may not be interested in every question. In this regard, categorization of questions helps in reaching the desired question and its answer. However, the categorization should be meaningful and not just done for the heck of it.

Provide the Option to Search

Having too many questions on the FAQs page can prove troublesome for the visitors and they may end up finding the question itself and go back unsatisfied. To avoid such a question, provide them a search option with which they can easily and quickly locate the question and get the answer.

Make Questions Clickable

Again, if the questions are too many, then it is wiser to put them together and make them clickable so that users can click on them to reach answers. The advantage of this is, users will be able to see all the questions and then can view the answers by clicking on them one by one or straightaway going to those they would like to have information on.

Last but not the least, lets users find FAQs easily

An obscure FAQs page will not do any benefit no matter how efficiently it can cater to users information needs. Therefore, it is highly important to make sure that it catches the attention of the users fast.

Thus in order to utilize the benefits of FAQs page, it is essential to design it in the right fashion. We hope that this brief information sheds some light and acquaints the readers with the benefits of having this page on the site as well as how to make it better.

We also look forward that our readers share their ideas as well.

The Web search has seen a long path from first generation search engines to third generation. It has improved a lot from the inception of first search engine till yet. The end users were not getting the accurate results until Google came into the picture. In this article, we’ll take you through the history of Web search (Search 1.0 and Search 2.0) to present, which we’ve today.

Search 1.0

W3Catalog was the first primitive Web search engine, and World Wide Web Wanderer was the first Web Crawler. WebCrawler was the first well known search engine to provide good results. In 1996, the top most search engines were Lycos, Magellan, Yahoo, InfoSeek, and Excite. Yahoo was the first to include humans in categorizing the search results.

The Web Crawlers used to follow the links automatically on the World Wide Web. They were automatically indexing every new page and caching it. The search engines were providing the results based on its index using a proprietary algorithm. The top most pages were those which had used the searched terms more than others. The Web sites and pages were ranked on the basis of “on-the-page” factors.

Search 2.0

The invention of Google by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 was a great step to revolutionize the Web and a good startup to bring the masses attention to the Internet. Google PageRank algorithm followed the democracy to count the number of links (votes) for a Web page. The major search engines adopted following points to prioritize the Web pages in their respective search engine result pages (SERPs):

1. Number of incoming and outgoing links at a page
2. Number of clicks in the SERPs
3. Other off-page criteria

The Web companies soon traced certain factors considered by search algorithms. They started tailoring content liked by search engines, building links counted by them, and inserting keywords in the HTML source. In fact, these things brought the search engine optimization (SEO) to main stream and made SEO a necessity for each Website. The black hat techniques like heavy link exchange, massive directory submissions, duplicate or spammy content, keyword stuffing etc. also emerged. These techniques were the real reasons for irrelevant results in the SERPs. The search engines started their work to fight against the spam in their search results.

Vertical Search

Suppose a user was looking for “news on California” then he/she has to browse the entire results just to find a link to News Website. Vertical Search provides the search results categorized on the basis of different fields like image, news, video, blog, audio etc. Google started categorizing the search results in 2001 with its so called OneBoxes.

Search 3.0

Search 3.0 is the mixture of regular search results with vertical search results. Another major change is the inclusion of localized search results. Search engines started providing results based on locality. The embedding of Google Maps in Google Search was a great step in this regard. People started registering their locations in the Google Maps. Following Google, other search engines soon adopted localization search. Google rolled out Universal Search in May 2007 and blended the search results with these categories: – Blog, Book, Catalogs, Code, Directory, Finance, Images, Local/Maps, News, Patent, Product, Scholar, Video, Web, and Everything. Ask came up with Ask3D in June 2007. Here, 3D refers to three dimensions: query expression, checking results, and digging deeply in the content.

Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask came up with their different vertical search engines to allow users searching in a particular field only.

Search 4.0

Search 4.0 brings the human back to action for prioritizing the Web pages in search results. Google and Bing are giving more preference to end users’ behavior towards a search result instead of other techniques. Both of the companies recently declared that they are incorporating the social signals generated for a URL in their searching techniques. The social signals can be Facebook Like, Facebook Share, Facebook Recommend, Twitter Tweet, Google Recommend It, Google Buzz, Yahoo Buzz etc. for a given URL. In nutshell, the social signals are gaining more importance and weight than other factors.

Fight Against Spam

Blekko’s Step against Spam

It allows users to filter the search results with slashtags. One can slash its filter term with the keyword, e.g. “news California /date” displays the news results sorted date wise. Blekko accepts login with Facebook Connect and allows its members to either like the URL or mark it as spam.

Blekko allows members to like or mark spam the URLs

SpamClock

Google’s Step against Spam

Recently launched Google +1 feature allows users to +1 the URLs appeared in their searches and see what their friends have liked. The +1ed URLs are stored in the Google Profiles of the users.

Snapshot of Google +1

Personal Blocklist Extension to mark the URLs as spam

User Interface

• Searched Keywords: QuickScroll Chrome Extension highlights the searched terms on a Web page.

Google Quick Scroll highlighting the searched term

• Mouse over Preview: Google and Bing allow end users to look over the Websites or pages appeared in SERPs with either mouse hover or a single click.

Screenshot of Mouse Over Preview in Google SERP

• The latest browsers like Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome 11 are using address bar as their search bar. The users can type the search term therein and search for without visiting any page.

Screenshot of searching in address bar in Google Chrome

• Google Instant is showing the search results on-the-fly while a user is typing the keywords to search. Appearing search results changes instantly as one keeps typing the keywords.

Showing Google Instant

Socialization

The emergence of social networking Websites leveraged the end users to share their knowledge, resources, and recommend search result pages. Twitter Search allows users to reply or retweet the search results, whereas one can use Facebook Search to search the listed persons, companies, products, communities etc. Google Realtime and Bing Social provides their regular search results blended with Twitter search results.

User Behavior

Both Google and Bing allow users to save the history of searches of an end user. Bing named this term as Search History and Google coined it earlier as Web History. You can login at Bing or Google search to turn on or off the search history. The Google Toolbar and Bing Bar also collects the search history.

Web History Option in Google Toolbar

Analytics

Google have included the Social Activity Tracker Plugin in its Google Analytics. This will help Webmasters to know about the social actions carried out at their Website and their effect on it. Now, Google Analytics displays different reports for each social activity like social bookmarking, social sharing, and traffic coming from social activities.

Social Activity Tracker in Google Analytics to trace Social Engagement, Action, and Pages at your Website

Conclusion

Currently, we’re using a mixture of Search 3.0 and 4.0 in our daily lives. Every search engine is working hard to improve itself and provide better search results. We’ve to wait what future has behind its curtains. We invite our readers to pour their comments on this article and their thinking about the future of Web Search.

With popularity of Android on the rise and increase in the number of its users, developers and designers have shifted their focus on this platform. There is growing need to make sites compatible with smartphones or mobile devices, which has resulted in the development of numerous related applications.

But here, we are going to present some of the best Android applications that developers and designers would find useful to serve their different purposes.

Android Applications to watch out

For Designers

SilverEdit

The efficiency of SilverEdit can be established from the fact that it allows you to create and edit pages both online as well as offline. It is quite a useful tool for designers as it offers a wide range of features including Syntax highlighting, ability to copy, paste, move and rename files,  Toolbars with easy access buttons, support for almost all type of web documents, etc. It presents customization ability as well.

SilverEdit

Magic Color Picker

Designers can make effective color selection with the help of this application. It supports RGB, HSV, HSL and YUV color models and states colors value in decimal and HEX. The application is useful for artists and programmers too and best of all, it is FREE.

Magic Color Picker

Color Dictionary

Designers often remain in a fix while selecting colors and keep on finding different ones for their web design. This application provides the right help by providing the option to refer 10+ dictionaries and 2300+ colors.

Color Dictionary

Photo Workshop

A simple but potential application that helps in the editing of the photos and offers a wide range of functions including Crop, Rotate, Text Overlay, Effects, Frames & Edges, Resizing, etc.

Photoshop Workshop

Typography Junkies

It is another interesting and useful application for designers which helps to come across the latest fonts and updates on typography. It offers news, images and videos related typography.

For Developers

AndFTP

AndFTP is an excellent application that allows accessing the web servers from an Android device. As the name indicates it is a FTP clients that also supports SFTP, SCP and FTPS. It has a long feature list  and some of the major ones are device menu feature to rename, delete, copy, set permissions and create folders, ability to upload/download with resume support, back button support and best of all , it is FREE.

AndFTP

WordPress for Android

This Free application from WordPress offers a lot of helpful features such as multiple blogs management, ability of creating/ editing Posts and even pages. It also has an inbuilt comment notification.

Image Source: market.android.com

Dropbox

It makes it extremely simple to access documents, files, photos and videos from the Android mobile and allows easy editing.

Dropbox

Google Analytics for Android

Irrespective of where you are, this paid application will help keep track of the Google Analytics data. It offers Date range comparison, Graphs and charts, Geolocation reports, etc and the best thing about this application is that it is fast, ensures security and doesn’t occupy much space.

Google Android

View Web Source

This application can let you view the source code of a web page very easily with the option to download. One can even search the text and copy –paste the HTML. Where does one get such features in a FREE application?

View Source Code

We hope you liked the collection and look forward to your comments and suggestions.

While a designer put in a lot of efforts for creating a novel and aspiring design, it also requires him/her to select the right typeface as it constitutes an important part of a website. But making this selection is not an easy job which is further complicated by the fact that there are several typefaces available. As it is something which cannot be avoided at any cost for it directly affects the users’ experience for whom the website is meant, it becomes imperative to carefully select the typeface which fits the purpose and complements the design.

Here we are going to discuss the various factors that should be considered as well as few tips that come handy before choosing a typeface.

Factors that affect the choice of Typeface

Legibility

It is concerned with the design of the typeface and refers to those features (x-height, counters, stroke width, character, style, letter shapes, etc) of a typeface which make it recognizable by the readers. It takes into account the ability to distinguish one letterform from another. The choice of typeface also depends on the intended meaning of the text for which it is used. To say for example, a decorative typeface can be used for a headline or to draw attention to any part of a site but when it comes to body text, it should be highly legible.

Readability

Though readability and legibility are often confused to be the same thing but they are different. Readability refers to the degree to which a text is easy to read and combines the various properties such as style, color, tracking, spacing, etc. It matters a lot as the content not easy to read is of no value to the user and will not serve any purpose. It is thus important to choose a typeface that offers high readability.

Nature of the Typeface

Some typefaces are designed for a particular intention; therefore before using them it is wiser to gain knowledge about them. For example, a typeface which is popular for its usage in headlines or in magazines, posters, etc may not be appropriate to be used for web. So it is good to check whether the typeface that you are going to use is suitable or not.

Users Expectations

No matter how good a typeface is but if it doesn’t fulfill the expectations of the target readers then it is not fit for usage. It also depends on the subject matter of the site.  If the site deals with a serious topic, say insurance, the use of light font like Comic sans will not be considered rather the designer should go for a sober one.

Mood to invoke

Typeface with other factors like readability and implied meaning can very well invoke the desired mood from the readers. It is therefore important to identify what mood or emotion a site wish to elicit from the visitors and then choose the typeface.

Tips to select the right Typeface

Define the Content Hierarchy

It is important to establish the hierarchy of the content first in order to decide what typeface/typefaces would be required. Analyze how you wish to structure headings, sub-heading, body text, call to actions, etc before making a selection.

Go for Extended Type family

Extended Type Family ensures that your typographic needs will be fulfilled well in time if required. Also it proves beneficial for long term projects.

Observe other sites that belong to the same industry

It is a good idea to observe and take note of what other designers have used for the sites. However it must be noted that the sites are of the same industry/field as yours.

Don’t look for the correlation between the typeface and the subject

Most designers commit this fallacy and choose a type simply because of its relation to the subject. It may not produce the desired result with chances of doing the opposite of what you have thought.

To be on safer side use classic combinations

It is better to use those typefaces which are much in use and are accepted rather than choose one which may make you regret later. This is helpful especially when you are running short of time.

This was our brief guide for the readers with the intention to help them select the right typeface for their web design. We would be glad to receive comments and views.

Why About us page is important?

Simply, because a user will definitely visit this page to ascertain the credibility of the service provider/company and will take decision if the information presented satisfies him/her. Also, about us page is important because it an efficient means by which one can convey necessary details and create a favorable image among the target customers.

Though there are different ways to create about us page but here we are going to have a look into some of the well designed and interesting ones to help the readers get an idea as to how they would like this page on their site to turn up.

Mail Chimp

The about us page displays a fine balance of a big photograph and short and precise content. While the picture captures the interest and makes users wait there at the page, the text answers their queries subtly.

Example of About Us Page - Mail Chimp

Twitter

It is a perfect example of a comprehensive About us page that aptly describes what all a user can do with this micro blogging site. The opening line itself “Twitter is the best way to discover what’s new in your world”, sets aside many doubts followed by a brief explanation of various aspects of the site.

Example of About Us Page - Twitter

Facebook

Just like Twitter, Facebook too offers a lot of information to the users about itself but does that in an interesting way. It presents a demo exhibiting its feature and giving a view of what users will have once they start using the social networking site.

Example of About Us Page - Facebook

Google

With Google offering a wide range of services to its large and diverse user base, it’s about us page offers links to the various pages and a user may click to get the information according to the specific need. It has done an effective categorization to lead different users to the information they desire.

Example of About Us Page - Google

Squiddo

This publishing platform has it all on its about us page. First it describes itself and then offers other details which are relevant to the users and increase their understanding of it. The information flows down and finally acquaints the user to its team members. It is informative but does that in a playful manner.

Example of About Us Page - Squidoo

These are just a few of about us page that were interesting and different from the several others that we come across every day.

Now it is up to you whether you would like to create about us page of your site taking inspiration from the above ones or will go for a totally unique one. You have one more option and that is to follow the league and create yet another boring and dull about us page as are available everywhere.

We would love to know which of the above about us page would you prefer and in case if you have something else in mind, we would like to come across your ideas. Who knows your simple idea may turn into a benchmark.

Similarly, If you wish to check out how to create effective design for FAQ page, which is also an important part of a site, then follow the link http://www.xhtml-css-code.com/best-practice/understanding-why-and-how-of-a-faqs-page-of-website

However one point to be noted here is that the decision to opt for a single page website must be taken after considering a number of factors such as nature and quantity of content. Also it is not implied that such sites present the best solution and can replace the multiple page sites. Rather depending upon the purpose, one may think of having a one page site.

In this article we are going to take a closer look at Single Page sites, what makes them different, what points to take care while designing them and what advantages do they offer.

But first clear the confusion…..

A Single page site is not a Mini Site

Though there might be some overlapping features but it would be incorrect to refer a single page site as mini site. The latter contains a couple of pages with one main page which contains the purpose of the site. On the other hand a single page site has only one page and easier to maintain than a mini one.

Points to Consider for a Single Page Website

Least Amount of Content

It is highly important to judiciously place the content on a single page site and that too in specified content areas. Too much content will lead to clutter and the site will lose its essence. In sharp contrast to this, minimal and necessary content is the need of such a site.

Make the Transition Clear

The various sections of the site must be clearly distinguishable and the transition from one to another must be clearly visible to the visitors. This can be done using white space, bars, headers or even drawing the line to separate the different sections/areas.

Use Large Backgrounds

Large Backgrounds in a single page website helps creating a uniform look and thus can be advantageously used. In addition to this, they also help in separating content areas on the site.

Utilize Ajax and JavaScript

Both are useful tools that help organizing the content while taking care of accessibility and SEO. Also they come handy if the single page site has a bit more content than usual.

Go for Horizontal Scrolling

Horizontal Scrolling is useful especially if the quantity of the content is more as it helps in presenting the content in a clear manner without any clutter.

Benefits of Single Page Sites

Provide Easy Navigation

With all the required information embedded in one page, it is much easier for visitors to navigate the site. A user can quickly go through the content and doesn’t need to move from one page to another to find relevant information.

Maintenance is Easy

As the site comprises of only one page, its maintenance is easier in comparison to multi page sites. One only needs to focus on quality.

Work Best as Single Product or Purpose Site

If the site is meant to focus on one product only or has some central focus, it is good to construct a single page site. Doing this the concentration remains on the key objective and visitors get what they desire to know.

Can Create the Positive Impact

As single page websites are less commonly found, they can be used to create a positive and desired impact on the visitors with their unique designs and appeal. Therefore they are increasingly being used as Portfolio sites.

Given that users’ demands have to be catered to and with much focus on mobile web, it is likely that single page websites will gain more prominence. But whatever may be the case, the decision rests with the designers who may challenge their own creativity to develop a powerful website of one page or with the clients who may opt for single page promotion of their product/service.