Website Development – Webmaster Tips

5 Things To Consider When Making a Website

May 18, 2023September 8, 2018 by Webmaster Tips

Whether you’re doing it as a hobby project or practising your skills as a web designer/developer, there are no shortcuts on how to make a website that is sleek, professional, and attention-grabbing. Even if you use WordPress or similar software, you will still be bombarded with function and design choices that will require your decision. Here are five things to consider when making a website.

1. Choosing a Hosting Service and Domain Name
Great domain names are catchy, even if they comprise one or two words. Simply look at Google or Yahoo. Both of these one-worded domain names are recognized by anyone with a computer. Aside from a domain name that is catchy and easily sticks to your head, the name should precisely reflect your brand and its product or service.

Finding an appropriate domain name is critical, especially for dedicated business websites. Combining search engine optimization practices, name construction, and brand identity into the domain name can actually yield better chances of being found in search engine results pages. Ultimately, this leads to a higher potential in sales and profit.

2. What’s Your Back-End Plan
It is useless to learn how to make a website without a functional infrastructure supporting the back end. Think of your website as a house. It may have that sleek paint job, luxury windows and doors, and a well-maintained roof, but these are the only parts your neighbours can see. In the tech world, the home’s structure, from the beams to the flooring, serves as the back end of the design. Without it, the design cannot stand.

Fortunately, you don’t have to start from the ground up when making your back-end system. There are several trustworthy engines for eCommerce platforms you can use, such as Magento and WordPress. The latter is the ideal content management system of choice for information-rich websites.

3 Must Have Upgrades For Your Blog In 2017

May 17, 2023September 2, 2017 by Webmaster Tips

Like all forms of technology today, the moment you think you have gotten your blog to that point of ultimate perfection…..the whole blogosphere changes again! Maybe there is a new type of malware sweeping across the Internet. Or perhaps shareable content made easier is now the “it” addition to serious blogs. Perhaps the “hamburger” menu button is out and infinite scrolling has already replaced it.

Here, 2017 is no different from other years. Change is on the horizon yet again, and the blogger who wants to start a blog and stay competitive needs to update and upgrade as needed. In this article, learn about three of the top must-have upgrades for your blog this year.

1. Content-Based Upgrades.

While actual numbers can vary from day to day, the current working estimate suggests that there may be as many as 173 million blogs registered online. That is a lot of blogs! Of those blogs, estimates indicate as many as 1.13 million new posts go live every day.

Point being, your blog is competing with a LOT of others for those coveted sets of reader eyes. You are competing even harder for subscribers – readers who like your blog enough to give you their email address and permit you to send them updates. As the blogosphere continues to expand, you need ever-better incentives to nab that all-access pass to your readers’ inboxes during the 30 seconds or so they are surfing around your blog.

The hands-down best incentive for 2017 is “content upgrades.” What exactly does this mean?

Content upgrades are freebies that readers ONLY get when they give you their email address by entering it in the little box and subscribing to your email newsletter. So you want to make them VERY alluring. You want your free content upgrades to be so enticing a reader who leaves without registering to receive it will navigate back to you later to sign up so they don’t miss out.

The top content upgrades for 2017 are shaping up to be:

– Bonus materials that enhance knowledge gained from a popular blog post. An example might be a blog post you wrote about how to make your blog more visually appealing to readers. At the end, you offer a content upgrade featuring the list of the top five colors readers are most responsive to.

– Templates readers can use to recreate your success. If you have achieved great success with a particular infographic layout or a certain video format, you can bet your readers want to know how to do it too!

– Free plugins to increase conversions and sales. Let’s say you write a blog post about how using a certain plugin on your blog took your readership from zero to 500 in 15 days. A content upgrade at the end of the post might be an invitation to receive a free resource list of the best plugins of this type for each blog platform.

FileMaker vs Excel for Business Purposes

May 17, 2023March 21, 2017 by Webmaster Tips

There’s a common joke in the business world that goes along the lines of “the entire world runs on Excel”. And while it always gets a few chuckles out of those hearing it, there is a frightening degree of truth to that phrase so much that the situation has become quite bad for some businesses, which rely on Microsoft’s spreadsheet solution or something equivalent to extreme degrees.

Sure, when you look at it in a certain way, Excel does act like a database in many aspects. But it’s not meant to be used as one and definitely doesn’t perform as well as a more specialized solution in heavier cases.

On the other hand, it does have the benefit of bringing simplicity to the table, allowing pretty much any member of the company to contribute to the collection of information and development of internal processes. But this should not be a reason to limit the whole organization to Excel, certainly not when you have better alternatives available.

FileMaker is a good middle ground

FileMaker is a relational database solution that aims to make the process of working with a “real” database easier and more streamlined by adding a nice graphical interface layer on top of it. While it takes a while to get used to, and it’s certainly more complicated than Excel once you dig deep beneath its surface, it’s often a much more optimal solution for those who want a good balance between productivity, features, and simplicity.

One of the strong aspects of FileMaker is that it can be easy to develop a custom interface for your internal databases, complete with custom control elements that can allow for the input of various kinds of information with a reduced error rate. The capabilities of FileMaker in this regard are miles above what Excel could ever offer you, and learning to use it should be your top priority if your organization still relies on Excel to a large extent.

Top 5 Tips for People That are New to Website Building

May 17, 2023March 4, 2016 by Webmaster Tips

1. Choosing the Right Domain

Regardless if you choose .com, .net, or .biz, it is extremely important at this point to pick a name that matches your business and has relevant keywords. It will be a lot easier to rank a domain EliteDogTrainingServices.com than it will be to get anyone to find TamiLovesDogs.com on the web. Think long-term, too, because this domain name will be something connected to the business for years; get it right now so potential customers can quickly associate the two.

2. Planning the Website

Think in terms of your potential buyers’ needs. Will you be selling a product, will you be providing information, or will you build a website that encourages interaction between the guests? Choose the right design platform carefully and utilize a template that will enhance the customer experience. One thing to consider here, too, is consistency. If you have a logo and color theme already in use at your brick-and-mortar store or on your
business stationery, make sure to use them throughout the website design to tie everything together and strengthen your brand.

3. Outline the Website Content

Don’t make the mistake of rushing to get your website online without having a clear outline in place. Regardless of the platform, the website is going to need basic components like an eye-catching homepage, information about-us page, relevant products or services page(s), and an easy-to-find page that has all of your contact information.

14 Adobe AIR Applications for Web Developers and Designers

May 17, 2023March 1, 2015 by Webmaster Tips

Snippage:

This is an amazing Adobe AIR application that allows you to snip any part of the website you are browsing and use it to make a desktop gadget. Very useful for web development as you can put these on your websites, fiddle with it and have fun.

FEAT (Freelancer’s Estimation Assistance Tool)

The feat is another interesting application that allows you to calculate your salary, price of a project and expenditure as you lap up those freelancing projects. Very useful for freelance workers, you can install it on your site or desktop and see it work magic.

Doomi:

This is a simple Adobe AIR application that is a virtual To-Do-List. Very popular with the people around.

Vertabase Timer:

This sleek desktop widget helps you track time on a project or on a client. It is your mini-task manager.

SearchCoders dashboard:

It is an award-winning application that allows flex coders to get in touch with one another. You can interact with them on forums, on chats and exchange bits and pieces of code as well.

Amazing Free Photoshop Plugins for Designers

May 17, 2023September 29, 2007 by Webmaster Tips

Photoshop is a powerful tool and the most commonly used design tool, but if you use the right plugins, you will realize how your Photoshop experience can change. At some point, you have probably had struggles with Photoshop functions that you need but that don’t exist.

What you can do if you have similar problems is either change the software or make your existing software better. We suggest that you should try to use one of these, which will make Photoshop even more functional and easy to use. Plugins can unify all the creative solutions in only one software, but they also save time and money and make your workflow easier.

Here we have collected some handy Photoshop plugins that might help designers in their needs and help them speed up their work. These plugins will help you be more productive and stretch your creativity. Here are some of the tasks that can be done easier and faster if you use the right plugin: exporting Photoshop layers, converting PSD to CSS3, Photoshop text to SVG and skeuomorphic design to flat design, generating long shadows etc. Choose the one you need, try it out and share your experience with us and your colleagues.