4 hours – design the draft
1/2 hour – explain the draft to the client
1/2 hour – listen to their design ideas
1 hour – advise the client our idea is the better one
6 hours – build the website
4 hours – add the content and test
4 hours – fixing Internet Explorer issues!!

The reason we spend so much time fixing Internet Explorer (ie6) issues is that Microsoft, in their wisdom, didn’t follow the guidelines set down  by the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) and so decided to make up some rules of their own, in addition to leaving out support for features that they promised years ago and were added to most of the other browsers available.

We have to allow for the different way that ie6 uses padding and widths as well as a lack of support for other features that make the web browsing experience so much better.

Why don’t people upgrade to ie7? It’s free and offers a better web experience. Come to think of it, ie 8 is in beta use right now, so they might as well wait and go straight to that version!

Firefox – free and far superior – is an alternative browser available now; try it, you might not go back to ie6!

We used to be restricted to 760 pixels wide to accommodate those users with a monitor set to 800px by 600px (the 760 allows for the width of the scrollbar) but with the popularity of newer, wider screens and better processors, most users now set their screen to 1024 pixels wide – allowing us more freedom with our designs.

We still have to design with 800×600 users in mind, though, as there are still quite a few people with this type of screen in use.

And of course, a monitor set to 1024px is more difficult to read due to the smaller icons and fonts (sorry, Dad, you’re one of them!) but I have found that once the change is made, the screen looks crisper and is far easier to use now their is more screen space to play with.

We often get asked “why is there so much space around the design, can you fill it with something?” and we have to bite our tongues (our own, not each others).

We design fresh looking websites that need room to breathe – hence the whitespace, no matter what the design size. And who wants to read from one side to the other when the page fills the screen anyway? Our clients often think that they are getting less for their money if the design doesn’t use the full width pf the screen!

Less is more, we say!

So, what is your screen set to? Are there any 800 x 600 users still out there? And don’t get me started on the use of Internet Explorer 6!

There are dozens of search engines apart from Google, but we’ll use them as an example.

After all, it’s just a glorified word search facility – a user enters a phrase that he or she is searching for, and Google searches all the pages it has previously indexed and presents those pages that have those words on the page.

However, as there are so many other sites on the internet in any given sector, you need to be careful when adding content to your site.

This is how it works ..

Google periodically indexes all the (new or changed) pages on the internet. Then, when a user enters a search term Google searches it’s index and serves up all the pages it finds with that word or phrase (called keywords or key phrases).

Now, if you have this phrase on your website in the general text of one of the pages and your competitor has the same phrase in a heading or a link, Google will list your competitor’s page higher than yours.

This is because Google searches all pages and indexes words and phrases in this order:

1. Domain name
2. Description (more on this in a later post)
3. Title of the page
4. Main Headings -called H1, H2 and so on
5 Links
6 Text

There are also other ways to help your ranking .. incoming links for example are invaluable. If you can find other ‘relevant’ websites to list your site and link to you, all the better. However, it’s no good just getting anyone to link to your site. Try getting a link on more respected and established (and relevant) websites as they will already be highly ranked and Google will naturally follow those links to your site, therefore increasing your ranking.

Outgoing links are not as important and the use of keywords hidden in your website is not so important these days.

Remember -

Relevant – make sure all your links and content is relevant to your business sector
Content – keep updating the content on your website .. content is king!

A little test – which of the following sentences carries more weight with Google?

a. We can help you with this! Contact us at The Cube lab for more help with Search Engine Optimisation.

b. For more help with Search engine Optimisation, click here.

Answers on a postcard to The Cube Lab please!

The Cube Lab