There are many reasons why a fast website is a better website and many reasons why your website may be running slowly.
A website that displays quickly:
- Gets your website users to the information they need quicker
- Means that a visitor is less likely to get frustrated and go somewhere else
- Provides a positive impression of you through a positive online experience
- Gets better rankings in website search engines
- Scores higher when competing against other websites for Pay-Per-Click position on search engines
Reasons your website may be running slowly include:
- The quality of the server and network infrastructure of your Hosting company
- Poorly optimised pictures, images and other media files on your website
- Poorly optimised web code
- Too much data or too many images on a single web page
- Inefficient database query’s
- External data feeds or scripts, for example Third Party Advertising services
In the days before broadband web designers had to be both prudent and clever with their designs to deliver a fast Internet experience for website visitors. As broadband became the standard way to connect to the Internet, and more bandwidth became available, inevitably designers relaxed a little and websites with more media heavy elements took over. The good practices from a decade ago though are still as relevant today as they were back then, paying attention to the things that can impact your website speed will always reap benefits.
Establishing a presence online when businesses are in their infancy is imperative as the days of a website being considered a luxury for businesses are long gone. Websites are now considered a necessity as people increasingly turn to the web as their main source of information. For many businesses, a website is the first interaction they have with their target audience(s) so communicating the businesses objectives, tone and corporate message online is fundamental.
At white interactive we understand the importance of having a professional website so have created a solution that will enable start-up and small businesses or those on a tight budget to develop and build their brand online. Our templated approach offers cost conscious businesses a straightforward yet highly professional solution, which can be tailored with the organisation’s branding and style.
Start-up business Lorus Consulting, a financial recruitment consultancy, have recently benefited from our templated approach. Working closely with the client, we designed a logo and identity which was than incorporated into the design of the website. The website www.lorusconsulting.com, which was also integrated with TriSys recruitment software, delivers an effective and professional web presence.
Dylan Pearson, Director of Lorus Consulting is: ‘incredibly pleased with the outcome. white interactive’s approach was professional and the website was delivered on time and most importantly within budget.’
The ability for web designers to use rich typography in their designs has taken a small step towards becoming a reality.
In something of a surprise move the software company is backing a newer effort at the World Wide Web Consortium to standardize Web-based fonts with technology called the Web Open Font Format (WOFF).
Let’s hope we see this new standard supported by all of the major browser manufacturers in the very near future.
Two new websites launched recently. The first is www.alk-lifeline.co.uk a website for EpiPen, a treatment for anaphylaxis and the second is for www.boginabag.com a light weight portable toilet.
2010 has started off incredibly busy for us here at whiteinteractive and we have just recruited two new staff to help support our growing digital business, offering website design for business’ in Hampshire and the South.
Here is a typical scenario we run into from time to time….
The client requests changes to their website, we carry out the changes and notify the client, the client reports back that the changes have not been done. Of course the changes have been done. the client just cannot see them. So what is going on here?
Welcome to the world of caching. When you view a web page your web browser software downloads that page, and the media on it, and stores it on your computer. This storage is known as the browser cache. This helps to speed up the viewing of the website as the browser doesn’t have to keep downloading the same files again and again. If you leave the site and come back later then, depending on how your browser is configured, you may get your local cached copy loaded instead of having the page freshly downloaded from the website. This is what can lead to the impression that page updates have not been done.
It is useful to be able to forcibly refresh a web page and clear the local cache. For information on how to do this there is a useful wiki page on clearing your cache. A quick way to force the refresh of a single page is simply to go the page and press Ctrl-F5 (PCs only).
Sometimes, even this isn’t enough though to see the page changes. The problem here can be that caching is occuring at your network level or even your Internet Service Provider. If this is the case then you will have to wait until their cache is updated.
So there you have it, an awareness of caching is always useful in understanding what you are looking at and how to ensure you are viewing the most up-to-date information.
Sunday, February 7th was a perfect day for once again staging the 19th Chichester Priory 10km Road race. This is one of the major road races in the English road running calendar and is recognised nationwide as a top quality road race. The high standard and depth of the field was matched by perfect weather conditions and resulted in the largest race turnout ever as more than1500 enjoyed one of the most popular and prestigious events in the South of England.
A three strong team from White Total Design took part in this years race aiming for personal best times. Despite what the organisers described as a slight incline after 6k – it was more of a mountain! – Lisa, 52.31, Sam, 55.47, Nick 54.49 all managed to finish in their fastest times.
This year the race was once again organised splendidly by the Rotary Club of Chichester Priory and was fortunate to have the same two sponsors, Peter Cooper, the local Volkswagen Group and Brooks Sports the international suppliers of sports clothing. Organisers and sponsors were pleased with a race where many personal best times were achieved by elite athletes, club runners and recreational runners alike.
We used to use Google’s Blogger software to publish our blog but due to changes in Google’s Terms of service, and their dropping of their support for FTP, we decided to jump ship to Wordpress. And we are glad we have, WordPress is great and was a breeze to set up.
We have transferred the best of our archives over (dates not withstanding !) so we are back up and running again.
Came across this very useful tip the other day for creating a link on a web page or email to a specific page or article within a pdf file.
The format for linking to a page is very similar to the standard anchor mechanism used for web page links.
Example
http://www.mydomain.com/document.pdf#page=1
To link to a specific article on a pdf page requires a two step approach.
Firstly you need to set up a destination tag within the pdf file:-
1. Manually navigate through the PDF for the desired location, and magnification
2. Go to View > Navigation Panels > Destinations
3. Add a New Destination and give it a name
4. Save the document
The second step is create your link, the format for which is:-
http://www.mydomain.com/document.pdf#nameddest=MYARTICLE
Beware of your pdf ‘initial view’ properties though which may interfere with how the article opens. It is best to set the layout and magnification to ‘default’ (File -> Properties -> Initial View).
In the age of the digital revolution and the birth or Twitter and Facebook is print dying a death? Many a Marketing Manager the world over is asking themselves how can they better communicate with their audiences? There is no easy answer!
We’ve been debating this in house for some time and have come to the conclusion that the best campaigns are those that use a mix of both and that are able to adapt their brand to work across a range of media platforms and promotional vehicles.
It’s all about getting your message out there in a way that your audience wants to receive it and most importantly keeping it simple and easy to understand. Traditional forms of advertising might be necessary for brand awareness but do ‘opportunities to see’ stats really give you a true picture on how successful a campaign has been?
The great thing about the range of digital solutions on offer is that you can engage and interact with customers in a number of different ways, which helps to keep campaigns fresh and interactive and the great thing is that the results are instant. You can measure success of an email campaign by tracking the number of click throughs from a link or the number of new registrations/ sign-ups to email newsletters. You can talk to customers and share their views and ideas and you can improve business processes by embracing digital technology and providing traditional printed material for downloads, info via podcast or online registration for fulfilment of promotional offers. The possibilities are endless.. but digital is here to stay and those that embrace it will reap the rewards.
When embarking on a new website design you may come across the terms ‘website journey’ and ‘key paths’, but what do these mean?
Very often you have an end goal in mind when someone visits your site. This could be making a purchase, contacting you for more information, filling in a form or simply going away with a positive impression of your company. Guiding the user from their entrance to the website to your final goal is the ‘journey’ that you want them to take.
Your website may well be catering for several different audiences of course so by defining what your key paths for those audiences are, during the design phase, will help define the structure that the site should have to best achieve it’s goals.
For example, when you are looking at a product on an ecommerce website you will often see a list of other products that are similar or related in some way. In this case the site developers are anticipating that the next step of your journey may be to look for similar products and are making that next step that much easier for you to take.
