CSS Sprites: How Yahoo.com and AOL.com Improve Web Performance.

This is a fantastic idea.  AOL and Yahoo! pay engineers to optimize their sites.  This is their only job!  The best part about the internet is that almost everything is open!  So, we can study what the larger corporations are doing and mimic them.

The problem: Google and others think your website has too many images, and makes too many requests to your webserver when you have visitors.  The solution: Have one image that has many smaller parts to it, and move the image around using CSS in the viewing port of the div so that the same image will show multiple different icons.

This is a fantastic principle and we are using it currently in our websites.  Sometimes you can save 20 requests from your webserver and put it into 1.  This makes your website more efficient, more streamlined, and better suited for a larger subset of browsers.  If you can minimize requests, you are more effiently serving your visitors, and efficiency is always welcome in the business world.

Your website is what your customers see.  If your website is improperly structured, there’s no telling how major browsers will render your website to your customer’s sites.  Let me explain.

Websites are created by creating HTML code.  This proper HTML code tells browsers what your website is supposed to look like.  If it is not valid code, how can you expect browsers to show your website correctly to the world?  Sure, it may look ok on your computer’s firefox, or internet explorer, but are your customers seeing the same thing you are?

Further, Google returns results for relevant webpages. If you are attending a seminar for a new technology or a salesman comes to sell you on using a particular service, and the person presenting speaks very ill-formed English, or even sounds ignorant, how likely are you to believe or take what that person said for relevancy? Google says the same thing about websites, but the language ends up being HTML.

This is why it is important that any web company that you hire needs to validate your website across the 4 major web browsers.  These 4 include Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.  So, what does this all mean?  It means that no matter how you do your site, there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t see the site like you see it.  This is particularly true due to mobile browsing so widespread these days!

This is exactly why AndPlus Design always validates all websites that we create.  If a website is properly structured, its output can be predicted much easier than if there are unclosed tags or improper or outdated HTML code.

We use the w3c Validator.  Try out your website today.  Enter your website’s URL in the form below and see what the result is.  If you see red, contact AndPlus Design today.

Enter your website in the form below!

Maybe I would be keen on taking my own advice!  News from 3 months ago is not exactly news, is it?  It loses a little bit of credibility to your site if you have news that is not current.  Have you gone to a site and had it say “News: Our company launches a new product!” and saw that the date was last quarter?  What has the company been doing in the past quarter?

Putting milestones on the page could be enough for your customers, if you want to keep people updated.  It’s better to have a full product offering on your website than to announce every move your company makes.

The biggest point i’m trying to make with this post is that you should not put the expectation that you are doing a ton of business all the time, nor do you want to put out the expectation that you are doing no business.  You, as a business owner, know that there are certain times when there are streaks of business, and other times when there are lulls in business.  Your customers should always be oblivious to this fact.

Understanding what your customers expect is the one of the most important things you can understand.  If you set the expectation, you better be ready to live up to it.

If you are in business for yourself, you undoubtedly understand the concept of sticking to what you know.  Businesses perform best when they fill a particular niche or set of niches.  Odds are you have done hundreds of value analysis trying to understand whether you should make something or buy something.  If your business was to sell cars, would you make the headlights, too?  Odds are the amount of research and QA cycles that goes into reflection angles, brightness, and performing according to certain state laws are above your company and it would be best to purchase headlights from companies that understand these factors best.  Are you a web firm?  Why build your own website in-house when there are others that can do it so much more efficiently?  This post will go into some reasons why you should outsource your website solution.

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Meta tags include a multitude of information about a particular page or web site. Information regarding what the page contains to who made the web page can all be conveyed through Meta tags. More importantly, the most important themes and phrases can be captured into these keywords. This post will go into a little more detail as to the importance of Meta Tags, and why they are more important today than they were 5 years ago.

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Relying on search engines to automatically crawl your website is not the best way to get your pages indexed. You must explicitly tell Google what pages you want it to list to potential visitors! This post will go into some detail and offer some different techniques on how to index your site more completely on Google. These techniques will be applicable to other search engines as well.

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Linking to sites which offer similar content or can add value to your words is one of the most important things you can do when establishing yourself on the internet. Understanding when to link and when not to link is one thing, but when you have a page *full* of useful content and no links, Google may think you are just some crazy guy with a bunch of opinions! Would you go to a college that had only one professor? Well, Google is likely to under-value your web page without appropriate links to like content.

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CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, but what does it do for me in terms driving revenue and keeping customers on your site? I will hope to touch lightly on the fact that even though you may not ever write a line of CSS in your life, it is important that your web person is intimately familiar with its workings, and installs this technology on your website.

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What does this actually mean? Do you print advertisements or marketing pamphlets? Are the filled with text? Probably not, because you know if you picked anything up with 1000 words, you would most likely not read even 10% of it! The same principles flow into web design and content layout.

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How often do your web people analyze your website for particular keywords? AndPlus Design does a monthly check on all of its customers using FREE webtools that any website owner can use! There are people who stay on top of the search engine spider logic, but, business owners shouldn’t have to.

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