SEOValley Launched its New Website, Logo & Tag Line.
PR Leap (press release), CA - Nov 3, 2005 India offering SEO, SEM, Linking, Web Design and SEO Product Development services and solutions today unveiled a brand new corporate website design, logo and

SEO FrightSites: Top Thirteen Worst Website / Search Issues seen
Internet Search Engine Database - Oct 30, 2005 The advantage seen by new Internet businesses are often found in the business in a box solution these schemes offer by enabling website design with a

Prime Visibility Introduces New Client Center in Website Relaunch
PR.com (press release), NY - Nov 22, 2005 and increasing online visibility, revenue and traffic to clients websites, introduces a new Client Center as part of their new value-added website design.

Action Pursuit Group Media, a Division of Apprise Media, Chooses
PR Newswire (press release), NY - Nov 2, 2005 2 /PRNewswire/ — Action Pursuit Group Media, a division of Apprise Media, LLC, has chosen TEN/The Enthusiast Network to provide website design and system

A Question of Scroll Bars. Does your website have scroll bars? It might not seem like an especially important question, but it is. In fact, when it comes to website usability, the question of scrolling is one of the most vital ones out there. Do Users Like to Scroll? One of those eternal questions of web design is whether users are fine with scrolling, or whether they hate it. In reality, the answer lies somewhere between the two: plenty of users don’t mind scrolling in the least, but there are plenty of users who still just don’t scroll. The very young (with low attention spans) and the very old (with poor hand-eye co-ordination) are the two biggest groups in this category, but it is also true of people who are just new to the web. You should be designing your site so that scrolling gives added value, but isn’t essential for basic usability. The Mouse Wheel Revolution. Since the beginnings of the web, people have become much more receptive to scrollable pages, thanks to mouse wheels and similar devices. These let them scroll with a quick flick, instead of the inconvenience it used to take. As a result, your visitors will be much more willing to scroll on your website than they used to be, and this works to your advantage. Still, you shouldn’t rely on it completely. Don’t Eliminate it Entirely But Pay Attention. The answer, then, when it comes to scrolling, is to be sensitive about it. Place everything important in a position that allows it to be reached with no scrolling even on the smallest monitors. Give your users the choice of whether to scroll or click, by linking to the individual parts of the article at the top of the page in a table of contents. In short, let the scrollers scroll, but don’t hide anything from the people who don’t want to. Please, No Horizontal Scrolling! Whatever you do, though, keep your scrolling vertical. Left-to-right scrolling on the web is an absolute abomination. Users aren’t expecting it, mouse wheels can’t do it, and web browsers aren’t designed for it. In short, it is a very, very bad idea. Every so often some designer will come along and try to make it work, thinking they’re being edgy and innovative (after all, no-one else is doing it), only to produce a completely terrible website. In the history of the web so far, there has never been a good horizontally scrolling website, and you’re not going to be the designer who produces one. Keep Flash Away from Scroll Bars. Another common design mistake when it comes to scroll bars is to think that you can do it better than the web browser, and use Flash to create non-standard scroll bars. While you might like the look you create, it will inevitably be less useful to your visitors than a normal scroll bar would have been. Your scroll bar won’t be immediately recognisable as what it is. It’s unlikely to work with mouse wheels or keyboard shortcuts, and you probably won’t even let users scroll by clicking in exactly the way they want. You end up designing a scroll bar that’s ideal for you, but frustrating for everyone else. However ugly you might think the default scroll bars are, people know how they work, and they’re used to them they don’t want to learn something new just to use your website. Scroll Bars are Better than New Pages. No matter how down you are on scroll bars, it’s always a bad idea to replace them with pagination. An article can easily become three or four pages long with the user having to click a ‘next’ button to get from one page to the next, and that’s just unacceptable on the web especially since, on smaller screens, some scrolling will be required anyway. If you think users dislike scrolling, then you have to realise that they dislike waiting for new pages to load even more: if your site requires them to wait for more than a few seconds between pages, they’ll abandon articles even if they’re in the middle of reading them.

Building Online Communities. When you’re thinking of starting a website, you have a few problems. Where will you get content from? How do you keep visitors coming back? When you make your website an online community, though, you can solve all these problems at a stroke. The Advantages of Communities. On a community website, people come there mainly to communicate with the other visitors your role is to set up the software that makes this possible, handling the technical side of things. Once your visitors make friends and find that people posting give them useful information (or just amusing writing), they will keep coming back, day after day, often even making time for it when they really ought to be doing something else. Even better, you don’t have to pay anyone to produce content, because the members of your community are producing more content for each other than you could ever hope to commission commercially. The only rewards they ask for are the replies they get from other members. Altogether, this adds up to an attractive proposition. Even better is the fact that the owners of online communities tend to quickly acquire cult leader-like status thanks to their ability to make the final decision when it comes to deciding who can be part of the community and who can’t. Members don’t even slightly resent supporting them, and will donate over and over again to make the website better not only will they tolerate ads, but they’ll click on them more in an effort to support you. There are forums out there that run entirely on community contributions: the Something Awful community forums and Metafilter community weblog, for example, charge $10 and $5 respectively per membership, and yet both have tens of thousands of members. What You Need for Your Community. Of course, thousands of members don’t just appear overnight. To get people to start coming and writing in the hope of getting a response, you need to give them a reason to come to your website in the first place. In many cases, your software will be what differentiates you. You’re likely to be competing with other, similar community websites, and providing better features than the next guy can drive a surprising number of visitors to your website. If you listen to and act on every request, you can’t do far wrong find out the visitors’ ideal features, and go out of your way to provide them, whatever they might be. Another excellent way to build initial traffic to your site is to provide some data that’s rare or difficult to get elsewhere, or to organise data in a way that will be especially useful to a certain community. You could, for example, compile live stock price data in a way relevant to a certain business sector, or organise TV listings so that they show all the times a certain show can be seen, whatever channel it’s on. If you can find something unique, people will flock to it and love it. Advertising a Community Website. One thing to note about this kind of website is that they don’t respond well to traditional promotion few people will respond positively to an ad asking them to join a community. Why should they write for you when you’re obviously only in it for commercial gain? Instead, you should make sure your community relates to something you have a genuine interest in, and then promote it casually in other relevant communities. An ideal situation is one where the owner of an existing website doesn’t have the time for it any more, and you can move their community over to your site this kind of ‘evacuation’ can give your site a thriving community overnight. Once you’ve got a community, of course, don’t underestimate how much promotion its members will do themselves: they will link it from everywhere they get a chance to put links, email things from it to friends, show it to people they know and get them to join the possibilities are endless. If you care for your community properly, it will pay you back many times over.

Dreamweaver: The Professional Touch. Dreamweaver is sometimes seen as FrontPage’s main competitor but, really, there’s not even a comparison to be made. Dreamweaver might be expensive, sure, but there are serious web designers out there using it and getting work done I can guarantee you that no real designer has ever used a copy of FrontPage to design a website. Consequently, Dreamweaver is way out in the lead in terms of market share, with about 80% of the users. So what do you sacrifice to get a better WYSIWYG editor? Well, apart from the higher price tag, you also sacrifice a certain amount of simplicity. Once you get used to it, though, Dreamweaver isn’t as hard to use as you might think. From the People Who Brought You… Dreamweaver is part of the Macromedia Studio that’s the company that produces the editor and player for Flash, as well as the well-liked Fireworks graphics editor and the Freehand drawing program. Their software is particularly popular with designers, and all it works on the Mac, but it has recently started to be quickly adopted by non-expert users as well. Dreamweaver Doesn’t Mess With Your Code. If you’ve already done some of the coding for your site, or you’re editing a template or a design that was done for you by someone else, then you don’t need to worry about Dreamweaver re-writing all your code and breaking it. Dreamweaver will leave your code alone for the most part, unless you explicitly tell it to alter it. This might not sound like much, but it’s really refreshing to see after using other HTML editors. For this reason, Dreamweaver is often considered to be the very best software out there for working with HTML templates, and most templates that you can buy will be provided to you in Dreamweaver’s format. Once you’ve got them, you can easily open them and insert your content. Standards. The code Dreamweaver used to produce was quite bad at conforming to standards it worked fine on most browsers, but it didn’t validate. In the most recent versions of Dreamweaver, though, not only does the code Dreamweaver produces validate, but it even has a validator built in. You can pick which standards you want Dreamweaver to code to, and it will stick to them for you, even if you choose the strictest ones out there. Dreamweaver was one of the first programs to support visual XHTML editing, and has received a lot of credit for it all you need to do to turn this option on is tick the box marked ‘Make Document XHTML Compliant’ when you create a new page. This newfound standards-compliance removed the last thing keeping a lot of designers away from Dreamweaver, which means that the program’s market share has grown still further over the last year or so. CSS, Javascript and PHP. A large part of Dreamweaver’s power comes in how easy it is to edit not only HTML, but also the things that go with it. Dreamweaver comes with a formidable Javascript library that does most of the useful things that can be done with Javascript, and makes it very easy to apply CSS styles to different parts of your page. In the latest version of Dreamweaver, you can even make interfaces to a MySQL database using PHP without doing any programming at all. This is a very useful feature, and saves a lot of headaches for many people who just want to make a simple database-driven website without learning PHP. Books About Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is a complex and useful enough program that whole books have been written about it and to get the most out of the program, you should really get a good one and read it through. Here are a few suggestions: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004: Training from the Source – Khristine Page. This is the official guide produced by Macromedia. Beginning Dreamweaver MX – Imar Spaanjaars. Follows the development of three very different websites using Dreamweaver, a nice format for a tutorial book. Visual QuickStart Guides: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX – J. Tarin Towers. A nice reference that’s especially good to refer back to when you need to know how to do something specific.

Don’t Be Scared, It’s Only Code: HTML for Beginners. For some reason, HTML seems to really frighten a lot of people. Some have seen complicated HMTL that’s been produced by an editor program, or they’ve clicked ‘View Source’ on a few pages and been scared by what they’ve seen. What you have to realise, though, is that HTML was designed from the beginning to be a very simple language to learn and to use just because automated systems for producing it have a tendency to make it over-complicated, it doesn’t mean that your code has to be that way. The best way to get started with HTML is to get over any fears you might have and just get stuck in. Note that you will need to save files as filename.html before you will be able to open them in a web browser. If you’re not sure how to do this with a text editor, use an HTML code editing program. All About Tags. There’s only one thing you really need to understand before you start writing pages in HTML, and that’s the tag system. Basically, tags are commands in angle brackets, with text between them. For example, here is some text in a bold tag: bold text The second tag has a slash before its name because it’s a closing tag. You can have as many tags inside other tags as you want, as long as you always remember to close the last one first. For example: bold, italic, underlined text If the tags are closed in the wrong order, then the code is invalid. The only other thing you really need to understand about tags is that they can include some extra information in the opening tag. A link tag, for example, will include an ‘href’ (the URL it links to), like this: . Closing tags never contain any extra information. The Structure of an HTML Document. These tags are usually laid out in a certain order. HTML is quite flexible in general, but there are two tags that almost all documents need to have: the head and the body. The head should contain information about the document, as well as any scripts or stylesheets it uses, while the body should contain the main text of the document. So, as an example, a simple HTML document might look like this:

some text

The first thing to notice is the way it starts and ends: with the HTML tag. This is essential when you write HTML. Now, notice what’s included in the head and what’s in the body: while the head tells you the title of the page and that its background colour is blue, it’s the body that has the web page’s text. Once you’ve got that basic structure, all you need to do is add more tags to make your page. A Guide to the Tags. html. The first and last tag. Tells the browser that the document is HTML. head. The header. title. The page’s title (appears in the browser’s title bar, right at the top of your screen). style. Contains CSS that provides information on how the browser should present your page. body. The main body of the page. p. A paragraph. All text should be contained in paragraph tags to start a new paragraph, close the old tag and open a new one. b. Bold. Text between b tags becomes bold. i. Italics. u. Underline. Beware of using this tag for things like headings, as many users have come to expect underlined text on the web to be a link. h. Heading. You should use different tags depending on how important your heading is, so h1 for a page’s main title, h2 for subheadings, h3 for the next headings down, and so on. a. The link tag (the a is a little confusing: it actually stands for ‘anchor’). This tag lets you link some of your text to another page. It works by surrounding the text that you want to become a link, like this: click here. ul/ol. Stand for ‘unordered list’ and ‘ordered list’ used to say that a list follows. The only difference is that ul uses bullet points while ol uses numbers. li. List item, a tag used inside ul or ol, like this:

• item 1
• item 2

img. Used for inserting images: . These are the most useful tags, but for a full reference, you might like to visit www.w3schools.com/tags.