The piquant Steve Jobs has been known to be outspoken in the technology bubble. And it isn’t much of a farfetched idea to notice that Adobe’s Flash has come under some scrutiny by more critical crowds; setting up for a debate on HTML 5 versus Flash use on mobile phones. Some iPhone users argue about Apple not including Flash with the iPhone, others are more interested in Apple’s technology. Perhaps by not including Adobe’s Flash as the standard on their mobile devices, it is Apple’s way of saying that if you want Flash, you have to go out and get it, or find something different; they don’t necessarily want to deal with a third-party developer, because of the inherent problems with that.

The near and far future of Web design deals with multimedia, especially Flash and HTML 5.

In his long-winded essay on Flash, Thoughts on Flash, Steve Jobs goes into the inherent problems of mobile use of Flash.

“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.” – Steve Jobs

Technology lovers can agree that there are some drawbacks to Flash, namely the fact it’s not completely open source, if it all, considering it’s a proprietary platform. And while being a great tool for multimedia, it lacks sufficient depth in other areas like battery performance, and overall implementation for mobile devices. The recent release of Flash 10 highlighted some new text features. And with that ability, came the full implementation of dynamic text abilities, for example, being able to display a news website, say the New York Times, using the glory of Flash’s new text engine. The newer system in Flash 10 is called the ActionScript-based Text Layout Framework. This delivers rich typography to the Web, within live Web layouts.

Many industry experts believe that HTML is an evolving to become a multimedia powerhouse, so that at one point in time, or another, it may outgrow the capabilities of Flash, at least on mobile platforms. While this may or may not be true, HTML is a fully featured API, and Flash is too, but there are differences and divergences where they can grow; it isn’t necessarily wrong for Flash to break into the mobile market, considering their platform is multimedia. In essence, both API’s are fundamentally different, but also have some similar capabilities.

There is a battle between multimedia API’s, but there is a battle between every other video format as well. It’s a natural course for technology. There is no real danger of Flash being minimized in their marketplace, but HTML 5 will most likely grow, as more people adopt new technology, and remove older cobwebs from their Web designs.

Take Silverlight for example, a competitor to Adobe Flash, it enjoys its market share and is just as fully featured as Flash, yet they both exist and live on. Obviously, open-source is the way to go for software development. People enjoy the idea that they can grab hold of a piece of free software, and use it to their hearts content. And of course, I enjoy open-source software too. This is where the debate begins for any piece of software, like Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight. It’s like the battle between Microsoft Windows and Linux–each with their advantages and disadvantages, although many people claim that one or the other is far superior.

The Adobe Flash white paper (PDF) highlights the capabilities of the Flash technology.

• A recognizable and complete system for video and multimedia development-and open source framework
• A platform that delivers content to the widest selection of Operating Systems, and other end-user variables
• Integrated development tools and workflow support, for front-end and back-end development
• Compatible with a large variety of open standards, easily integrated with Web, Java™, and .NET infrastructures

A short introduction and related book on HTML 5 and CSS3 (PDF) by Brian P. Hogan, Develop with Tomorrow’s Standards Today, displays the technology.

• Used for Web friendly applications
• New elements for defining site structure
• All kinds of embeddable items
• Extra markup, and advanced multimedia support in CSS3
• AJAX-the buzz word for Web design and Java for the Web

In a blog post on June 8, Google announced, “Our new search index: Caffeine”

And as Google works to improve their search engine, on a day-to-day basis, they have introduced new ways to speed up the process of searching. With the completion of Google Caffeine, they have improved the functionality, and speed of search engine results and indexing.

The Basics of Google Caffeine

• 50% fresher results for Web searches, better and faster content retrieval, quicker updates…
• A search index capable of retrieving results in parallel; able to process hundreds and thousands of pages in a matter of seconds…
• With parallel processing, Google Caffeine is able to index and retrieve Web pages on an enormous scale.
• Temporal relevancy determines newer, fresher and more updated content. Think of temporal relevancy like breaking news; when something important happens, it needs to be quickly found online.

If you are wondering, or a bit confused, as to what we are talking about, do not worry–Google has a video on how search and caffeine work. When you search Google, for say the keyword “cute puppy” you are in fact retrieving Google’s cache of its search index; you are not retrieving a real time result, but a copy of Google’s cache of that Web page.

“We’ve moved from a batched indexing system to an incremental system that enables us to more quickly and efficiently refresh pages.” – Google spokesperson Jake Hubert

When you search for any keyword, Google’s API will query its massive index for all matching terms, and then it will display the results. You may ask, “How did Google collect the index?” Well, Google employs the use of bots that crawl the Web continuously; they download new or existing pages, cache them, and then update the index. Bots work by crawling the links on a page–that is how they got their name.

The effort to maintain and keep this index up-to-date is a massive one. Google datacenters are the heart of operations, with super clusters of servers that network their entire infrastructure and indices together. Therefore, when you search for the keyword “cute puppy” all of their technology comes together in unison to bring you the results.

Google realizes that search engine users want the freshest content they can find. With the older indexing system, results came up relatively fast, but as more content was added to the Web, the pace of new information would have been troublesome to maintain.

“In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second.” – Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer at Google

The Scale of Google Caffeine

Google processes Web pages at astronomical speeds and lengths:

• One index can take up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage.
• Google adds new information to the index at an alarming and rapid rate; hundreds and thousands of gigabytes per day.

Estimated size of Google’s index – Image courtesy of http://www.worldwidewebsize.com

However, with Google Caffeine, and possible future speed improvements, the company is able to keep up with an ever-increasing amount of Web content–social media for example has been one large data mine. Google does not index certain elements of many social media websites, for privacy reasons. And some social media websites do employ the “content=noindex” or “rel=nofollow” HTML tags. Noindex tells Google’s bots to ignore the index, i.e. not to cache the Web page. Nofollow tells the bots not to assign any importance on the link, i.e. Page Rank/authority; it makes a link transparent.

What Google has also done is index certain public elements of social media, for example, the public profile section of your Facebook account–if you set it to public. They have also employed real time results via social media services like Twitter. If you want to see real time results in action, search for anything that is popular in the news, say “congress.” Then click the “latest” link on the left side. You should get a Twitter feed in the results.

Essentially, Google fully realizes the need to scale their search engine with the growth of information online.

Cirrus ABS – Experts at Web development, design and technology…

Since its founding in 1995, Cirrus ABS has worked to deliver award-winning Website design and Web development on a national scale. From our headquarters in Fort Wayne, IN to other regional offices like Indianapolis, IN we have delivered astonishingly crafted websites to businesses who want professional Web design, development marketing, and more–using our unique Web technology, and solutions that we call the NetCentered Business Strategy and the Cirrus eBusiness Suite.

We are a full-service Web developer, offering many services that can achieve success and measurable results for your business online. We like to say that, “If you can dream it, we can build it.” And we put heavy importance on the ability of a business to get found online with search engine visibility.

For search engine optimization (SEO) services and localization like “Fort Wayne seo” or “Indianapolis seo” we have it covered. We understand that your business needs to be found for the localities that you serve–on a local, regional or national scale.

Contact Cirrus ABS today, ask about our award-wining Web design, or NetCentered Strategy, we are here to help serve your businesses needs online. You can call 1-877-817-4442 to speak with a solutions consultant. You can also request a free needs assessment to tell us what you may want for your website, or you can request an online demo with us that will highlight our advanced Web technologies.

We also have expert Web design and development that is focused on small business. View our Small Business Suite for an overview–it offers everything that a small business needs to succeed online. ]]> http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/all-about-google-caffeine/feed/ 0 http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/5-handy-firefox-add-ons-for-web-developers/ http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/5-handy-firefox-add-ons-for-web-developers/#comments 06/22/2010 Rick Kemery http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/?p=558

Many times a Web developer may need a handy utility to speed up a process. The follow list of Firefox add-ons can do just that. For helping with Web design, an add-on like ColorZilla can help select the right colors, by using a Photoshop style palette chooser.

And for Web development, the Firebug add-on can provide a full-range of debugging tools.

ColorZilla

ColorZilla can help when it is difficult to find the exact color that you are looking for. This handy Firefox add-on provides a Photoshop style color picker and palette browser. If you are stuck on selecting the right color for Web design, this add-on is meant for you. It provides a quick way to match a color found on the Web to a design. And you will not have to open Photoshop to get the right color. It is also wonderful for developing a color swatch.

Firebug

Firebug can be a great companion for Web development. This add-on offers a comprehensive suite of debugging tools, which allows a Web developer to view code properties on every Web page. With Firebug, you will be able to view and edit the HTML, CSS and JavaScript properties of a Web page. Plus you will be able to view potential bandwidth bottlenecks and HTTP headers. This is an excellent utility if you are looking for an easy to use debugging add-on.

Web Developer

Some say that the Web Developer add-on is a virtual “Swiss army knife.” With Web Developer, you will be able to disable key browser features, such as JavaScript, images, CSS and more. Plus, you are able to view and edit a Web page’s CSS and HTML on the fly.

A debugging tool is included for dynamic JavaScript, which is also good for AJAX debugging. You will get the ability to edit forms and form data. There is also an additional line guide and ruler for measuring out Web pages on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

Save Complete

With Save Complete, a user can save an entire Web page to their hard-drive, without downloading difficulty. If one uses the traditional “Save Page As” option in Firefox, a few things could go missing in the offline copy, such as images or CSS elements. Save Complete is great for archiving purposes, and even better for storing the entirety of a Web page.

Screengrab

Screengrab can help if you want a quick utility to capture a mockup image of a Web page, . Without needing to open up your favorite image editor, this add-on can take an entire screen grab of a Web page, allow you to grab certain portions of a page, or a selection. Other options include “copy to clipboard” and “save as a file.” This is a handy add-on for Web designers who are consistently mocking up Web pages and need quick access to a complete screenshot utility.

These add-ons are great for a novice or casual Web developer, but if you are looking for a professional website design, we have just the right thing.

Need a complete solution for your website? We have what it takes to win on the web…

At Cirrus ABS, we combine our expert approach to Web design and Web development in our NetCentered Business Strategy. We provide a full-range of Web services, from expert copy writing, to complete solutions for online marketing – we have it all and more. We’re not a traditional Web design firm, because we go beyond what’s offered somewhere else.

And the technology that drives our successful Web solutions? The Cirrus eBusiness Suite, a comprehensive Web platform.

Contact Cirrus ABS to ask about our comprehensive Web solutions and how they can work the best for you. We serve any size of business, with our Small Business Website (SBS) offerings, to our competitive industry solutions. ]]> http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/5-handy-firefox-add-ons-for-web-developers/feed/ 0 http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/writing-for-blogs-and-optimization/ http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/writing-for-blogs-and-optimization/#comments 06/21/2010 Rick Kemery http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/?p=528

For the optimization of a blog, the All in One SEO Pack should be considered a “must have” for blog writers. Fundamentals of the pack include in the ability to edit the title, description and keywords of a blog post. For new users of WordPress, this plugin provides out-of-the-box workability. After installing, a user can access main features immediately, without the need for additional configuration. And for an advanced user, it supports a variety of features to fine-tune its integration on a blog, such as canonical URLs and title formatting.

And for blog writing? Well, develop your personal blogging style with attention to a few tips found in this blog post. These can help out in key areas such as readability and tone.

All in One SEO Pack

Under the settings menu, there are options to edit the home title, description and keywords of a blog. This will allow for quick optimization of a home page, without the need to edit files. When writing a title for either a home page or a blog post, keep the message clear and to the point. As the pack suggests, search engines use a maximum of 60 characters in the title. Being able to provide a concise message, within the restrictions of character count, is one approach to writing effectively with this package.

Search engines use the description field to provide a snippet on a results page. Again, try to be clear and concise while ensuring that the description is below or at 160 characters. Writing effectively for both the title and description helps keep a uniform and clean format throughout a blog. And when search engine users find this content, the title and description will both adequately convey the topic and message of the post, while conforming to standards.

The All in One SEO Pack will also use keywords automatically with associated blog tags. However, this section is not as “mission critical” as ensuring that a clear and concise title and description are present. However, make sure that both the associated tags and keywords reflect the topical meaning of a post.

Blog Writing

Aside from writing the title and description concisely, it can take years of work at writing to develop fluency in tone, delivery and style. And to develop one’s own writing style, the best approach is most certainly hard work and commitment. A well-respected and prolific English novelist, Anthony Trollope, who was popular for writing The Eustace Diamonds, would dutifully write 250 words of a novel each day and would never skip a day of writing.

Trollope’s personal quotes reflect his feelings about writing,

“There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily” and “Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.”

As one starts to develop their style of writing, they will start to notice the intrinsic qualities of their style. They’ll be able to edit on the word and sentence level more aptly, to convey a concise and overarching message throughout a piece of work. As one starts to get better at writing and editing, they’ll be able to develop and refine their tone to reach and captivate a varied audience-but it starts with hard work, and a commitment to writing.

As you may know, writing for a blog is somewhat different from website content writing. To develop a style of blog writing, approach a target audience with informality and a conversational tone. Essentially, effective blog writing conveys your own conversational tone and a passion for a given topic. Once you are finished writing, read the post aloud and slowly, paying attention to the syllables of each word and their overall flow from one word to the next. For example, the following universal English phrase, “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” flows well, reads well and has certain resonant sound characteristics, namely assonance and alliteration.

Flesch-Kincaid Formula

One can also gauge the grade level of their writing by looking at the Flesch-Kincaid formula. This assigns a grade level and score to a text, to determine the overall difficulty of reading. Generally, academia reads on a Flesch-Kincaid score of the low 30s, and print/magazine tends to score in the 50s, or at the high-school grade level. It is based on the syllable counts in the text, and the use of simple words versus complex words (monosyllable or disyllable words versus tri-syllable or more).

The Flesch-Kincaid formula is interesting to look at, but not the end-all of writing. Use it as a tool to understand how word usage affects the reading of a text, and how important that can be to determining the ease of reading. Microsoft Word has the ability to score readability statistics using Flesch-Kincaid, if you check “Show readability statistics” under the proofing section in Word options.

Cirrus ABS – Web design and copy from seasoned professionals…

And if you’re looking to have a team of seasoned and professional writers to craft exceptionally written Web copy, we can help. At Cirrus ABS, we meld our team experience into all aspects of Web design, development and copy writing, including the business process and marketing with our award-winning Cirrus eBusiness Suite platform.

Contact Cirrus ABS to learn about our unique Web approach. We’re headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana and have been in the business of Web solutions and NetCentered business strategy since 1995. ]]> http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/writing-for-blogs-and-optimization/feed/ 0 http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/the-popularity-of-mobile-browsing/ http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/the-popularity-of-mobile-browsing/#comments 06/10/2010 Rick Kemery http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/?p=462

The use of mobile internet browsers included with cell phones are becoming quite popular, especially with the latest news about the upcoming launch of Apple’s iPhone 4G. As more people catch on to the idea of utilizing their cellular data plans for mobile browsing, the advent of reading the news, or accessing other media over a cell phone is “all the rage” in the technology and other web-related approaches, including the adaptation of mobile browsing techniques and applications in Web design.

In just a few years, the popularity of mobile browsing became so popular that every technology-based company wanted a piece of the pie. It started in 2006, with cell phones that were capable of handling the mobile internet browser applications, and those were usually limited version of their full-featured web browser parents. They were developed to be small enough to handle the capability of the cell phones at the time. With the advent of new cellular technology, such as with the release of Apple’s iPhone, the arena of mobile browsers changed into a completely new world of opportunity.

With the increasing attention towards the use of mobile internet browsers on cell phones, the term wireless portal was coined to define the movement of mobile browsing. This portal is used as the landing page of mobile browser users.

You might remember the PDA of the early 2000s–now a mere dinosaur of the past, but it was also the first platform for straightforward non-cell phone focused mobile web browsing. The codenamed Apple product, the Apple Newton, was the first to use such mobile web browsing technology, it was released in August of 1996.

As time staggered on, so did the innovations of mobile web browsing. Now we have cellular devices capable of offering full-featured mobile web internet browsers, which are able to handle HTML, CSS, scripting, and other web API formats. Popular mobile web browsers include the Android browser, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer mobile, Safari Mobile Browser, Opera Mobile, and other mobile browsers commonly found on gaming consoles like the PlayStation 3. It’s clear that the web has switched over to individuals becoming more invested in what they find on the web, and more involved in the technology behind it.

Social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook for mobile phones have been the main motivators for people to start using their cell phones as mobile web devices. Over just a one-year period, from 2009 to 2010, the number of people who used their cell phones to access web-related services for Twitter, Facebook and mobile browsing tripled in numbers. ]]> http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/the-popularity-of-mobile-browsing/feed/ 0 http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/website-design-and-the-buzzworthy-html-5-api/ http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/website-design-and-the-buzzworthy-html-5-api/#comments 06/08/2010 Rick Kemery http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/?p=414

With the latest buzz by Apple on a few new interesting tidbits of information about HTML 5, the web development community was presented with some alluring and somewhat provoking uses of HTML 5. The API at its most basic foundation is used to expand on a users interaction with a website – by expanding on the capability of what a simple video, image or even a div tag can do.

Web design used to be simple, a few blocks of text, and maybe an image or two; but that was when Netscape was still a browser and not a throwback of the past. Although Netscape moved on to become Firefox, the idea of web design also transformed over time.

With the movement from HTML 4 to HTML 5, web design took a step towards the future. I remember being amazed back in the 1990s of seeing video and animated images creep into web design. Although the use of animated images took off and became the cliché of the decade, it did speak to a larger idea – multimedia was becoming the de-facto user experience on the web.

After YouTube was created in 2005, multimedia was solidified as the primary source for immersion and fun on the web. And now with the integration of social media and interactive media, we’ve come full circle for immersion on the web.

HTML 5 offers a variety of newer web features for web design, APIs that allow advanced media playback, document editing (a la Google Docs, for example), the ability to draw on a 2D canvas (and support for dynamic images), web messaging and more.

With the move from HTML 4 to 5 new rules were also introduced. Added was the ability to use inline SVG, MathML, new elements such as article, audio, canvas, footer, header, and new attributes such as ping and charset – deprecated elements include applet, center, font, and noframes, for example. HTML 5 also allows old browsers to ignore the newer attributes – for a bit more compliance. For a more complete list of the changes from HTML 4 to 5, see dev.w3.org. ]]> http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/website-design-and-the-buzzworthy-html-5-api/feed/ 0 http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/develop-your-website-one-step-at-a-time/ http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/develop-your-website-one-step-at-a-time/#comments 06/03/2010 William Clausen http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/?p=406

So, you’ve gone through the process of getting a website for your business. Hurray! But making it live for the entire world to see isn’t the end of the line. You need to come up with a comprehensive website development strategy in order to make sure that your website continues to grow. If you don’t have some sort of game plan for adding in new content, images, videos or more, you can end up finding yourself wanting to work on everything at once.

One of the best ways to get started is to single out one area of the site that you know will need to be developed further. After all, you’ve gotten your potential customer to the site, you want them to hang around and convert. Take your most popular product or service, break it down into areas that you know still need expanding on, and go from there. Once you know what you are missing, it’s easy to plan out what you need to do. 

For example, Product A currently has a webpage describing the item and why it’s the best solution for your client. However, you’ve noticed that there is a large interest in some of the finer details of the product. Your analysis of the questions and information that is being requested shows that you can put together three PDFs on the specs, two videos covering some of the uses of Product A, a widget that can calculate the amount of savings it provides over other popular alternatives, a handful of questions that you can add to your FAQ page, and a few content pages that go into further detail on its uses in specific industries. Now that you have a checklist on how to provide your users a better experience, you can just start down the list. Rinse and repeat for each area of your site, and you will find that developing your website isn’t as overwhelming as it first appears. 

You don’t want your website to grow stagnant. A good website development strategy, along with a proven web design, will ensure that it doesn’t end up that way.

Just don’t do it!

Does the size of your logo on your site matter?  It matters a little…in that your logo should be there.  But it shouldn’t be the focus on the page.  Do you want me to come to your website and just stare at your logo and not read any content?  No, doubt it…the point of your website is to drive me to an action, to pick up the phone, to learn more about you or to buy something.  Not to be hypnotized by your logo!

I’m only going to say this once…please, listen!  YOUR LOGO IS NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ON YOUR WEBSITE!  If you didn’t catch it the first time, re-read that…and again…and again…and again.

Why am I harping on this enough that I’m writing an entire blog dedicated to it?  Because one of the most common requests we hear as web designers is, “Can you make my logo bigger?”  Yep, we can.  No, you shouldn’t.  It does not “need to stand out,” in fact, it shouldn’t—at least not as the most important thing on the page.   It does not “need to draw extra attention,” again, it shouldn’t.   A giant logo on the page does not need to re-reinforce “who you are,” they already know who you are.  They came to you, remember?

Who is your logo most important to?  You.  That being said—your logo IS important.  A good solid logo goes a long way to good solid branding.  A few tips on logos:

• It should be on your website.  It does not need to be the focus on your website, nor repeated over and over again on your website, other than in places like the header and footer.
• It should be on everything else—your business cards, marketing pieces, company clothing, etc.  (on that note, if you do have a website, your website address should also be on every piece of marketing, emails, business cards and clothing—you name it, as well)
• It should always be the same.  The colors shouldn’t change with the seasons.  You should not re-brand every other quarter because you’re bored with your logo and you just want to spruce it up.  It should always be the same aspect ratio…meaning your logo proportions should be consistent.  You will obviously have different sized logos; that is fine as long as the shape is the same.  You should not size a logo down for something and decide to reshape it to make it fit somewhere better than its normal shape would.  If you saw the Nike logo and it was a really short, fat swoosh, you’d probably wonder if you were buying Nike or a knock-off Niko.
• If you do rebrand, because let’s face it, it does happen: be consistent.  Don’t keep some things with the old logo and some with the new.
• Your logo should be visible. Don’t tuck it into a corner and make it invisible–it SHOULD be seen because it is important.

Moral of the story?  You need to have a logo on your website.  It is not the focus of your site.  Think about even going to Google and doing a search.  You probably barely acknowledge the logo there—you already know who they are—you went to THEIR site…so the logo just kind of blends in as part of the page.  You would probably notice if it wasn’t there, but the size of it would not be a big deal…their logo is not what makes you go back to their site…and a bigger logo is unlikely to convert your site users into “business.”

I’ll stop you on the argument you’re probably posing already, “Yeah, exactly Google does it!  They change their logo with holidays and seasons and days of the week and colors, etc.”  Are you Google?  When you have the brand recognition of Google, go to town.  We won’t stop you.  In fact, do you want us to help design the different logo versions?  Otherwise, until you have the kind of brand power (or budget) Google or Nike has, “just don’t do it.”

If you have six minutes of your life to waste…watch this video on YouTube—at least the beginning!  Make My Logo Bigger Cream.  It’s a spoof sales video, exaggerating a common misconception that the bigger the logo, the better.

Hilton Kramer, an art critic for the The New York Times in the late 1960s once said, “The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation” and that quote rings true to the fundamentals of design itself. The more modern we get with our web design approach, the more minimal we want things to become. The more we want our small expressions to be conceived as larger explanations. In short, a clear and concise message throughout web design is ultimately the foreseeable interpretation to what we call “modern” design.

A brief history of web design thought -

If you remember anything about the Internet in the late 1990’s, you will remember personal web pages. The various culprits of this period were Tripod, Angelfire, AOL, and Yahoo. When personal web pages hit the scales of popularity, web design changed for good. Before that, we were used to getting our web sites delivered in white on black page schemes with as little graphical elements as needed.

But after this explosion of personal web pages, Internet users were bombarded with animated gifs, flashy text, and color schemes that would make even the most artistic of users cry out for a “less is more” approach. We became inundated with web design that turned everything “up to eleven,” and for that I guess we owe a little gratitude.

The creative spark of all those personal web page creators, while a bit misguided in terms of delivering a clear message, showed that we Internet users crave a little creativity in what we find on the web. What happened then as a larger movement during the late 1990’s? Businesses gave away to old HTML, to the white and black backgrounds, revamped content and design with streamlined graphical elements and added content that was reflective of an overarching company message—for example, AOL’s revamped message was “AOL Anytime, Anywhere.”

Gone were the days of simple links, text and pages. Now websites were integrating complex frameworks of html, or java menu systems combined with text, and additional graphical elements included in logos, headers, and footers. If you are interested in examples of this change, check out archive.org, search for Microsoft’s website, and look for the changes over time. In addition, look at how AOL redesigned their website in the 2000’s; how those changes are reflective of this larger movement towards a graphical, more concise, and modern approach to web design.

Modern Web Design -

Coming from this movement in the early 2000’s we have once again faced a revamp of the fundamentals of web design. Now with the inclusion of social media, and the draw of industry-related hot topics like embeddable type, web 3.0, xhtml and a slew of other catchy phrases, we are meeting up with our “modern” version of web design more frequently—we find many examples nowadays of what this is.

What many business, personal and blog sites are doing is emphasizing the need for a high-quality message, superior content, and using web design to fit those goals. With the introduction of newer HTML technologies, doors are opened to the designer’s creative powers much more. Designers are becoming less limited in what they can do, graphically or otherwise for a websites design.

We are not only bringing a larger approach and message to the websites of the 2010’s, but we are analyzing and improving everything else. From one-page layouts, typography, artistically merited logos, hand-drawn designs, typefaces, interactive approaches and to intuitive design advances, the model for web design has changed significantly since the inception.

The Minimalistic –

Throwing “old school” methods out the window, many websites feature an emphasizing design message that centers on what the artist would call “negative space,” or the empty space that surrounds a design. Textual elements, conceptual design choices, and an approach of simplicity will highlight this approach and reign supreme in terms of what is featured on so-called “modern” designed websites; for examples of these minimalistic designs check out typographica.org, pixelcraft.ie, or uxmag.com.

In essence, designers are cultivating, and shaping web site design with many more tools than they had in previous times. In the 2010’s and beyond, we are entering a time when web site design is becoming centralized on the “artistic implication,” combined with the visually stunning elements of the design itself—

In essence, the emphasizing of a “less is more” approach mixed with the advent of new technology, which creates all new spheres of web design methods and approaches.

And for what we have done here at Cirrus ABS, check out our portfolio section for a sample of our design approaches and practices that emphasize a modern style of web design.

You picked your current web designer for a couple of reasons. Their portfolio looked flashy – they had some unique looking sites and great designs. Oh, and they were cheap; actually very cheap in comparison to some better known competitors. But do they have a business strategy behind their design? Do they understand web best practices? Do they have multiple departments specializing in areas such as search engine optimization, research and development, and business analysis or did you hire Bob from church, your nephew who is going to college for web design, or a 2 person show working out of a spare bedroom in their mom’s house? Or better yet did you just have your IT guy set up the site because he knows all about that “computer stuff” and he’s already on your payroll?  Now ask yourself these questions – would you let your nephew do the taxes or bookkeeping for your business? Is your IT guy well versed in online marketing or just tech savvy? Why do you let your website, your public face to the internet world, have any less importance to you than other aspects of your business? After all, research has shown we spend more time as a society on the internet than doing anything else, well, besides sleeping.

Here are 5 signs that your penny pinching may be costing you money in the long run in lost business.

Roadblocks

Do you have an “enter” page or a flash introduction to your website? If so, you might be deterring potential customers from ever finding out what it is that you do. As a consumer I want efficiency. I am lazy and when I want information, I want it now. When you put up an obstacle, another hoop for me to jump through, I get frustrated which makes me leave. Although you think that video intro is awesome, I could care less. Oh and that music you have in the background, it’s giving me a headache.

The Yuck Factor

Your site looks like it was designed around the birth of the internet. It very well might be because Bob, in fact, did design it and it looks just as bad as that mustard stain on his button down shirt.  The color scheme, pictures, and technology are outdated and hideous. Plus, unlike that Member’s Only jacket from the 80s that you have hanging in your closet, website design doesn’t come back into style. At least the internet hasn’t been around long enough for that to happen. Chances are if your website looks this way I’m either going to think that you’re no longer in business or that you’re a second-rate company that I don’t really want to deal with anyway. After all, the internet is all about image.

Huh? Your company does what?

I landed on your site because you came up on the search engines for what I was interested in. Plus your home page is sprinkled with some words and phrases that are hot buttons for me. Yet I can’t seem to figure out what it is exactly that you do. That and I don’t know what to do next because you haven’t told me. See as a consumer, I need to be told what to do. That’s why I pay $4 for a cup of burnt-tasting coffee at Starbucks and shop at Wal-Mart even though the grocery store down the street has a much better selection of produce. Proper communication is vital to my understanding and taking action. If you aren’t conveying your message appropriately or in a clear and concise manner then you’re probably doing yourself injustice and confusing me. With a less than powerful marketing message you’re falling short which means your website isn’t converting and I’m not buying.

Too Many Choices

Your homepage has way too many images, pictures, links, buttons, advertisements, banners, text, graphics, rotating flash, widgets, etc. You get the point. If your navigation is overly complex with an endless abundance of choices all you’re doing is confusing me. I don’t know what to pay attention to, what’s important, where to click next. Your site should guide me down an intuitive path of correct choices. Too much thinking causes indecisiveness and causes me, your potential customer, to lose focus; which equals you not getting the sale.

Playing Hide-N-Seek

Atlantis is supposedly the greatest civilization that has ever existed.  The problem is that nobody has ever been able to find it.  Your website could be the ultimate information and sales machine but if I’m not landing on it then it doesn’t really count for much. If you aren’t showing up on the first or second page of the search engines for keywords that I’m typing into Google or Yahoo, then what’s your site really worth?  You might as well be parked at the bottom of the ocean next to Atlantis because your company is just a myth. I have to be able to find your website in order for it to produce results.

If your website is suffering from any of these symptoms give us a call at 260-420-2222 or visit our site online at www.cirrusabs.com.  We can help you develop an effective website and strategy.