You just finish your website, and you are excited to see it “live”. But first you should test if everything on your website works correctly. Remember that the website is your corporate identity on the Internet. Testing your website gives you a chance to fix errors before they destroy your business reputation.

Now, what you should check first? I would start from the basic.

Spell Check and Grammar Errors

Proof read your site … no matter how careful content creator was, you will always find a few misspelled words or grammar errors. If you don’t, be sure that your customers will.

Check Links

Next thing is to check if all your links on all your pages works. You can do it manually if you want, but on larger sites, it can be a tedious task. For large projects, you can use Xenu’s Link checker. The good news is that it’s free and better than most other link checking software.

Forms – E-Mail

We all want feedback from our website visitors, right? To ensure that you will get some, check if forms on your website work as expected. Make a habit to test forms on your website from time to time.

Web site visitors many times enter wrong input in form fields. If you use Java Script to validate form input, check your scripts in IE and Firefox at least. Not all scripts works in all browsers.

Page Titles – Meta Tags

Web developers use different software to create web pages. If your webmaster forget to add Meta tags on your website, in the title will write: Untitled Document.

How can anyone forget to add Meta tags, I am hearing you asking.

Well, search on Google for: Untitled Document and 35.000.000 results will be returned. For the search term Untitled Document 1, there is much less competition. Google return “only” 1.650.000. I guess that you will agree that your company name is better title than “Untitled Document”.

Meta tags are useful (especially title and description) for both, your website visitors and for search engines. So do the check.

Screen Resolution

You are looking at your website on your monitor, and it looks great, right? How will it look on other monitors and other screen resolutions? You website should look acceptable on 800 x 600 and great on 1024 x 768 and higher.

How your website looks in different browsers?

It is easier than you think, so continue reading. One of the things that you should definitely test is how your website looks in different browsers. The reason is: Each browser can display Web pages slightly differently, and you want to make sure your pages look good in the most popular browsers.

I have only one browser installed, how I can do this, I hear you asking. Search on Google for “view your website in different browsers”, and you will find different websites which allow you to preview your website in almost all known browsers. And yes. It’s free.

Usability – Can your website visitors find what they are looking for?

Ask few people to visit your website. Your friends or relatives, doesn’t matter. Ask them what they think about your website. Let me clarify. It is not important did they like the colors or the layout of the site. Important thing here is: Can visitors find what they are looking for on your website within a few clicks?

And the most important: When they look at your home page can they understand what your company is about? How comfortable they feel with your navigation, did they understand the terms that you use on your website? Can they reach your contact page?

…

Zoran Makrevski is founder and CEO of WebGoto.Gr from Thessaloniki, Greece We have over 10 years experience in Web Development. Our database driven websites will help you succeed in your online business. http://web.goto.gr/company.html

Read more articles written by Zoran Makrevski

If you’re selling products on the web, you need to incorporate pictures. Whether you’re selling something as artistic as handmade religious jewelry or something as technical as phone headsets, a bunch of details about the product and a price are not going to catch a visitor’s interest. So it follows that when you’re building an e-commerce website, you will be including a place for pictures.

Here’s the thing; it’s a lot of hassle for everyone if you have to hand-code in every new item. If the phone headset site finds a new distributor and gets a hundred new types of headsets in, or the religious jewelry site comes up with a new rosary necklace every week or so, they’ll need to be able to add the new products. That’s why you’ve created a fancy database-driven CMS, so they can add in the information and it automatically populates to the website.

But what happens when the new phone headset distributor sends a bunch of 1,500 pixel images when your system is designed to display 100 pixel thumbnails and 500 pixel normal images? What happens when the religious jewelry pictures are all high-resolution images that will take far too long to load? When the site layout is based on the idea of the images being a certain size, and then new images are introduced that aren’t that size, problems occur.

Now, you might be saying, “Oh come on, this is easy, just include a width=whatever height=whatever in your image tag and call it a day.” If so, hit yourself. I’ll wait.

See, the reason you see those attributes added to the images so often is, the great majority of the time, because it helps with getting the images indexed in the search engines. It’s not to actually set the image size. If you try to set the image size with them, the quality is dramatically reduced. And, if you’re sizing down, you wind up dealing with full-size loading time for a part-sized image.

Your next option is to get the client to make sure any images it uploads are properly sized. Not too likely. Aside from the very real possibility that they’ll forget what sizes to use, make a mistake, just not bother, or try to do it with Paint or something equally ludicrous, that’s just giving them more work, and one of your jobs is to minimize the amount of work and complexity they have to deal with for running their website.

So how do you get these phone headsets to fit in the proper format, and these religious jewelry pieces to load in an acceptable amount of time? Well, it just so happens that there’s some php code that can resize images automatically on the server. It’s not perfect for enlarging, but it does a pretty clean reduction, and it’s not too hard to code up a loop that will run through existing images to size them, and then add the resizer to the backend of the admin – right by where the image uploads works. Personally, I prefer setting some variables to determine the size and folder of the image, and then having it size the image in the chosen ways (a thumbnail, standard view size, and full size, for example), and save each to their own folders, keeping a single image column in the database.

So, when working on admin systems for e-commerce sites, from phone headsets to religious jewelry, expect there to be pictures. Prepare for them for the first batch of uploads and for future updates by including dynamic image resizing. It will make things easier on you and the client, and result in a cleaner, nicer-looking, and more easily updated website.

Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique works on websites of all varieties; their clients may offer products and services ranging from religious jewelry to phone headsets.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

People of all ages are dreaming to make money online. Part time jobs on the internet, or even freelancing jobs are more easily accessible to anyone with the right set of skills and an internet connection. By reading on you will find which are the most sought after legitimate full and part time jobs on line.

The first option to make money online is writing. While there are many employers seeking freelancers for individual jobs or projects, finding a stable and secure full or part time job as a writer is the best option. You only need to have good writing skills and you are halfway there. There is a great demand for web content writers, article writers for magazines, websites, or even advertisement, and most of all there is a high demand for high quality writing ghostwriters. With the right set of skills and the luck to get the perfect part time jobs, you are well on your way of being able to say you make money online. When it comes to requirements, you will find that you only need a computer, an internet connection, and a good word processing application, like MS Word.

The second dream job that is also in high demand is based on web design and programming. It is a well known fact that programming jobs pay really well. This is especially true when it comes to online part time jobs, because people usually request programmers to work on tight deadlines, thus further increasing the pay amount. This is the case for web designers also, although in this case, all the time spent learning is replaced by talent. You can make money online, lots of money, if you choose to learn first the basic languages like, HTML, CSS, PHP, well needed for the creation of websites, and then more complex programming languages that will bring in money by the bucket. In order to get such part time jobs you need solid knowledge in any field you wish to enter, and secondly a technologically advanced computer.

The last entry in the top three of the most sought after ways to make money online, is consulting. Even if on the internet, consulting jobs still pay very well. Consultants are needed in many sectors, from medical and legal advice, to internet related consulting, like website optimizing, search engine optimizing, and so on. You need to make sure that you are well versed in the field in which you would like to find part time jobs, because if you work is not high quality, you can be sure that there are hundreds of others just waiting to take your place.

To conclude, I’ll say that when it comes to making money online, apart from skills, knowledge and talent, you still need some just, simply because the numbers of workers from every country trying to find part time jobs is simply overwhelming.

For more resources about make money online or even about part time jobs please review this website http://www.worldofincome.com

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Website Motivation – Whatever your skills, whatever your interests, everyone has the ability to be creative in their work.  However, we can often lose our motivation and drive to create, making it difficult to stay focused on a particular work plan or project, especially in web design.  So what is the best method for staying motivated?

The key to maintaining your own motivation to be creative is actually a long term effort.  Starting out can be tough, and in most cases the most difficult part.  But with the right methods and consistency you will be able to reach a point where staying motivated is easy.  It is a simple case of knowing when to make the right choices at the right times.

Obviously everyone is unique and each of you will have your own methods and actions into being creative.  But here is the chance to read something that offers some possible methods and solutions when getting motivated and staying motivated.

The main things to take into consideration are:

Set goals
You will find it is a lot easier to stay motivated when you feel like you’ve reached a target.  Give yourself something to achieve and break the work load down.  If it is a large website project you are working on, set yourself mini goals so you are reaching targets every few hours or days rather than spending weeks trying to get the lot done.

Small bite-sized objectives
As mentioned briefly above, set yourself up for more success than failure by being realistic in goal setting and come up with small, bite-sized tasks to start with.  As you complete more tasks, start making your goals more ambitious.

Build a creative workstation
Whether you design websites at your desk, in a dark room or a home office, you need to assign a place to yourself where you can be creative.  Once you’ve decided on that place, use it!  Each creative task and success you achieve in your ‘creative workstation’, will slowly train your mind to be creative within it.  When I first set up my creative workstation it took me about 3 months for it to click in my mind that it was actually my workstation but as soon as I enter now, I can focus my mind that I’m ready to work.

Walk away, but don’t quit!
Whatever you do, you must always remember to never give up on a website or problem.  Put them to one side for a while but always come back it later on, even if it means coming up with a theory for solving the problem.  These problems build confidence and develop a nice portfolio.

Find your creative time zone
Just like your body’s sleeping and eating times, there is also a best time when your body can be most creative.  For me, the best time to be creative used to be late at night, now-a-days it’s usually between midday and late evening.  Although I do have a creative burst where I get most work done after 9pm.  Your main objective is find out when you are at your most creative side and start using that time to your advantage.

Using the right tools
When being creative designing websites you need to ensure that you are using the right tools for the job.  The ‘right tools’ doesn’t necessarily mean the best tools but being creative can be difficult enough, therefore, the idea is to make the job / project as easy as possible.  For example, my best choice design software has got to be ‘Photoshop’, you may make this more difficult by trying to use ‘mspaint’ to come up with some amazing graphics.  It’s something you just don’t do!

Following progress
One of the key points in being creative is to follow your own progress.  As mentioned in step 1; the main objective is to break the task down into smaller parts.  Therefore, after a few weeks working on a project look back and see how far you’ve come.  If you don’t stop every so often to see where you were a couple of months ago, and where you are now – do it!  You might just surprise yourself on how much progress you’ve made and how your creativity has grown.

Get out of the house
This may seem a bit like the step where you walk away from your work and come back to it later, but there is a fine line between setting aside some work and actually taking a break from your workstation.  Whilst a creative workstation can often be the best practice, it sometimes helps to go somewhere different to work.  It can provide a different level of ideas and influence your creativity and work.

Work through it
You may think that it’s pointless trying to force yourself to be creative when you’re ‘not in the mood’ but often it can work in your favour.  It may feel difficult to start with but as you gain momentum you’ll find your motivation returns almost every time!  After all, you have nothing to lose; you get the job done and you’re still producing quality work / websites.  It may not seem like they are of good quality but you may still be working the same as you usually do, you’re just in the wrong state of mind to realise.

Read more about web design and Ecommerce web design glassbottomdesign.co.uk.

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There are many reasons you may want to consider building a website. Most businesses now have websites online for their customers. You can use a website to market potential customers or to provide current costumers with ongoing information about your service or products. Most people love the idea of having a website, but are simply scared of the website design process. However, website design doesn’t have to be scary and it can actually be a lot of fun. There is simply a limitless possibility of what you can do today. As a business, you can list all of your services and information about your company. Your website is actually like an online storefront for your company.

When you are developing your website design, you have to consider that it is the face of your company. In the same way you want your office to look clean and professional, you should feel the same way about your website. Customers will judge how good a company you are by the website design you use. If you use a jumbled and messy website design, customers will quickly become frustrated and move on to someone else. You need to make sure your layout is user friendly and allows customers or visitors to move easily from one area to the next.

Another major aspect of your website design is the originality factor. You don’t want a cookie cutter website that looks just like everyone else’s. You should make sure your logo and slogan are used in your website, and that any photos you use are original for your site. You will find that many website companies now allow you to use templates to create your website design and these can be great to quickly get online. However, you will find that your creativity is severely limited and you may not be able to create what you want. The best thing to do is build a website completely from scratch and lay it out the way you feel is best.

If you are unfamiliar with building websites, you may want to go with a professional website design company. Many companies will even design your logo for you and help you come up with a tag line. These companies also have sophisticated programs that can make your web pages look completely unique when compared to other sites online.  They can even include custom boxes about your products or videos made for your company. These companies often offer packages to build and maintain your website for a certain amount of time. You can have your site built and then make changes as needed throughout the term of the contract. This is often the best way to go since your products or services may change throughout the year.

In order to be successful online, you need to have a unique, user friendly, website. Having your site custom built is the best way to guarantee both aspects.  The best part is that you get complete control over what is done and you say when things should be changed. With a professional company, they will allow you full input into the creative process.

Want a Great Web Site Design Quote in South Wales then Click the link below.
http://www.completewebsolutions.co.uk/website_design_services.html

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