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Website Page Length Considerations

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When arranging your pages, be aware that novice viewers can be easily disoriented by long, scrolling Web documents. They seem unable to find links when they disappear off-screen as they move through very long pages. Though there are ways to keep your novice viewers oriented, it’s a good idea to limit your documents to two screens worth of
information. If you must use long documents, be sure to feature navigational links at the beginning, end, and even the middle (if your document is very large) of the Web document. A frames system helps to eliminate this problem by enabling you to keep your navigation bars on-screen while the content is scrolling.

Another disadvantage of very long Web documents is that the viewer must rely on the
vertical scroll bar to navigate through the page. In many graphic interfaces the scroll bar
slider is a fixed size and gives the viewer no real indication of the length of the
document relative to what is currently visible on the screen, so users have no idea how
long your Web document is, or when they will reach the end of it. In extremely long
Web pages, very small movements of the scroll bar can completely change the contents
of the screen, leaving the viewer no familiar landmarks on screen (where am I?). This
forces the viewer to creep slowly downward with the scroll bar arrows (often
line-by-line), or risk missing sections of the page.

All this would seem a good argument for always limiting your Web documents to two
page lengths, but of course, as with all rules, there are exceptions. For instance, it makes
sense to keep very closely related information within the confines of a single Web
document, especially when you are providing information which you anticipate the
viewer will want to print or save to text. By keeping the content within one document,
you make printing and saving much easier. When designing long Web documents such
as these, always provide internal links within the document. The best way to do this is to
arrange your Web document like a book, with the information split into separate sections
(chapters). You can then make a table of contents at the beginning and end of the
document so viewers can jump to a particular section without having to scan through the
whole page.

A navigational table of contents.

Page length tips:

  • Attempt to make the majority of your pages no longer than two screen lengths. If you must use long documents, feature internal navigation links at the beginning, end, and even the middle (if your document is very large) of the Web document.
  • When a page is intended to grab people’s attention, don’t make the page longer than the average screen length.
  • If your document is more than one screen “page,” try to see to it that some content is presented on the first screen so the user can tell that there’s more to be seen below the horizon.
  • If your pages include text that viewers will want to read at length, it’s all right to use lengthy, scrolling pages—just be sure to warn them that a big file is coming.
  • If dividing information into separate segments, provide a separate link to a complete document. This will make it easier for viewers to print or save your document.
  • If you have a page with only a small bit of information, try to combine it with related information. It’s very annoying for the viewer to have to wait to download a page that only contains two links or one paragraph of text.

Making the Site Captivating – Part 1

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We hate to pigeonhole communications, but there seems to be a trend among WWW
design that lends itself to categorization. We can break many pages and systems into
three categories:

  • Basic Information

  • Entertainment

  • Product Sales

As you’ve surfed around the internet, you’ve probably seen pages and systems that fit into the
above categories. You’ve probably seen systems that give way too much information on
a product (and do so in a dry, technical manner), systems that are all bells and whistles
with no content, and systems whose only focus is on getting you to order the product
right now.
Our focus in designing commercial websites is to combine these three types of systems into
one, and thus create a complete marketing tool. As we have already said, marketing is a
combination of things that lead to commercial advancement, and not a single entity.

What we are seeking is a balance of information, entertainment, and product sales
communications that will provide a complete communications package.
To put things into perspective, we’ll tell a story about the three little business people. The
first was an informer. When she was asked to send a client information about a product,
she would gather everything she could get her hands on, bind it all together in one big
book, and send it to the client saying that everything they could possibly want to know is
in there. The second person was strictly an entertainer. He would go to a client’s office, tell jokes,
show interesting slides, do magic tricks, and so on. The third person was strictly focused on getting the client to order. She would walk into the client’s office with a contract in one hand and a pen in the other.
Separately, these three people did very poorly. They would either confuse, distract, or
irritate the clients. Together, however, they were unstoppable. They were able to engage
the clients, provide him or her with the information they needed, and close the deal.

Your pages should keep the same balance. You want to provide enough information for
your potential clients to make an informed decision (and to support them after the
purchase), you want to provide this information in an engaging manner, and you want to
make the sale. By balancing this carefully, you will make your system appealing to the
broadest audience.

Organizing Your Page to Your Commercial

The Benefit

So, how do you go about making a system that provides all three elements in perfect
balance? The key is in organization, both at the page and system levels. To may make
the site appealing to the broadest audience, you will need to design your work so that it
provides effective communications to several different types of people (shoppers looking
for a quick overview, people wanting in-depth detail, and so on). We’ll start with the
basics.

  • Basic Elements of a Web Document
  • These items should appear on every commercial WWW document:
  • Company name
  • Link to information on contacting company or company e-mail address
  • Page title
  • Author or contact person’s e-mail address
  • Content
  • Link to home page
  • Date of creation or latest revision (on time-sensitive materials)
  • Statement of copyright
  • Hypertext link(s) to other related local pages
  • Company logo

The basic items in a commercial Web document.

Your company name and logo should appear on each page, so that it is clear to everyone,
regardless of how they entered the system, who owns it. This also ties the Web system
into any printed collateral.
Providing a link to information on contacting the company, or a company e-mail
address, is crucial. Remember, this is two-way communication we’re dealing with here.
If the viewer can’t get ahold of someone for ordering, further information, and so on, the
system doesn’t serve much of a purpose other than letting people know the company
exists somewhere.

Many of these elements can be addressed in different ways.
The company name and logo can be a graphic on each page, a
banner in a frames system, or something else. You should
address all of these items in some way, but the exact way you

do it is your choice. The page title should exist on two levels: first, it should be included within the HTML
<TITLE> tags, so that a browser will display it outside of the page (usually on the
browser’s top border). Second, the title of the page should appear clearly within the body

of the page, so that it can be viewed within the first screen (without scrolling) on a640x480 pixel monitor. The author or contact person, often called the webmaster, should present an e-mail
address, and a link to his/her e-mail, on every page if possible. This enables people to
report problems with your pages. This sometimes becomes a nuisance, as there are
people out there with way too much time on their hands who will fill your e-mail box
with annoying observations. On high-traffic websites, you may want to drop the webmaster
link after you’re sure that most of the bugs have been worked out of the system.
A link to the system home page offers primitive navigation to people who may be
unfamiliar with your other navigation tools, and it enables people to start over from the
beginning. It’s also useful if someone is accessing your system from anywhere other than
the home page.

  • Press releases, technical updates, and other time-sensitive materials can include the dateof creation and/or latest revision. If this is not something you want to make public (and there’s really no reason to), you can include it in the code as a comment tag, or you can encode the date, revision and any other information on the bottom of the page (as in 080896r4). Copyright law states that you needn’t claim a document as having a copyright for it to bevalid and legally yours, but it will help if you are ripped-off and need to take it to court. Your statement of copyright should look something like this: Copyright 2007, Blasty, Roads and Associates, All Rights Reserved.
  • Hypertext link(s) to other related local pages should be included for obvious reasons, but how and how many are a matter of style and application. For instance, don’t link out in the middle of a paragraph if you want that paragraph to be read; instead, add a more information link at the end of the text.

On the next page, we’ll discuss “the look” of your website

Why Valid HTML (XHTML) is important to SEO

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Why Valid HTML (XHTML) is important to SEO

What are do many webmaster write non valid HTML?  HTML or “hypertext Markup Language”, is vastly misused and written poorly Valid HTMLthroughout the web.  HTML is what the world wide web is made of and should be taken much more seriously. The validity of the HTML coding or programming is a very important.  But, you ask why is that important?  Most web pages are written in HTML or HTML is produced once a database query is asking for a page to be built on the fly .  Just like any other language on the planet, HTML has its own syntax, vocabulary, and grammar.  In other words, it needs to be readable by another computer and that very same computer will need to display it properly. Every online document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules. In the natural progression of today’s internet, programming languages have long been perceived by the mainstream programmers as a “natural art” for designing websites and other web applications.  In the early days of the web, it was all text based and not graphical at all.  Once graphical user interfaces came to light on the web, so did HTML.

What is valid HTML code?

Valid HTML code is simply said programming code that is built in accordance with Web standards, and provides one of the most reliable guarantee that future Web platforms will handle it as designed. Validation is one of the simplest ways to check whether a page is up to snuff to today’s standards.

Why Web professionals choose to validate for Valid HTML?

  • Valid HTML allows for greater accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, and can even possibly help your search engine rankings.
  • When a search engine like Google crawls your site with it’s search bots, it has to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the actual relevant content to what you’re writing about. If your HTML code contains errors and is NOT valid HTML, search engines might not be able to find everything on the page.
  • Search engine crawler programs obey the HTML standard. A non compliant site makes it extremely difficult to crawl or index your site if it the coding or programming is NOT compliant to the HTML standards set today.  While on your site, if the search engine locates an error in HTML, it may simply cease the crawling of your site just because of the error.

Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason if your web page cannot be found in search engines.

There are many uses for coding or programming your website(s) to be HTML valid or HTML compliant.

  • Professional webmasters use validation as a debugging tool
  • Professional webmasters use validation as a future-proof quality check
  • Professional webmasters use validation to cross check their coding or programming skills.  It’s is one of the simplest ways to check whether a page is built in accordance with Web standards, and provides one of the most reliable guarantee that future Web platforms will handle it as designed.
  • Professional webmasters use validation to eases maintenance
  • Professional webmasters use validation to help teach good practices
  • Validation is a sign of professionalism

Imagine telling a friend who has never been to your house and telling them directions on how to come over for a party.  You start to give them some directions based off a map but halfway through you start speaking in nonsense and gibberish. The friends wouldn’t have much luck in finding your house, would they?  The same is true for websites that are broken and have invalid HTML.  Valid HTML is one of the most important aspects of Search engine optimization.

Social Media….Optimize for it!

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Social Media….Optimize for it!

Social networks, social media and optimization with those networks is really flying through the web with a large popularity. Social networks as FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, Ning, Tagged, Classmates, Meetup, Friendster,etc. have been in the news lately talking about how popular they have become in the past few years. Some have even been lead to beleive they they may “become the web”. Some others also include You-Tube, Del-icio.us, the list almost can go on and on! All of these give you some sort of ‘presence’ in the virtual world. More and more these days businesses and regular people are using the social media or social networks to to optimize and promote their presence through the web.

Social Media Considerations – deepen connections and relationships.

Bloggers and website owners, these days, mostly use social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com, StumbleUpon and Del-icio.us. How these sites work is that they give feedback on articles that you webmasters submit, then a judging process “judges” the articles and bumps them up based on the number of votes. This type of social media campaign, can bring massive number of visitors to your site. An article that is accepted well, can deliver a large amount of traffic and comments to that article. When a webmaster or site owner is considering their search engine optimization strategies, it’s most efficient to choose the right path for your optimization. By using all three of those social media sites, they will help a bunch, but they all differ in what they can deliver. Digg will take many votes to deliver excellent traffic, but StubleUpon will take less votes to deliver just some traffic. If you can get enough Diggs from Digg.com users, you just may get the front page of Digg. By utilizing social media the proper way, it can raise your exposure throughout the web. The more pages that a search engine bot travels throughout the site, the better ranking you could possibly have. When a write is aiming to get higher rankings, building the popularity of the site is of utmost importance and your website traffic statistics will show the story. Users will visit your site simply because they like to read your blog or your rich content. Building up a huge “friends list” on any of the social media platforms is what you want to do, if you desire to promote your business online.. You can now promote your site over and over again to your friends list. the best way is to aim to your target audience with the same ideas, feelings, and collections. You, as the writer, know these people since you are one of them..

Social Media, Working For You!

To get “Social Media” to work FOR YOU, you will need to understand and think just like the social network platforms that you are targeting. The best way to get your site looked at by Google (indexed) is to construct articles on your website or blog regularly. Social network articles, posted regularly, will allow sites as Google to have a search engines so that it makes it easy to locate your blog fast and easy. Once you get you site into the search engines, the sky i s the limit. You can get a lot of organic traffic from being indexed. Undoubtedly, this should bring some organic traffic and making it easy to direct them to social networking site of your choice. With daily,monthly or regular posting of social networking articles, you should be able to people’s trust and respect because you can provide them information they need and want.

Keep in mind that when you write articles online, consider search engine optimization alongside utilizing social media platforms for exposure.

  • Who is your target audience?
  • What time of day is your target audience online?
  • What is your goal with the article?
  • Which keywords are you looking to get more exposure on?
  • Have you placed hyperlinks throughout your article to include internal and outside links
  • Have you styled your content styled to help with reading it easier?

This might include:

  • Bullet points
  • Clearly defined subheadings (search engines appreciate this to help with indexing)
  • Key points and fascinating quotes
  • Is the article informative or educational?
  • Do you have your RSS feed setup to show targeted from the articles?

Social Media Campaigns take work. Take your social media campaign and promote it around on the social networks! Promote Promote!. Take the time to build your webtraffic organically by promoting your site(s) through your choice of social networking. If done correctly, using social networking to promote your blog or site can work. Social Media Optimization does work.

3MultiMedia – Tony Eden

A digital agency on a mission to help small and medium businesses with their online presence. I work from my California Office to take your ideas and turn them into a digital online design for you.
Contact me