Targeting a site’s readership, especially when one has a blog, is not an easy task. On going over some websites, I have seen that many would publish their level of hits or visits in one day. Some are pretty awesome when imagining some 30,000 visits in one day. Everybody would dream of that. This would mean huge monetisation programmes, nice level of side income, “influence” and all that goes with it. When delving into SEO and community management, one has to take into consideration another parameter, which might actually be a better indicator than the level of traffic. This indicator is the bounce rate. Bounce rate is what really defines the success of a website. If people are entering and leaving your site in less than 5 seconds, you might need to have a serious talk with you community management and your SEO experts.

Bounce rate fluctuations.

You might have noticed that a bounce rate can either fluctuate a lot on a website or stay put over a long period of time. This goes with the quality of your traffic. Most of the time, the fluctuations will be of more or less 10%. Higher fluctuations and, at that, frequent ones mean that there might be something weird happening on your website. Even if these are not what you would first look at, I sincerely think that important bounce fluctuations should be used as alerts on the health of a website.

3-5% Bounce rate?

Now, you might have come here to see if it can really be done? The answer is “yes”. This very blog, the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, has been set up to do this. After the first weeks of its launch I tried to find a way of making this site stand out. There were too many odds against it as there is no real web design community in Mauritius but the idea was to get to that very small web engaged community out there. And it worked! The aim was to target that specific traffic and this is what is happening today. Below is a screenshot of one year’s publications. 3.19% bounce rate over a whole year.

We’ve been talking a lot about the Google Maday update as well as Google Caffeine, the new algorithm. Though this would seem like talking over and over about the same thing, we must take into consideration the huge impact that this new algorithm has on the whole web, search engine optimisation and users ecosystem. The web is an ever changing entity and the “addons” that influential web companies publish always have an effect on the way users will be interacting with websites. This is what Google did by launching Google Caffeine.

Fresh content, the new El Dorado.

Let us jump back to what Google told web professionals on Google Caffeine some two weeks ago. The core elements to take into consideration are:

[Google] Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index. [...] Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

This means that the way the Google index worked before, though not completely removed, is currently pushed aside to favour a new way of indexing. This new way of indexing takes information as it is published, analyses it and sends it directly into the first (freshest) results that the search engine will be delivering to its users. The impact is that fresh information will always have a lead, be it small, on the old system of having capitalising on age for a page indexed on a given theme.

Impact on companies.

This crosses one of my everlasting belief that companies need to produce more fresh content to keep up with the pace at which the whole system is running. A company can have a website and be communicating on it but if the new deal is that the company regularly publishing content on its own field gets the topmost ranks in search engine results pages then the cards are being redistributed.

This also means that everything like tests and sandboxes are being shattered to pieces (though Google Caffeine must have a sort of filter on that). A younger company with a younger website publishing fresher and to the point content will now be able to compete with the old mammoths. Result: increased competition directed by the Big G. Could anyone have thought that Google Caffeine would have had that much influence on business communication models?

Blogs are not crutches but tools.

Right oh! The solution, as anybody would have imagined is to implement professional business blogs on company websites. Blogs have the flexibility of being readily editable and can produce a lot of tools to improve indexation, social media interaction and drive leads. These are the new tools for indexation and traffic and community managers will be the new guardians of web traffic and notoriety.

It will now become a standard if one wants to stay in the race as Google Caffeinee is implementing it. New search habits are bound to crop up and new SEO techniques will show their face. What business need to understand now is that blogs might be the best way to catch up with the others. As things go, many companies will be launching up blogs with a lot of content copied and pasted from other sites or from their “paper material” but here things will be different. Real blogging rules will have to be used, those levers defining the quality of content and the targeting of traffic will become real in business spheres and those who will be using these as tools rather than crutches to their SEO will be those getting something out of Google Caffeine.

EDIT 24-06-2010. To illustrate the words.

This edit comes 18 hours later. I’ve been following the indexation of this article and as shown above, this post has, for example, hit Google’s first search engine results page when searching for “google caffeine” just after publication just because of the freshness of the article.

The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius seems to have reached a new level in terms of web presence and traffic over the past month. This is why I have decided to make an overview of the most viewed posts each month. What might be somewhat disturbing is that some of the most viewed posts might have not been published over the past month.

Here is your chance to catch up with them if ou missed something. Below are the 5 posts that have caught the most attention over the past month.

You should be (over-) using the H (heading) tags.

A post on how some major standards tags are overlooked and how they would be a sure bet to be included in any web site design.

Speeding your page load time will improve your Google ranking.

Google threw it over the web and everybody started talking about it: page loading time will be a new ranking factor in its algorithm. Find out ways to do it.

Failure of the web design community in Mauritius?

I was a dreamer hoping that there might be a budding web design community in the country but I was wrong. It depends on the people and the way our society works. The 2 commenters here made some great points!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for “coming soon” pages.

This is an exclusive article off the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius. “Coming Soon” pages can do a great deal of SEO work for a website that’s not live yet. Tested and approved tutorial on why and how “Coming Soon” pages are SEOable.

“Facebook login” draws heaps of angry Facebook users!

Is it only usability or understanding the human mind with its different levels of web usage. Find out how the Read Write Web Facebook Login issue tells us some bitter truth on the difficulty of designing websites.

Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.

Want to get Google sitelinks? Google published a report on the fact that it uses SEO to have its own products listed and ranked in its own search engine. One specific part of the report concentrates on Google Sitelinks and how a site must be set up to get these. Find out how to improve yours to get those great features.

Heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) have always had a bad reputation in web designing. The main reason for this is the beastly appearance these tags when they have their default styling. Many a time web designers have thrown the H1 tag out for the use of a H4 one just because the latter has a smaller font size. The H tags are, however, core elements of page building and SHOULD be used and even overused.

The ugliness can be put aside as all this can be styled (as they have always been) with cascading style sheets (CSS).

Semantic web and standards.

With the advent of standards, web designers have understood that clean semantic code is what must be produced be it for maintainability, load time or cross browser compatiblity. Heading tags are part of this semantic code as they are here to structure a page. Their mark-up has been created to give the maximum structuring possibilities to pages. Some tips on their usage:

• The top level heading (bearing the title or theme of a page) should always be a H1.
• There can be only one H1 in the entire page.
• Use heading tags logically, there cannot be suh-headings (H2/H3/…) before a H1.

Search engine optimisation.

In semantic web, headings bear the “titles” of pages and sections. These are therefore important information that a page is giving out to its visitors. Search engine robots have algorithms that take this into consideration. Heading tags are thus analysed by these robots and keywords included in titles are given more weight (this is not an incentive to go for keyword stuffing in headings). Using headings is therefore a good way of working on a page’s ranking.

Another interesting angle on headings and search engine optimisation is the fact that links are allowed in headings. Using headings and keywords along with links result in good optimised anchor text for any page. This can be taken into consideration when working on onsite deeplinking and SEO strategies. The current trend is to put a site’s logo and link in the H1 tag. This does not bring much in terms of SEO as it would do by optimising a page on its own theme and content.

Heading tags and usability.

Nobody likes to read huge boring text blocks on screen. The boredom is usually accentuated by the monotonous looks of long texts. Adding headings reduces this in the first place. Second, headings will allow a visitor to quickly scan a page and the different themes or points the page holds on a particular subject. This comes as a usability tool in this case.

Google has unveiled a lot on the way its algorithm works and on how the company actually works to promote its own products on the engine. Google Webmaster Central has published an article on the SEO report cards that Google uses to maximize its products’ visibility on its own search engine. There is a lot of things present in there and it all gravitates around tuning up one’s pages for better ranking and increased user interest. One part on which I really perused is the building up of sitelinks.

Sitelinks for the dumb.

Google sitelinks are very easy to spot. They are direct inputs to a site’s inner links, categories, themes… The advantage of such an option is that it allows the user to go directly to some specific part of a site, thus maximising conversion by, for example, removing any redundant step like going through the main page. Sitelinks look like this:

The Google SEO report card defines it as such:

Sitelinks are often a signal to users that they’ve found the result they’re looking for and can help in finding information faster.

How to get sitelinks?

This is the trick question in the whole system. Webmasters can’t choose when sitelinks are shown. Up to now, nobody knows when, how and who triggers the sitelinks. There are different assumptions on the subject but no one really knows if it is human powered or not. However, the report card shows that there is a 56% of changes to have an incoming click through sitelinks on a search engine results page. So what can you do to get sitelinks then?

The SEO report card states that an improved site organisation and good internal linking strategies can improve the chances of getting them. Here are the instructions:

• use a hierarchical site structure
• use descriptive anchor text and links pointing to internal pages
• avoid deep nesting of content behind many subdirectories

Bonus feature.

The bonus given by Google concerning the sitelinks is that they can be optimised for providing relevant information, helping the users find the content they want faster and, a really nice way of putting things, taking up more real estate on the search results page (the result taking more space on the page).

The card coins good sitelinks as “Appealing Google Sitelinks”. These sitelinks are those that really do the job, those that give the relevant information or provide the user with the best options. For those oblivious of the use of Google Webmaster tools, there is an option in it that allows the webmasters to block unappealing sitelinks.

There are hundreds of articles on the subject of domain names all over the web. Most of them deal with the choice of the domain names associated to a brand, a company or on why top level domain names are important in the definition of your SEO strategies. Actually, a lot of these articles talk about what could be coined as “the usability of domain names”.

The usability of domain names.

The usability of domain names is the whole marketing jargon buster used to help a client define a domain name. It is here to define branding and visibilityof a brand online. One great resource for that is “Building the Perfect Beast” (pdf document) by Igor International.

The elements are generally:

• Size of the domain name (the smaller the better, as it seems).
• Easy to remember (to print in your customers’ minds).
• Business related (aiming your field).
• Top level domain (to maximize indexation).
• Inclusion of keywords (improving ranking through the domain name).

You might be careful.

Some of these advice might have flip sides to them though. The size of the domain name, if coupled with the inclusion of keywords, might not be compatible if you’re trying to become a leader in your field. An example might be DCDM where the name De Chazal du Mée is long and does not give the information that the company is that of chartered accountants.

As such their domain name does not show this aspect either. OK, DCDM is known in Mauritius, what about the international aspect? The branding does not include the fact that the company is big in Africa. Maybe some domain name such as dcdm-chartered-accoutants.tld (top level domain name) would help. To push the envelope a little bit further, the domain name would take care of at least 4 of the elements stated above.

Local you said?

What about local search then? It might seem cool to look for interesting domain names but if the primary audience is local, it would be better not to aim past the target. For example, the Web Design Bureau targets Mauritian web designers. The domain name is therefore a top level one mixed with the “mauritius” keyword. It could have been more specific but this is like that for one specific reason that will not be discussed here.

In a local context it is a good thing to aim for local domain extensions. For example: BBC keeps it domain name centered around the UK www.bbc.co.uk, TF1 in France has a .fr and CNN has a .com (generic extension used in US instead of the .us). None has really gone for the .tv extension but the MBC has tried it out.

What about hosting?

Any domain name with a real website needs to be hosted. Hosting does influence SEO. First of all there is the neighbourhood. On mutualised servers, some domain names can be blacklisted or have bad reputation (the Bureau suffers a bit from hosted porn neighbourhood). Therefore, one should make sure that the site is clearly well hosted.

In the case of multiple websites, one interesting thing is to work on different C class domain IPs. Each site has a unique IP number. If different websites are to be hosted, having really different C class IPs can help when working on different sites’ net linking. Different addresses mean different servers to the robots, so it might really be a win-win strategy to use different hosting companies.

A whole lot of talking is going on around the new Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) TV/Radio website. It always is a major event when a major Mauritian company sets sails out for a new web venture and people can question and appreciate the job. Here, the great thing is that the tool used is WordPress which has now gone past the “blog” platform and has matured into a full grown Content Management System and even been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS award in 2009. That’s one good point but there’s a major “but” when it comes to the way the MBC managing board seems to have directed this project!

Corporate you said?

The said website is a corporate one, at least, it’s what is said on the main page title. I will not be going into an indepth analysis of the design and the website as well as its functionalities. The discussion between the webdesigner and the public is nearing trench warfare more than anything on Yashvin’s Blog with all the contradictions and accusations that go with such situations. I will not be adding to this!

My firm belief is that Mauritian companies need to mature in their use of the Internet and start working on online presence. They have to invest in development and user experience with indepth audits of user demands and conversion rates. This calls for a good deal of methodology, vision and professionalism. So my concern here is how can a huge thing like the MBC get involved in an amateur construction of its website.

Templating and project management.

To build a new website, objectives must be laid out, budgets (if any) calculated, but more important, the whole project must be managed with validation procedures, content improvement, calls to action and lead analysis. But what do we have here? A webdesigner who claims to have done the job for free by buying a template (Hello MBC managing board, don’t you even have some money to even pay for a template?) and modifying it to suit the MBC’s needs. And what does the poor chap get even with investing his own money into the project? Just a poor link to his website! This is pure slavery! The MBC might even be de-localising some of its own work to China.

So what’s the problem here? Having a webdesigner claiming high to having made just a template modification for such a big company means that all the steps required to make a real, good, managing board driving, visionary and high level website have been flushed down the toilet. All this has been boiled down to a template available to anyone and just modified. Do they care for their image? Do they have a communication & advertising department?

Amateurish and cheap.

The MBC is not the structure that bears the shiniest image in Mauritius and it would somehow have been logical that the directory board would have had the idea of making use of this occasion to buff it up but once again, the amateurs have hit home. The MBC is a leading Mauritian body and one would expect a site to its grandeur with a huge input in quality content. The whole system is heavy and loaded with glitches. Just one example, how many of you readers will ever read every word in this “About us” page. This is where the group should have had clear specifications in terms of content, design and wireframing. But none of all these are here.

An example of what “not to do”.

Overall, this whole project is a great example of how a major company should not be leading a web project. Specifications should be minute and written clearly. Each element should be made to maximise conversion and user experience. All this is done through thorough statistical analysis and user interview. Usability tests should be made to test each page, each way of delivering content and of the service and not just impose a template to any web designer. As sad as it might sound, the MBC managing committee has failed to make use of a great tool just to save money or maybe for some really obscure reason… who knows?

This article is based on a real life project. It aims to show small business owners, whatever the field, how such businesses can drive leads out of a small scale but really optimised website. I’ll be taking the example of a small scale French business (18 employees) specialised in aluminium zinc works with which I worked and which made over a gross million euros over 3 years just through its website.

Website. This word and its concept is rather unclear for a whole lot of users online. Worse, many business owners hear and talk about the Internet and websites without ever getting a grasp of the concept. Some understand the possibilities and power of using the Internet and others just do not want to even hear about “that thing”. Huge mistake, especially when it comes to small businesses. Why? Because small businesses are more flexible and faster than large scale ones which are already missing a lot on the web. Moreover, being small means being more available locally, thus having better conversions locally, therefore securing contracts easily.

Real life example: Euralu.

Euralu Zinguerie is a small family business working locally in the Rhone-Alps and Auvergne regions in France. It employs 18 persons who are all local experts in zinc works and aluminium stripping for roofs. Nothing to do with the Internet, heh? However, the founder of this enterprise is tech savvy and had heard about websites and was ready to give it a try with a relatively low investment. The idea was to compete with its closest competitor regional Dal’Alu. The latter is a big group with small franchises disseminated everywhere in France.

The process.

The Euralu Zinguerie process was rather simple. The aim was to (re)create its identity and build a website that would have permanent calls to action to generate leads. The site would also need to compete with a minimum but long lasting search engine optimisation.

The conversion issue had to be tackled even before getting into the design process. The latter had to be extremely light to be able to give more importance to content (hence content to search engines). After some tries, we settled for the possibility of getting into direct contact with the company from all the available pages. This gave the direction for the design process as well as the upcoming SEO.

Minimal effective SEO.

Based on its nature, the site was more of the static type with minimal PHP just for the contact application. Aluminium zinc works being a really specialised field, it would have been really difficult to find specialised directories, especially in France, to get the site boosted by backlinks and exogenous SEO. The other thing was that the SEO wouldn’t have to be maintained (reducing website costs).

We therefore had to base all the SEO on the content and treated each page as a single, optimised entity. Each page has been built around one theme and we even used the site’s static file structure to optimise the whole lot. Site navigation was set to have it always available at eye level and all the specialised parts have been cross linked to maximise crawling. We also made sure that the business field “zinguerie” was present in the domain name.

Results.

Analysing conversions and results for this website might be done from different points of view but, after a friendly call to the founder, I got material to analyse both sides of the medal: online leads as well as offline.

Online.

Okay, so what goes on online for this website? In 3 years, the website’s PR is 0/10. What? 0? Yes, 0 and this kills all your misconceptions on PR because the site boasts 2nd on “zinguerie aluminium” just after the national leader 4th place on “zinguerie alu” and between first and 10th place on most of its strategic keywords such as: entreprise spécialisée zinguerie.

Along with this, is the conversion rate. Here is a screenshot of the conversions over 3 years.

1.74%, not much? We had set a simple calculation of how much it would have cost to get these persons to convert. The investment over 3 years would have been $495/350€/MRU Rs 14 775. So these are the gross savings made over the Internet for new clients. All in all, about 60% of these clients have hired the company.

Offline.

One of the good ideas we’ve had on this site was to set the phone number just beside the contact form. Notice how easy it is to get contact information from any page of the website. This, on its own, has generated about 150 phone contacts (every new contact is asked how it heard of the company). Here again about 60% of the clients signed for business.

Conclusion

Many are expecting, at this stage to know how much money came in. I have no clear sum to give but this is what I got from the founder. On average, the minimum contract signed (due to the nature of the work and the involvement of raw materials and travel expenses) is 8 000€ (MRU Rs 338 000) and the maximum can go to as much as 30 000€ (MRU Rs 1 260 000). In remaining on the minimum average with an 60% full conversion rate from the web for this small business, the average contracts signed via the website over the past 2 years is a gross 1 008 000€ (MRU Rs 42 504 000). And let’s keep this in mind: Euralu Zinguerie is but a mere small scale local business.

SEO, search engine optimisation, is not a new term. Nearly all site owners know about it and work on it, be it in an aggressive way or just doing the minimum to get traffic coming to their site. I’ve done a lot of that for clients but started living a whole new experience with the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius as it is a niche blog. So niched that search engines do not generate much traffic. True story! This site might be the only one that works like this as nearly all my client sites have Google as the major referrer. On checking thoroughly the site’s statistics, the major element that creeps out is that Twitter is the referrer that generates most traffic.

Social Media v/s Google.

Why did Twitter go beyond Google in the traffic generation rate? Where do other social media stand in this picture? How does this happen?

There are many answers to this question but the main element is content. Building content is fine for a site, however, the main problem is visibility. This site does have the ambition to compete with major web design sites such as Smashing Magazine and the editorial line is quite different due to the fact that the content is really Mauritian-oriented. On this basis, the web designer community in Mauritius is really small hence the small amount of web searches on web design reference for Mauritius. It was therefore necessary to find other ways of getting the content to the user. So I went in for Facebook and Twitter.

Delivering the content.

If the visitor does not come to the content, the content comes to the visitor. This is the main force of social media. If your site is not very well known, your feed subscribers will not be that important. What matters the most is to get people reading the content. Facebook’s feed tool is a great tool for that. All information published on a site is directly re-published on the Facebook page. This will incite people to read that content. Ok, it’s not your site attracting visitors but if the content is what’s most interesting than actually visiting the site, it’s a good deal. Moreover, depending on those readers, many of them might be more regularly connected to Facebook that surfing the web.

Same goes for Twitter. With a tweet, the link content of a post or article is directly sent to the user. This is interesting in terms of traffic as the tool allows retweets. Starting with the number of followers you have, you just have to tweet your link to get the traffic flowing in. If among your followers, a major Twitter personality retweets your post, its all the more good for your content.

Niche industry?

Using these tools are great and are in use along with major search engines for large traffic websites. If you are, like me, in a niche, you might find that concentrating your content on delivery is a good way to generate traffic. This does not, however, replace optimising for search engines. If you check the articles on this website, all of them (except the mini-blogging ones) are search engine optimised. So the use of social media for generating traffic should not be the only way of doing it. One of the advantages of being in a niche and on Twitter is that the community might be more present there and are easier to connect with.

Future.

Social media is taking the pace and this is why search engines are massively indexing social media pages. Google has also started indexing tweets. This shows that search engines know the power of these tools and how users interact with them. In some years, these tools will either be absorbed by groups like Google or will be the base of new Internet empires.

An idea?

An idea just popped like this some days ago. It was a simple, somewhat crazy but cool idea which might have some great impact, at least some minor incentive, on the Mauritian Web Design field. This crazy thing is currently called the “2010 project”. A better name might be found later on. Now, the cool thing about this idea is that this project will have a collective aspect. Yes COLLECTIVE in the sense that the Web Design Bureau’s (small handful of) readers will be associated to the project.

Why?

Why associate the Mauritian readership? Because the project concerns them, the project’s subject is some kind of representation of Mauritians all over the world. Yes you are right! You’re getting the idea of this project and what it will consist of. And you will participate!

What?

As said earlier, your representation on the web: the Mauritian government thing (yes, you can’t call that a website). The idea is that, as time goes by, more and more information is being added to this site. It is currently impossible to know how many pages there are in that site, how it is really organised and what SEO/SEM strategies are applied to it. I tried a spider simulator on it and ended with an #epic #fail (hello Twitter world) with a lot of 404 errors and a whopping 69 links in only one page while getting you lost in there.

So here is the project. It’s not said that it’ll be a killer success but it at least is an attempt to provide and alternative. The project is therefore a redux of the site.

How?

I have no idea yet but the concerned persons are Mauritians first. So we need to address the Mauritian public, well the site needs to address the Mauritian public. This is why major decisions on the design will be set as polls open to the readers. All ideas will be welcome and active participation will get interesting. No code will be generated, it is only a graphic design redux of the site just to imagine how it would have been if the right questions had been answered when necessary.

Let’s do this!

Ok, this project can be a huge flop but it has the advantage of budding (at least). The idea is not to take the place of anybody nor steal the job off anybody either. Just the fun of trying a real project management challenge on an equally challenging subject along with the web friends.

End of year approaching, I am starting this little series of post to look back on the past year. Actually, it is a look compared to the previous half-year because the Bureau is only a year and a half old. Among many other things we can look at this year’s best posts, at least this year’s most interesting posts.

People love winning

Ok, these were real traffic oriented posts but hey, they did get some success. People love winning things. Free is good! So those posts having attracted the largest readership were the contests the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius did over the year:

1. Google Wave invites
2. Free vector packs
3. Designing for the web (the comments are a must read)

Counsel and How tos

A lot of the advice, counsel and how to posts also got their share of readership. Though not as much as I would have liked but they did make their way and are still here to guide those is search of information. Here are those having made the list:

1. Why so much SEO? on the need to include SEO in design.
2. Are Mauritians that bad at design? on the fact that the government of Mauritius outsourced the designing of the new Mauritius logo.
3. Showing off your design work on how to increase your contacts and contracts with your past design work.

Chronicles

Chronicles are a new part of the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius. I’ve held a personal blog for the past 6 years but with the management of e-reputation and the need to protect my private life I closed it down. The Chronicles section here is not very old and allows me to blog on a more personal level. Short but sweet, they are still in “budding” mode. My favourite one, and also the one I’m most proud of is The Mauritian in Me. I’m also a guest author on Island Crisis now, solely blogging in French.

Conclusion

All in all, 2009 has been a nice year for the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius and some new elements have set their pace in the Mauritian web world. Twitter, for example is generating more traffic on Mauritian blogs and sites, the web community is getting larger, the Mauritius Blog List longer and a new year for more great experiment.

As a Web designer, there are some rules that you have been acquainted to. One of the first being: “store all layout and graphics in a separate CSS file”. Nothing bad in this one. Knowing that a CSS file is downloaded once or updated if needed in a browser’s cache, this speeds up pages and adds more semantic through the separation of layout and content. All the good basics of CSS.

It happens that the content of a CSS file can easily grow. On some large websites it’s no surprise to see CSS files running over a thousand or two and even more lines. At the end of the day, a CSS file might in itself reach some 80kB or go over that. In France, the recommended “accessible” page weight limit is 27kB. So with an 80kB CSS file you’re just shifting the data bloating problem to another file. Its still here. So, this is my little trick to reduce CSS file weight. This will have, as a consequence, a positive result on your page loading time.

The Tool

One of my favourite editors is PsPad, lightweight, easy to use and packed with a whole bunch of useful elements. One of these is the ability to reformat the CSS/HTML in structured or inline format. A lot of tools do that too but PsPad is just one of those but allows me to manage whole projects in one go making it really handy.

The Trick

The simple trick is to actually structure the data of the CSS file then throw it to the inline version before uploading it to the server. Structuring the data is useful to clean the file. The CSS parser in PsPad realigns the code and structures it with the relevant tabs as well as drops all empty lines and redundant spaces. This increases readability.

Afterwards just reformat the CSS file content into “inline”. Here the tool will reformat the whole content to have each node on one line only per node. The file loses a bit of readability but gets improved in terms of spacing, hence reducing the filesize. Take a look at the 2 screenshots below. The first shows the weight of the layout.css file with structured content and, the second, the same file with inline content. The file size change is rather surprising:

More ?

This small tutorial is but a mere trick to lighten up your file weight. Other solutions exist, solutions that would allow you to get those precious kB off your visitors’ shoulders with a view of proposing fast pages which would help them choose to convert on your site. On of them would be to use CSS shorthand and don’t forget precious tools like YUI. A good mix of those and techniques like the one presented here would surely help your pages load faster.

I was toiling through my huge RSS feeds list and was somewhat surprised to see that Six Revisions had published yet another retro colors showcase and tutorial. If I’m not mistaken, the retro trend had its days of glory in 2005-2006 and was less used nowadays though still a sure bet. Even Jonathan Snook came back to it just last month. The idea here is not to delve into retro design but into the assumption that all the web design clichés that we now have are here to stay for ever.

Clichés you said?

Some call them trends but all in all its like this. Someone gets an idea and builds a site with a specific style and layout. This is new and fresh. Web design showcases and popular magazines put this site in their never ending lists of “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking”. Then, some other guy will draw inspiration from it and mix it with the inspiration from another list of “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” and come up with a new site that will itself be part of a “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking”. And this will start a never ending cycle.

Back to the future.

After some time, when new trends will be catching up, the older clichés will tend to get into the background. New elements, new ideas, new “past” inspired clichés will come up making web design seem bland after running around the same type of sites all the time (this explains why the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius ended up with a really “common” theme). You can’t avoid it, you need to get inspiration and your clients will have seen a lot of the surrounding sites around before asking you for a specific design.

Then you get that little miracle spark. One designer will click around in those “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” archives and get his/her eyes watery of the reminiscence of past styled designs. He/she would think “Hey, why not go back to this? It would be a real change and an adventure!”. And there you go again, a new venture with elder styles.

What next?

Well, the elder styles mix up with the newest “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” and you get another new new old based trend… and the uroboros is complete. This is how the clichés will carry on living in web design and will still be served in some way or another.

Its just like those trainer-problem filled trainee(s) cliché film scenario that Hollywood just seems to have the secret:

A great trainer (sometimes retired or having left the competition because of some sad life changing experience) does not want to train some guy or team. The trainer has his own problem and the trainee or team also have theirs. There’s a lot of misunderstanding all around but somehow they get to build up a relationship and solve their problems together while winning their contest and living happy lives.

How many of these films have you seen? Even the award winning “Million Dollar Baby” is based on this scheme proving that this still works. Another award winning one in this category is “Rocky”.

Conclusion.

So, as a bottom line, we could say that Web designing is like being the “Karate Kid” :

Wax on, wax off !

As a web designer, a lot of responsibilities lie on your shoulders. The present article stresses on the fact that a web designer should also delve into a lot of other web related skills to improve his/herself. Well I’ve always stressed on this point in any case. The reason is simple: make a site’s web design work for it, helping it converting visitors into customers. One of the usually overlooked aspects is “images”.

The usage.

Custom has it that the web designer chooses some attractive images that go in the line of the client’s message or the client simply gives a CD with a number of stock images or images it has collected. Many a time the client’s desired images are not the best ones but the worse can be the fact that they don’t carry the message that benefits the client himself. It is the web designer’s job to get as close to ‘image marketing’ and explain things. A pretty face can push visitors away as clearly illustrated in this article.

Choose.

After explaining the concepts and alternatives to the client, choose the images for it as per your wireframe. But here again do not fall in the same trap as the client. You might want a “CV” image but make sure that it carries the right message. Below is a part screenshot of a big Mauritian company’s website offering career opportunities and showing a resumé:

Where it goes wrong.

You’d tell me that its ok, they’ve put a “resumé” image illustrating the main idea of the page. There still is a problem around here. Yes, the resumé as it is, in this image is crumpled. You might be offering career opportunities but you are also supposed to respect your future and current employees. The crumpled resumé is currently sending the wrong message while in the same page it is stated:

[The group's] regional presence and culture of excellence can help you build an exciting and gratifying career.

You might be on the job market but you sure want to be respected for your skills. The same applies to business partners. For some, the value you give to your workforce is your value.

Your job as a web designer.

As a matter of fact this stresses on the essential information that, your implication in a web site is not only to get the best gradient colours and pixel popping but showing your added value by understanding each page’s content and concept before choosing the best image to illustrate it. This also adds value to the site you sell as you are able to maximize conversions.

Google Wave is the new craze over the Web. The new communication tool is as interesting as promised and many a company are thinking about switching from their own internal collaboration tool to Google Wave even if the latter is still in Beta/Preview. So people are all running after the wave which is currently looking more like a tsunami than the simple caressing ripples we usually get on our Mauritian shores. Why? @webmastergeek showed me that the Google wave invites were even on sale for nearly $50 on ebay.

As usual the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius will not be doing things like everybody else does! Here things are free and offered. Just ask all the winners we’ve had over the past months, everybody’s happy. Now, let’s wave together.

15 Google Wave invites to be won!

Now, this one will be short and quick. You want a free Google Wave invite? Just enter the contest here on the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius. The terms first. The contest will last 10 days as from today the 26th of October 2009. Thus ending on Wednesday 4th of November 2009 at midnight. 15 (fifteen) wave invites will be immediately sent to the winners after random listing. The contest is open to EVERYBODY. Here are the different options you have to enter the contest, just do one or both of these:

1. Write a post on your blog talking about this contest (it does not have to be a long one) linking back to the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius and then put a link to that post in the comments here.
2. Tweet about this contest on your Twitter profile with a link to the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius and then put a link to that Tweet in the comments here.

Really easy huh. Just for precision, only those comments abiding by the above rules will be entering the competition. Up to you now.

And another word, check out Zack’s superb article on the new Google Wave Haters… a real must!

Twitter, the new craze that some understand, others love and some simply abhor. This small app has grown so big and quick that it is becoming rather addictive. Let’s face it, Facebook did its day for the non-tech guys and it seems that some more “web-savvy” people are on there. The application is still blooming and there could be thousands of posts to write on it. All kinds of people are on it, building new international micro societies online. The problem is that spammers are already here, bots are already here and automated twittering is a blast. On the other hand, the Twitter Fail Whale is a huge buzz and when Twitter is down you just get thousands of helpless people wandering on blogs whining about their misfortune.

So, how in the world can you get out of such a jungle and why do you need all this? Answer: search me. I haven’t really got an answer to this question. The only thing I can come up to is that I just like the fact that I receive links, inspirational sites, solutions, SEO/marketing research, web design related news and info in one go, on one tool and without all the fuss and hassle of having to even open an RSS reader. I’m a Seesmic user and I just need to drop an eye on my panes just when a tweet falls and I read the 140 characters or less that either incite me to click or not. The choice is easy.

I think that the simplicity of it all is what seduced me. Nothing more. I’ve had a facebook account some years ago. Then shut it down to reopen one just for the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius. One thing simply killed me! It is so difficult to find your way in it. You simply feel like you’re always wading in high waters with that. When I started out in web design, visual was the only thing that interested me, now its usability and accessibility and this has changed my relationship to apps. Simplicity is so hard to find.

On the other hand some things have started disturbing me. You do get a lot of followers after some time. Trouble is that many are automated followers who will just send you automated replies. Others are boring and others don’t tweet at all. Those who tweet sometimes become really gross and you don’t get time to read all the tweets. I don’t know if the term exists but I think that we now really have “Tweet pollution” which is a lot of useless and unnecessary tweets in your timeline just because you are following a lot of useless and unnecessary people. The worse kind are those who tweet about MMO and send you the never-ending same link on how to get millions of followers. What do I care about getting millions of followers? I just want to follow the guys who will feed me inspiration and tech solutions and some friends.

In any case, once you start getting a lot of followers you just get overwhelmed by the number of new follower emails that fall in your inbox. I just hope that you know how to make your inbox filters. Just to end this. Twitter is great and interesting but be careful not to become a twitter victim… like me.