Duranos Web Design Services

May & Lou International, a villa developer and contractor based in Bali have assigned Bali based Duranos web services to maintain its web site as well as tweaking a running set of Google Adwords campaigns in villa sales & construction.

May & Lou International provide a complete service in villa construction and building extension and modification, from concept and architectural preparation to construction and finishing. May & Lou International also prepare all necessary certificates to ensure its clients’ investment conforms to local laws and conditions.

If you run a business and you’ve not been steadily living anywhere under the rock in this very digital age, chance is your business has a website.

If it’s your company’s first website, while excusable, it may or may not look ugly to the common public standard. At least compared to below’s list. Check it out.

Inconsistency

This apply to web pages layout structure, navigation, header or footer. To be less confusing web pages within a website should be consistent. You wouldn’t want your visitors thought they’re already sent to other website while browsing your website just because on some pages you use a totally different layout or navigation, different colors, different fonts or different logo graphic.

Too much GIF or Flash animation

Truth is, animation (usually in GIF graphic format) on a website, when overly used, tend to distract and leave a really personal / amateurish impression to visitors.
What about Flash animation, isn’t it cool? While it’s true when deployed & used properly, full blown Flash sites looks cool or some even spectacular, still when visitors visited a Flash only site, they rarely hang around for the file to finish loading (playing). When visitors see new one that’s fresh, they might watch it, but soon, they’re off to another website where they can buy something. Generally, if you’re selling anything online, lose the total Flash page and make the site accessible, usable, professional and trustworthy. The additional bad news is, Flash and especially graphics (animated or static) are not index-able by search engines whom practically blind of them. The soon they meet graphics data, search engines just skip the bitmap data found inside graphics for the next index-able data (mostly text).

Non proportional image resizing

Not proportionally resizing image lead to a weird looking picture, either too fat (wide) or too thin (taller) than it supposed to be. When you resize a 2″ wide x 3″ tall image to smaller 0.5″ in width, you know that the height should equally be measured 0.5″x3″/2″ = 0.75″. Turn on that “Constrain Proportions” option in your graphic editor.

Use of large photos that supposed to be thumbnails

Big pictures when put on a web page will drag the overall web page’s loading speed down. Did you take the photo on your homepage with your new mega bytes digital camera and then slap it up on the website, maybe just dragging the corners to make it smaller? That giant photo (which only looks smaller) takes at least 20 seconds to load in my browser and I’ve already clicked the next link in my Google search results. Best practice is when you use 2 sets of size for each picture, one with smaller dimension for thumbnail and the other larger for the full sized picture. And you need to do this separately using a decent graphic editor (Adobe Photoshop, JASC Paintshop, Corel Photopaint, to name some).

Poor readability

Did you go through your font list for the weirdest fonts that exist, add neon color and then enlarge them? Don’t think visitors going to use their credit card on a site that drips bright colors in a mishmash of fonts. Beside, consider that most of your reader’s computers won’t have that weird font, so it doesn’t make sense to use it. Or does your web page copy is barely readable, the font color and page background color just similar. For ease of reading to your visitors, instead use a contrast text versus page background, use as many paragraph (new line) as many as you need to differentiate different thoughts or ideas, don’t use all capitalized letter as it’s just like you’re shouting your readers, use title that at least 1.5 times larger than your ordinary paragraph font size.

Monitor’s Screen Size

In general web pages cannot be to wide that visitors must scroll its mouse horizontally to read the content. You can pick either 750 or 970 pixels for your maximum width, which refer to 800 and 1024 pixels screen resolution used by the majority of computers.

Get rid of obsolete news!

If your homepage has news or upcoming events and the latest one happened in 2005 or 2004, get it off your homepage. In fact, get “news” off your homepage because no one updates their site often enough.

Confusing navigation

Navigation (links) should be clear, logical and intuitive. If visitors can’t find what they want from your business website, they’re leaving. List down what pages you want on your site, try to organize or group them in a logical order.
Visitors first! Put the most important and used link (from your visitors point of view) near the top or as to allow easily seen. Put them on a fixed spot, usually horizontally (on top) or vertically (on left or right hand margin of your web page). Don’t change its location from page to page as to provide visitors a consistent navigation. Whenever possible try to highlight the current page visitors are on. Additionally put a breadcrumb (small navigation path of page hierarchy, like the one shown on top of this page, just above the page title).

Nothing to say?

Don’t be. Too few web pages in a website are not good for website ranking on search engines. To get search engines’ good attention, a website need to have a rather thick content and growing… So instead, what wanted are more pages with useful information, which all focus to one theme subject: what is the website content all about. Having good contents will encourage other websites to link to your web pages and so does encourage the search engines to score more for your pages.

Internet display advertising in U.S. jumped 17.3% to $9.76 bln, as budgets continue to shift to digital media, according to TNS Media Intelligence. While spot TV, helped by record-setting levels of political advertising, was up 10.4%, nearly 21% in Q4 2006 alone, to $17.23 bln. Spanish-language television saw a 13.9% growth to $4.3 bln. Network TV grew just 2.5% while cable rose only 3.4%.

The Olympics and the midterm elections helped boost U.S. ad spending by more than 4% last year and underlying growth trends remain relatively slow in this one, according to a leading industry tracker.

Advertisement spending in the 19 media came in at a hair under $150 billion with the highest percentage growth coming for the Internet, spot TV and Spanish-language television.

The research firm sees no significant changes to industry fundamentals that are apt to move the ad market onto a different track and maintained a recent forecast of 2.6% growth for 2007 that while conservative, still seems appropriate.

By media, Internet display advertising jumped 17.3% to $9.76 billion as budgets continue to shift to digital media. Spot TV, helped by record-setting levels of political advertising, was up 10.4% — nearly 21% in the fourth quarter alone — to $17.23 billion. Spanish-language television saw a 13.9% to $4.3 billion although other areas of the TV marketplace were slapped by a second-half slowdown. Network TV grew just 2.5% while cable — long a star performer — rose only 3.4%.

As a group, newspapers were down 2.4% with a local newspaper spending drop of 3.3% offsetting modest gains in national and Spanish newspapers. Other media showing drops in spending include business-to-business magazines and local radio.

Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble held on to its spot as the No. 1 spender, laying out some $3.4 billion last year. It was followed by General Motors, which hung on to second place at $2.3 billion despite a 23.7% cut in spending. AT&T was right on its heels, increasing 30.8% to $2.2 billion. Verizon came in fourth, at $1.9 billion, an increase of 10.4%, and Tine Warner rounded out the top five at $1.8 billion, down 12%.

A new pop information web portal, Kamu.info, in Bahasa was recently released.

Kamu.info aims on providing a web place for youngsters to find, gather or submit interesting info. It allows new users to self register and submit their articles online for publishing on the portal.

New facilities to be implemented in the near future among others: discussion forum, classified ads, newsletter subscription and a handful of other interesting features. The website construction was designed for 1024 x 768 pixels or wider screen resolution and use a state of the art content management system on PHP / MySQL platform.

It’s estimated that the major strength and selling point of this portal are its high domain “real estate” value, simple & easy to remember domain name, kamu.info, which in English literary or casually translated as “Your Information“. Quite promising.

Considering the market readyness nature in adopting new web destination, organic search engines result awareness and various other facets that need to be developed, the initial plan is to launch it quietly, then add, extend and develop more features as they become apparent as required.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets has been the number 1 provider of Web-based productivity tools, which allow users to work together remotely, since October 2006 according to report by survey company Nielsen//NetRatings.

With key features like import existing documents and spreadsheets, edit documents and spreadsheets from anywhere with a web browser, store online securely documents and spreadsheets, share changes in real-time, invite co-workers to make changes to the documents or spreadsheets or make changes together at the same time. And the price is perfect, free.

“Web-based productivity software further extends people’s use of the Web browser beyond Web site visitation, and shows how the collaborative power of the Internet is bringing traditionally offline activities online,” said Jon Stewart, senior analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings. Furthermore he continued “Google has capitalized on its devoted audience and wide brand recognition to gain traction quickly in this space, but there is clearly a lot of room for growth.”

In October 2006 the combined unique visitors to Google Docs and Spreadsheets reached 445,762, with an average time spent of 10 minutes per visitor. This accounted for 92% of unique visitors and 95% of time spent among providers of Web-based productivity tools that month.

Other providers include: EditGrid, Zoho.com, Thinkfree.com, Numsum.com and WriteBoard, among others.

Since October 2006, growth at Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been relatively flat. In November 2006, these Google properties attracted 424,785 unique visitors and 432,156 unique visitors in December 2006.

Time per visitor has increased somewhat, from an average of 10 minutes in October 2006 to 14 minutes in December 2006, Nielsen//NetRatings reports. Users of Google Docs and Spreadsheets skew toward higher incomes, with 28% of users earning upwards of $100,000 annually. A large majority of users, 76%, have an income greater than $50,000 annually.