website optimization...yes, it's just like this

To a web developer, website optimization* is a worthy goal all by itself. There’s a certain pride in managing to create a site with the fewest lines of code possible, only the most essential element ids and classes, a robust CSS file and nary an unnecessary <img> tag to be found. But this isn’t just web geeks trying to earn more points on our geek cards. There are also some practical advantages to website optimization, and choosing a good web designer will make sure you benefit from them.

Website optimization: Page Load Speed

Do you like waiting for a page to load? Does anybody? Several factors can add to page load times, from extra communication with the web server and lots of user-side scripting to plain ‘ol bloated code. But clean code reduces page load speed because the web browser simply has less to construct before showing you the page. If your web developer isn’t concerned with website optimization, they’re slowing this process down unnecessarily.

Furthermore, search engines know that a slow site negatively impact the user’s experience, so they are now grading on site speed and factoring that into their ranking algorithms. Everything you do to help your site load faster has built-in SEO benefits as well. Bonus!

Website optimization: Browser Issues and Maintenance

Ugly old code tends to make the site look different from browser to browser. Website optimization using tried and true coding methods, in my experience, leads to less surprises when it comes to browser testing. What looks beautiful in Firefox doesn’t always look the same in Internet Explorer, so the less opportunity you give IE to get it wrong, the better.

When it’s time to update a site after launch, the whole process slows way down if you have to dig through piles of code just to get to the content. Website optimization using clean, elegant code from the start means less development time, fewer browser issues and less maintenance after launch.

Website optimization: Bandwidth

“Sorry, this site has exceeded it’s bandwidth requirements.” Ewwww, no one likes to see that message. Granted, a few extraneous lines of code here and there are not going to cause major bandwidth issues, but if your site receives high traffic, each kilobyte adds up. Say a page currently weighs in at 60kb, and in reality, it should only come in at 30kb. A 50% savings each and every time the server loads that page is nothing to gloss over.

Website optimization can be accomplished in many ways, but I’ll save you the geektastic details. The important thing to remember is your site performs better the “lighter” and “cleaner” it is (read: optimized), and this is especially true when viewing on mobile devices where connection speeds may be slower and the user is getting charged by the amount of data transferred.

Summary

Not only does an older website probably need a fresh assessment over content and strategy, there’s also a good chance it could use an overhaul under the hood as well. While this may or may not affect how the site looks, it will for sure affect how the site feels. Users will notice improved performance, the server will be less bogged down and as a positive side effect, search engine visibility may improve.

One final note: the cleanest, most elegantly coded site in the world is still at the mercy of the server it sits on. If the web hosting provider isn’t up to par with its equipment, the site will suffer. Be sure to choose hosting carefully.

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Photo courtesy of Axion23

* Although loosely related, website optimization and SEO are different things.

Website optimization – it’s not just for geeks is a post from: RSA Blog

The RSA web development team has been hard at work creating highly optimized, effective websites. We have many exciting sites we’re currently working on:

• City of Huron
• Scotchman Metal Fabricating Solutions
• Dawes County Tourism
• Kelly’s Frozen Yogurt
• CD Hopkins Financial
• Bridges to Buttes By-Way
• Murphy’s Pub and Grill
• Knecht Home Center and Mead Lumber
• RCS Storage
• Lehman Trikes
• Casey Peterson and Associates
• Waste Connections of Denver
• Faith Veterinary Clinic
• Sioux Empire Fair
• Wyoming State Fair

Also, coming very soon to the web, fresh from our team’s creative fingers:

• South Dakota Farmers Union
• Powderhouse Lodge
• Radiant Systems
• International Metals

We are also excited to announce our newest service offering: mobile websites! We’ve been creating mobile sites since early 2010, and would now like to offer it as a standard service. RSA can produce the mobile version of your website, which usually contains fewer graphics and more text, quickly and inexpensively.

We’re currently working on mobile sites for the Ramada Tropics Resort, Des Moines, and Ramada Sioux Falls, having just completed our own mobile website.

We’re always developing new, effective solutions in our creative and interactive departments, and our business is always growing and evolving. We have our clients to thank for that. Keep up the good work, everyone, and thanks for your business!

- Tony

Inside RSA Web Production is a post from: RSA Blog

Smart Phones

Mobile devices are becoming more and more popular, and the mobile web is an alluring place for web surfers, offering all kinds of communications capabilities on the go. Yet it’s still a very new arena for many people, especially here in South Dakota.

The capabilities of mobile phones and devices now make mobile a serious contender to traditional website access. In the next few years this technology is predicted to surpass the amount of internet users currently utilizing desktop computers.

Why should I create a mobile website?

There are limitations to mobile web such as limited screen space & slower connections speeds. To date, a large amount of mobile web users are attempting to get to vital information about companies and topics quickly, but they can run into problems because many websites are not ready for mobile viewing.

A traditional website won’t always work. Having all the content from your website show up on a mobile device may frustrate the visitor, making their experience slow and hard to navigate. A little forethought can help reduce frustration.

Is mobile browsing really that popular?

Consider the following:

• Cell phones are in the hands of 5 billion people worldwide and over 290,000 in the United States.
• Over 93% of U.S. adults own a cell phone and the demand for mobile access to the Internet has skyrocketed with experts predicting broadband subscriptions surpassing 1 billion around the world this year.
• One third of those who do not own a cell phone live in households where someone else has a cell phone.
• 20% of all U.S. households are now “mobile-only.”
• More adults have a cell phone than have an iPod or mp3 player.
• As of July 2010, 23% of mobile phone owners have accessed a social network via a mobile phone, 20% have used a phone to watch a video and 11% have made a charitable donation by text message.
• 11% of mobile phone owners make purchases through their phones.

Now the question should be, “do I want my business to be found and easily accessed on the mobile web?” I would think the answer is yes!

Based on the work we’ve done for clients getting their websites mobile ready, I can say this is an increasingly popular trend, and a cost-effective way to reach web users in a whole new way. If you want to create a mobile website, give us a call!

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Photo courtesy of Robert Bejil Photography

Why Create A Mobile Website? is a post from: RSA Blog

Ok where's the Easy button?

A client said in a recent meeting about his service (paraphrasing here):

“A lot of our customers want things very simple, and I always have to tell them the simpler you want it to be for you, the harder and more complicated it is for us to set it up.”

I heard this and thought to myself, wow – he could be talking about web development. He wasn’t, but I am.

The “Easy Website” Button

We also have many clients who come in and say they just want things to be simple and easy. This is understandable, as I imagine few people really enjoy complication.

So what does an “easy website” mean to our clients? Usually it has to do with the user interface and how difficult or easy it is to make changes to web content like events, blogs or photos. But often the easier this is, the harder it was to make it so. In other words the road to “easy” can be packed with complications.

You need drag-and-drop capabilities? We understand – that makes it way easy for you, or even your visitors. But to get that done we’re talking about quite a few hours of programming, or at least tossing a few bones at a third-party dev for existing software, which still needs to be integrated. Basically it’s easy for you, difficult and time-consuming for us. Which means it’s also expensive for you.

The trick is to find a balance between what you can spend and how easy you really need things to be. Can you live without drag-and-drop?

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Photo courtesy of James Cridland

Make me an easy website is a post from: RSA Blog

Sometimes your color preference doesn't matter...

As Amanda mentioned in her recent post on designing professional logos, designers tend to approach their work in a different way than many people think. Our decisions aren’t arbitrary – it’s not like ordering food, where you just pick whatever you happen to like at the time. There needs to be purpose.

Many of the decisions designers make are based on some external criteria. In this business, that’s usually the audience being catered to. A common experience, however, is for the client on a project to override some such decision based on their own personal preference.

Often, however, the client isn’t even part of the desired audience. So while their preference might be relevant because they own the project, it doesn’t necessarily help the project be more effective. As a simplistic example, if the audience mostly responds to blue and the client wants it red…well we’re missing the boat.

Think about that next time you start a project: are you part of the audience you are trying to appeal to? If not, how might your preferences interfere with reaching that audience? If so, do you think your individual preferences are representative of the majority of that audience?

In either case it would probably serve any project well to find out exactly what that audience likes or prefers, and base decisions on that data, regardless of the personal preferences of the project team.

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Photo courtesy of pinksherbet

Does this logo make me look fat? is a post from: RSA Blog

Lego Ninja is serious about content strategy.

In the late ’90s content management systems (CMS) were rare. Those that did exist were either underdeveloped, by today’s standards, or just slightly customizable template systems (RIP Geocities).

Back then we hand-coded websites, for the most part, and clients had very little access to make updates to those websites. The internet gods looked upon this and saw that it was good. So, of course, they changed it.

Enter the CMS

These days you can’t throw a cat without hitting someone who wants full access to change their websites. It’s now common for clients to ask for a CMS-based website, and I can’t blame them. If you’re making a lot of changes to the site, it’s certainly more economical to do it yourself than pay someone else to.

But is it really as  simple as it sounds? That depends on a few things:

1. Do you know HTML? The CMS of today, though relatively well-developed and easy to use, still requires some level of web code knowledge to keep things together. It’s not drag-and-drop, at least not yet. Yes, you can bold text and change the colors – but creating page layouts or typography any more complex than a basic Word document takes a little more doing – usually in the “source” code of the CMS editor.

2. Do you have the time? Having access to make changes to your website might save you a few bucks, but it’s certainly not going to save you any time. Besides having to think about keeping the information on each page current (planning, researching), you also have to actually go in and make the changes yourself, troubleshoot issues that crop up while doing so, and maybe take care of the thousand other things you were already responsible for.

3. Do you have a plan? Remember Legos? I remember Legos. I played with those things until I was 15. They were awesome. I built all kinds of things: spaceships, battleships, castles, planes, trains, and time machines. I’ll admit it – sometimes I didn’t know what I was going to build when I started. Those masterpieces usually ended up looking like Frankenstein’s monster…but with more blocks.

But the ones I planned…they were *art*. And that’s the lesson here. If you don’t have a solid, ongoing plan for your website’s content, there’s no CMS in the world that’s going to make it work. It’ll be a mess, and a huge waste of time for you.

Here’s the truth: no CMS is going to allow someone with no web knowledge and a million other responsibilities to manage their website effectively. That’s not what it’s for. The CMS allows easier access to the content on a website. This does allow those with little knowledge of the web or code to make changes and updates to a website, but it isn’t – and was never meant to be – a substitute for a good content strategy and web developer.

Does your website have a CMS? How’s it working out?

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Photo courtesy of thrig

Content Management System Confusion is a post from: RSA Blog

How can we solve this?

Using the internet is now mainstream; a way of life for the great many people who buy products and services online. In light of this, you might think more businesses would have a better online presence. So why don’t they?

Low budget = cheap website?

In my experience the top reason is budget. Businesses, usually those on the smaller side, tend to have limited financial resources to devote to web marketing. Now no one wants to settle on a poorly designed website, but some do because they think it’s all they can afford. Unfortunately a poorly designed website can often seem shady or unreliable to potential customers-which sort of defeats the purpose of a website: to draw customers in.

So enters the do-it-yourself website template. This kind of thing sounds good, in theory: it’s fast, cheap, and requires no special skills in web design, content development, information architecture, search engine optimization, or the rest of that “stuff.” As a business owner, you can’t lose, right?

With a decade of experience developing websites across many industries, I’ve seen the effects of both good and bad design. So I can say with confidence that your website, if done incorrectly, will most likely fail to achieve your goals, leaving you with a sense that websites don’t work.

The “template” website

I’ve noticed a recent push by these template companies to sell their product as a quick and easy website solution, but they’re selling you an incomplete package. Don’t get me wrong-these types of services can be useful, but only in the hands of a professional development team. That’s right, team. Web development is much more than just placing a Word document into an eye-popping web interface, and so it takes more than one person to do it well.

Web development takes the business as a package and gives it an online presence, so that everything your business is and does is represented as a whole. You could say it’s your “brick and mortar” for the web.

Website templates completely skip all strategic planning steps, and many feature poor navigation and content structure. Some may even look like a competing business. This can hurt your brand in three ways:

1. It forces you to modify your brand to fit a set “look” rather than designing that “look” to fit your brand
2. It means less thought goes into your site structure and content development, affecting user-friendliness
3. You have far less chance against competition, especially in search engine results

A better way?

If cost is the main issue when building a website, spreading that development cost out over a longer period of time may be a better option than a one time “cheap” solution. Let’s put it this way: would you go to the car dealership and ask to see the best Cadillac on the lot and only bring enough cash to buy a Yugo? Maybe you would, but you certainly wouldn’t be driving the Caddy off the lot.

Instead, maybe you’d purchase the base model Caddy knowing that you could upgrade the vehicle over time. The analogy ends here, though, because we all know cars don’t work that way.

But websites absolutely work that way, and this way of developing your website can  be more successful and  save you a costly redesign in the future.

Necessity of strategy

If the goal of your website is to make some kind of conversion, whether it’s product sales, subscriptions, downloads, etc., a strategy is essential. But the implementation of that strategy is an ongoing effort that does not end, and should never be thought of as a one-time purchase.

So even if a template purchase is your decision, having a good game plan for that website is still very important. Get a consultation with a reputable development company before executing any major decision, or you may end up missing the boat.

Have you ever gone the “cheap” route? How did it work out?

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Photos courtesy of ricardodiaz (left) and irinaslutsky (right)

Cheap Web Design, Step Right Up! is a post from: RSA Blog

Who cares what the glass looks like...is the beer any good?

Who cares how a website looks if it doesn’t work?

Well, the owner of the site, usually. Many of the websites I’ve built over the years have been for clients who care very much how their websites look, and often make decisions to enhance that aesthetic quality at the expense of usability (the ease with which a person uses the website).

Of course the “look” of a site is important. A website needs to draw and engage the eye quickly, or at the very least, not make the visitor puke on their keyboard (here, this might help you with that).

But drawing the eye is only part of the equation. Readers familiar with this subject might here expect me to talk about “function”, and how it needs to take precedence over “form.” In other words, don’t sacrifice usability for flashy eye-candy. But we all understand that, don’t we? I don’t need to beat this dead horse, because look, here’s a perfectly good, live horse that’s ripe for a beating:

Form follows Function follows Content

What’s usually left out of the puzzle is content. Yet content is the most important piece. It’s what the internet is about; it’s what you visit websites for. It’s what you came here for. You’re reading content right now.

Would it make a difference to you if this site was ugly (go ahead, call the site ugly–Google knows where you live), so long as you were still interested in this article?

Further (let’s assume you came via direct link), would it have mattered to you if, when you came here to read this article, the navigation was broken, the images didn’t show up, or the styles or scripts didn’t operate quite right? Would you still have read the article? I think so, provided you were interested enough. And interest in content is only effected by lack of good function or form to the degree that lacking hinders your ability to view the content.

Form follows function follows content. Content comes first; it’s what we build the website around. As a designer, it’s always better for me to know the content before beginning design work. It allows me to design a better website, something that fits the content in look, layout, and function, and to do it much more efficiently.

The benefit to you, the business owner, is a better website all around.

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Photo courtesy of stevendepolo

Is The Look Of A Website Most Important? is a post from: RSA Blog

"The cobbler's children have no shoes."

We’re entering 2010 with a new website, but also a fresh perspective and a new appreciation for the position our clients are in when embarking upon web development projects.

As an agency that offers web development as a core service, we’ve been painfully conscious of the need to update our website for a few years now. It took us a good long while to devote enough attention to getting our own work done, for the obvious reason of being extremely busy with client work. As Robert once put it, “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.”

Of course finding the time was only part of it. It’s often said “you are your own worst critic,” but we never thought we’d also be our own worst client. Turns out we are.

The Curse of Knowledge

We’ve built websites from research to release, from the ground up, and been very successful at it. Dozens of times. Yet for some inexplicable reason, all of our knowledge about marketing and web strategy, design and usability became completely useless when we started on our own website project. We may as well have been school children trying to reach Mars.

I’ve pondered this at length: how and why does this happen? It didn’t take long to realized we’re not unique in this – it happens with many of our clients as well. But it was rather surprising to experience it first-hand after being on the outside for all other projects.

What we experienced was the overwhelming scope of a web project that involves something so personal you can’t separate the emotional from the pragmatic; the technical from the preferential. This subject matter was so internalized – we take so much of it for granted – that it was immensely difficult to pull it out and put it down on “paper” in a way that made any sense to others. If you’ve ever read Made to Stick, you’ll recognize this as the “Curse of Knowledge,” as the Heath brothers coined it.

But this experience also underscores the value we offer our clients, not only in expertise or great service, but also through caring enough about your business to understand the emotional element, yet remaining objective enough to weigh the practical and external concerns. It’s much easier for an outside agency to keep a project on focus without the “curse” of detailed and ultimately distracting knowledge of the subject matter we found in ourselves during the project.

In other words, if not for the fact we are an advertising and marketing agency, I would love to have hired such an agency to help us with our website. After all, the surgeon doesn’t operate on himself.

Need a Hand?

So here we are in 2010, with a fresh look and a fresh outlook. What about you? Thinking of building your first website or upgrading the one you have? Feeling overwhelmed or apprehensive? We’ve been there, and we can help.

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Photo courtesy of alanlpriest

Meet Our Worst Client is a post from: RSA Blog

Whenever I sit down to go through ideas for blog posts, I inevitably think of a few that sound great, only to realize hey, we already wrote that one. A lot of the things we wrote about last year are still relevant even now – maybe more so.

Looking back through our logs, it’s no surprise to find some content was more popular than others. After all, we’re still experimenting to find the sort of thing you, our readers, find most useful.

To make sure you didn’t miss any of the good ones from last year, here’s a short list of our most viewed posts from 2009.

Why Good Customer Service Is So Important

5 Reasons Not to Cut Your Marketing Budget in a Recession

Elements of Internet Marketing

Going Nuts? Don’t Cut your Marketing

Should You Put Video On Your Website?

Understanding Web Design

14 Practical Uses For Social Media

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Photo courtesy of kevinzim

Stuff You Liked From 2009 is a post from: RSA Blog