Monday, July 4, 2011

Top 10 web browsers

The internet or Web is ever widening and there is no question that it would remain in such a character. However, how many of us care to look at its spread! Rather we do not get time actually to find through such matters. But one of the media or the windows through which get connected to internet world, has ever some priority. Okay, let’s get straight on to the point – the use of web browsers. There are several web browsers available with various facilities to let the users browse the web as they wish!

And according to their several features, we like some of them very much and do ignore a few. As you know, Online Web Directory, a directory for web design company and every other business, ever tries to keep you update on several matters of technology, this time we like to inform you what are the top 10 ten web browsers now. It will certainly help you browse through the internet very well.

  1. Internet Explorer: There is no doubt that it is one of the most popular web browsers available and in use. There are several reasons of its popularity. The stronger two are - till date its free availability with windows operating system (most favored by the users) and its safe browsing promptings.

  2. Mozilla Firefox: As an internet user, all of us know that Firefox is highly popular for its speed, so many plug-ins, built-in spell checkers and so many other features. Day by day it is also getting renovated. Every new vision is coming out with several good plug-ins and other features.

  3. Google Chrome: The search giant Google, has given the internet community one of the best gift – Chrome. The browser is a light weight, new interface and fast loading features. The most favored feature is its private browsing – “incognito window”. And day by day its extensions and tools are getting it highly popular.

  4. Opera: This browser is in several ways highly popular for its attractive look and “turbo” speed. This browser is very much in use for it mobile version. The fast space and slick feature in mobile phones, this browser is gaining back its lost fame.

  5. Apple Safari: It is fact that there is less number of Mac Ox users. But though the browser was built especially for the Mac machines, now for innovative web kits, Html 5 support and availability in other computer formats (ipod & other smart phones) the browser is getting highly popular among users.

  6. SeaMonkey: It is an all in-one latest browser developed by Mozilla foundation. It has several exciting features included – integrated email, newsgroup, html editor, IRC chat, web development tools and etc. A simple user has to like it as he or she can use several mails in tabs. At the same time developers like it for its rendering of CSS in html editor with dynamic images and table resizing. Even JavaScript debugger and DOM inspector is include in it. The browser is compatible with windows, Linux and Mac OX operating systems.

  7. Flock: It is one of the browsers targeted towards social networking lovers. It has the feature of letting its users informed of the social networking updates. It has several features of Firefox (even powered by Firefox) and the users like to use it for this very reason only.

  8. Maxthon: It is favorite for its powerful tabbed user interface. With all its basic browsing functionality, the tabs are strong enough to stop crashes against the running of multiple pages at a time. Its Isolator Technology creates a walls type of system that prevents tabs being frozen for the bad web pages.

  9. PhaseOut: It is a web browser for outer “starship navigation” panel with all the latest privacy protection shields. It comes with several “Pop-up Blocker” and “CleanUp tools” with extended options, skin database and swapping interface layout, it is gaining popularity to the internet users.

  10. Avant: This browser is one of the ultra-fast web browsers. It has a user-friendly interface that brings efficient browsing experience with reliability. Apart from its simple common features of browsing, Avant has strong detection of malware, mouse gesture support, multi processing.  Slowly it is getting popularity.


This is our list of top 10 web browsers.  However, you can find out several portals providing several unique lists.  Whatever the case may be, the most important point is the usage of the users – you. Try Yourself and judge the usability of the browsers.

Top 10 web hosting companies

Online web directory three cheers for each and every subscriber of its directory. Thank you very much for keeping faith in our directory. We always try to provide you with best of services! We are happy that we are able to showcase your listing of business to the hundreds of the visitors coming in our site.

We ever try to keep you informed of some really helpful information that can make your online presence more viable and worth keeping alive with all your efforts. This time our aim is to remind you of top 10 web hosting companies that are supporting their customers with top class web hosting services.

Let us come to the point depending on which you can either decide to go for a web hosting service provider or scrutinize if your existing one is worth keeping continued!

  • Unlimited Disk space/server space: It is very much vital that you choose a web hosting service provider ready to provide you with ample disk space to host your site. Hope you are aware that now with the improvement of the technologies, say introduction of the cloud server system, providing unlimited space has become possible.

  • 99% Uptime guarantee: Web hosting uptime is most important! It is fact that you would like to see your site ever up and visible to the world audience. And it will only be possible if you can arrange a service provider who has technology and back up to keep your site 99% up through out the years. And now every web hosting service provider guarantees the uptime or returns money.

  • Unlimited bandwidth: At the beginning of journey, a site gathers only few visitors. So data transfer or the bandwidth is no matter. But gradually with the increase of the visitors, you will begin to see your site falling prey to bandwidth exceed if given some limited bandwidth. So it is better that you choose a web hosting service provider which is providing unlimited bandwidth.

  • Supports latest web technologies: It is very essential that you have chosen a hosting service provider who is giving you a hosting service that supports al the latest web technologies - CGI-bin, PHP, mySQL, FPage, SSH, RoR, ASP, JSP, PHP, RoR, Fantastico,  etc. Even the control panel has to be latest.

  • Security:  It is very much essential that you go for a web hosting service provider which is providing you secure hosting service. There are some hosts who provide SSL certificates and SSH service to protect your business transaction and even the penetration of the virus or hacking.

  • Customer support: It is not that you go for a web host who is providing several promises to support your account but actually at the days end you find they have vanished. You need to check out how is the record of the support of the host? You can make it confirm through the existing customer testimonials. Otherwise you will find your investment at a loss. Some company even provides free set up.

  • Affordability: Everything – technology, support – is good but how would it be if you can not afford the service? So it is important that you are going for a web hosting service provider who can provide you with affordable hosting service. Sometimes it is found that the initial charge is very low but gradually you are made to pay too much. You can now get some companies providing money back guarantee.

Depending on these above factors we can now have a list of top 10 web hosting companies on whom you can have faith to start your online presence renting web hosting. At the same time you can easily transfer your site to one of these sites.

  1. JUST HOST .COM: This host is providing customers all the hosting facilities. The service is really affordable than all other hosts. Even if you have little desire in your mind to begin a hosting business, you can buy reseller hosting from this service provider. It is emerging Giant.

  2. BLUE HOST: With some thousands of domains and sites hosted, this service provider is said to be one of the major hosting provider. Blue host has all the facilities just little higher in price. You can rely on this provider as like the other satisfied customers.

  3. HOST MONSTER:  It is fact that this hosting service provider is providing all the hosting facilities to lure the customers to their services. What very much fact to this provider is the 24x7 support truly provided to the customers.

  4. FAT COW:  There is nothing in the name! This hosting provider has really made the hosting service little different from others.  This hosting provider provides the customers all the facilities. And even you also get Google custom search and web master tools integrated in your account. It is not a big issue! But see how care the provider takes to make your business successful.

  5. IN MOTION HOSTING:  Just like other service provider this hosting service provider provides you with all other best hosting facilities for sure. More importantly its cheap personal website hosting service is a great solution for anyone to just give a start of a personal web presence. All the packages are designed in such a way that you could hardly resist of being its customer.

  6. I PAGE: There is no doubt that with “I page” you will get all the latest facilities required for the hosting of a website. The service provider will give you one more thing just included with all the packages – security suit! So there will not be any issue regarding buying additional security certificates from other or same service provider.

  7. HOST GATOR: We can call this hosting service provider as one of the emerging player in the hosting game! With all the facilities, this service provider has made it unique with its total support of transferring the hosting from other hosting service provider. There is no issue if you have found yourself in deep sea after investing with other provider.

  8. IX WEB HOSTING: With all other facilities, this web hosting service provider provides you one more special feature – contractual trial option. You can try its hosting service easily just going under a clean term. There will not be any issue if you leave the service being unsatisfied.

  9. GO DADDY:  If you want to get all the services under one roof, this is the service provider you must look for. The packages are cheap and secure. You get the easy option to add the features slowly. But one thing that this service provider is offering, the 4th generation hosting service. They not only declare to provide fast, scalable and secure service, they even challenge you to ask them prove. They are proving it also.

  10. GREEN GEEK: Not just the name – this hosting service provider is providing the customers with true green hosting service. The service is powered by the wind energy. Most importantly they provide cheap service and it is the only company to support several charitable services with donations. Even your little money comes in use for so many people in need. There is no issue of dissatisfaction too!

So these are the top 10 web hosting companies providing hosting to millions of customers. You just need to choose one according to your need. Each one is great in its own position. You can rely on their service. And here we would like to tell you that this review is not a paid service.  We ever try to help our customers with best of services. So it is our initiative to guide you proper way.  You may also visit http://www.onlinewebdirectory.com/web-hosting/ to get information on hundreds of reliable hosting service providers.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Top 10 reasons to use Google analytics for future planning of your online business

Every business aims at better return on investment (ROI) and that is not possible without proper analysis on the initiatives taken or fixed to reach a set target. Well, for offline business you may have different types of analysis process but in case of online business you got use one of the best online analytics tool. And thanks to Google for coming up with a great tool “Google Analytics”. There are lots of benefits if we use Google analytics to plan future steps to improve business. This tool does not only provide extensive report on the traffic to a site, it does report on the events, ecommerce information, status on paid campaign, business target benchmarking and lots of things. More on these is its support, easy access, and right to use it free!

So, when our customers ask Online Web Directory (a renowned web directory for every web design company and all types of businesses) for some suggestion on the improvement of business returns, we do tell them first to use Google analytics for tracking their present and every online business development initiatives. Now you may be thinking otherwise! What could be the best reasons of not using other tools than Google Analytics? Well, here are the possible top 10 reasons to use Google analytics.
  • Report on visitor activity: You need to know the visitor flow to your site. Not just the number of visitors coming to your site, you got to know from which geographic location they are coming, how long they are staying, with what specific terms they are searching and everything! And know these things you have to use Google analytics. It is the best tool of its kind to provide such extensive data. You may even know the IP address of the visitor!
  • Track Ecommerce transactions: Yes, it is possible to track the ecommerce activity of a site! When you use Google analytics, you just put a brief extract of transaction code in the analytics, you just get details on the specific behavior of the customer while trying to purchase products from your site (but it does not track personal information).
  • Benchmarking: Don’t you think that you need to get a comparative business analysis between your business and the competitors? Yes, you need it! Otherwise, how would you understand the progress of your business development process! Use Google analytics to set your business target and compare it with others.
  • Analyze your paid ad campaigns: For the business promotion, online businesses run several paid advertisement campaigns. It is very much essential that you properly analyze how the status of the campaigns is. For example, Google AdWards is one of the most successful pay per click advertisement campaigns. If you use Google analytics, you can easily track how the campaign is running, what steps should be taken to run the process more successfully.
  • Getting analysis on keywords, links: When you use Google analytics, you get complete and extensive analysis on what keywords the visitors are searching your site with, which search engines are used to find your site. Even you come to know what links are present or removed from your site. Through these data you can easily plan or get better concept on restructuring your keywords and link exchange process.
  • Automatic update for bug fixing: No other analytics tool comes with automatic update and bug fixing facility than Google Analytics. There are chances that other tools fall prey to bugs. And to fix the bugs you need to dump the version and get a new updated one. But the moment you use Google analytics, you are free of these headaches as it comes with automatic update to latest versions. So you find the bugs are fixed (if any) automatically.
  • Easy to install and use: If you go by comparison with other tools, you would find that use of Google analytics is very easy. It gets installed fast and smooth way and the use of it also no doubt easy. You will bet comprehensive help in using the tool for your business purposes.
  • Better support available: Sometimes it may be the case that you do not understand some of the analysis or may by chance find that you need some support from the technical team of the tool to use it better. Here you will find that you have taken the right decision to use Google analytics as its support team and the community is always ready to help or provide solution fast! So there is no tension at all.
  • Better assigning privilege: If you use Google analytics you would find that it comes with administrator assigning facility. So you can offer any superior or junior to you the privilege of accessing the tool for analysis and planning. There is hardly any other tool in the market to come these facilities. You may impose various restriction or control on the use.
  • Last but not the least – it is FREE: There are several analytics tool available in the market but most of the useful ones come against subscriptions. And for this very reason, so many businesses cannot use this tool. But every business can use Google analytics for free. So avail the opportunity to use the best tool and plan your business growth from today.
Hope you understand the above points. However, there are several other good reasons to use Google analytics tool. But we think these ten are the top ones. Well, opinions do vary! What is most important for all of is its use in business growth.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

IP location database: How to use for your online business improvement

It is very evident that every business with online presence always likes to make better returns on the investment. But it is not that without proper business strategy the growth will automatically come. While performing various process of business analysis have you ever thought of using IP location database? Yes, this database can come in your use to track and establish some policy of growth. Not only can you find out the flow of visitors in your site, you would be able to prevent the forgery with your business with so many other benefits.

As online web directory is one of the popular directories for web design company and all businesses, sometimes we receive several queries from businesses on the use of IP location database! And we happily answer every query showing potential ways of success in promoting businesses (for example- providing text, banner advertisements at affordable rate on prior pages). However, now see some of the best reasons of using IP database:
  • You can locate your visitors/site traffic: When a website is built, it is very much clear that the site owner will like to know where from the visitors are pouring in! And without the use of IP location database, it is hardly possible to clearly track the visitor destinations. There are various free IP tracker services available but do they guarantee you of proper service? Never, so if you can buy a database, the tracking goes proper.

  • Analyze traffic to make proper strategy: It is very much essential that you analyze the visitor activities in your site. From which location the visitors are coming and what activity they are getting them involved? And to initiate these tactics or policies you need to use IP location database. You would be able to refine or categories the visitors according to your desire and can make plans to work on those geographic locations.

  • Use it to upgrade the user friendliness: With the help of IP location database you may make your site more user-friendly. For example, in functionalities like user registration, automatic selection of countries can be done. Every time the site gets more high-tech with these processes.

  • Prevent the frauds: One of the best advantages of using IP location database is prevention of frauds from using your site. In the case of ecommerce transactions you can track from where a buyer is using your site. In case he or she is having malicious desire, you can easily block the user. Especially in credit card transactions you may help the police or investigators by giving them exact location from where the card thief is using your site.
These are the major benefits of IP location database. Don’t you think employing these steps you can grow your business? Certainly you can! But remember that you have to find out the best seller of the IP database. There are so many vendors who provide database but it is found that either the database API is complicated to use or the process does not show proper location of the IPs. Again you have to take help of your web development company to know if they can integrate your bought database (they may also tell you if the database is proper or not) However, hope you find the best updated (with process of automatic update) IP location database in affordable price and grow your business.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Google web fonts: Will it be a liberty from Times New Roman and Arial

We must thank Google for presenting us with Google web fonts that provide us relief from feeling bore to see the same font style 'Times New Roman', ’Arial’ or the like! Especially when we like to present our online business through a great website, we could desire to get some change in the fonts! But it is not that always we could get this liberty. Web designers prevent us with some specific issues that really hurt our emotions – browser compatibility, handling of multiple font files, costing and many more.

Yes, it is fact that you can ask a web design company to use Google web fonts API to give you the liberty in making your website as far beautiful as you desire. If you do not hire an experienced web designer, he or she may be giving you the following excuses against using Google web fonts. Let us see:
  • Browser quirks: Your designer may tell you that it is always better to use browser safe fonts (Arial / Helvetica / Times New Roman / Courier New / Courier) so that your site goes visible easily from any browser. Using fonts other than these few may incur browser quirk mode in which your original webpage texts will be replaced with browser known fonts. And the beauty of your webpage vanishes! But now you can ask your designers to use Google web fonts that have lots of fonts and will be available all time!

  • Ease of use: It may be the case that you are determined to use your favorite font in the website. That is fine but to keep your site visible in every browser the designers have to use the safe fonts with the particular font of your choice. But if you choose one of the Google web fonts, and then your designer has no headache – only use the API for the Google font and the rest will be easy. The font will be available as Google makes it available for sure. You safe the labor and resource to make these footling things!

  • Minimum knowledge is sufficient: Sometimes for various reasons you may hire a web designer or team with less experience! In those cases you find that they have only the minimum knowledge on the use of "@Font-face" and for that you are getting trouble to put the desired font in your site. They do know how to use the default font setup. But if you ask the designer to use Google web fonts API, they are not going to face any trouble in applying that. You only choose the fonts among lot many available ones through Google web fonts.

  • Cost does not matter: Many a times your designers advise you not to use your own chosen fonts as that may be not available on free of cost! And consequently you have to suppress you desire of using your favorite font! Now there will not be such issues! You have to simply ask your designer to use Google web fonts as those are open source and free! So choosing favorite font has gone far more comfortable - isn't it?
These are only a few good reasons to come forward with desire of making your site beautiful with the use of Google presented web fonts. Google has the same goal- of making the web more beautiful! So without any delay, you have to find a designer or the developer who can simply add the Google web fonts API in your site (it takes just a few lines) and the rest is nothing. If you have any trouble in finding any web design company, you may take the help of any reputed web directory like onlinewebdirectory.com and you get thousands of companies to serve you in your web building initiatives.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Google webmaster tools: How helpful in increasing traffic to your site

Increasing traffic to a site is one of the primary goals of any online business. And the site owners can put anything on stake to achieve the best level of visitor input and business. They are ready to hire SEO experts and the webmaster to maintain the visitor activities in their sites. There are many online software available to help the webmasters track the visitor activities – one is - Google webmaster tools.

Now not going by comparison or discussion of several other tools, we may cite here some of the best reasons to use the webmaster tools to track the increasing traffic. Now let’s see some of reasons:
  • Check the crawl error: With Google webmaster tools the account holder or the webmaster can check if there are some crawl error in a site or not. With this check, the webmasters or the site owner can understand if the site is presented well to the web spider or the search robot. If the site is not properly presented to the search engines, it will detect in the crawler error page. The lesser the number of errors, the better the increasing traffic flow to the website.
  • Presenting site links to the users: A site has to be presented well to the visitors. With Google webmaster tools a webmaster can optimize site links so that important links come in show directly in the SERP. If a user gets, the site links directly then he or she can easily hit the page in look out. It will certainly help increasing traffic to the site.
  • Sitemap issues: Every one of know that sitemaps are very important for every site. It helps the search engine robots to index the site properly and visitors to find the navigation. Now say, a new URL is created then it has to be notified to the search engine! With the Google webmaster tools the robot can be invited to index the new URL in its database. The fast inclusion of the new and important pages will help increasing traffic.
  • URL removal: With the use of Google webmaster tools analysis report, a webmaster or the site owner can find out if the site has some 404 page (page not found)or a web page that has less use to the visitors or not. And with this tool a webmaster can block a page from the view of the visitors in Google results. So isn’t it helpful for increasing traffic to a site with no irritating 404 page for the visitors to see!
  • 301 redirect/change of address: One of the best uses of Google webmaster tools for increasing traffic is re-directing the total visitors to a new domain or site address. Some times existing site address has to be changed or new domain has to be created. In this case there is no losing of existing site traffic, if webmaster uses this Google webmaster tools option to inform Google of the situation.
Hope with the following points you have understood, how with little care and proper use of the Google webmaster tools any webmaster can fruitfully engage time and manpower (SEOs) for increasing traffic. Well, if you have any hesitation in selecting the service providers, you can take the help of a web directory. And more over that, there you would get information of the entire website building matters – information on web design company, web hosting company and everything!

Monday, May 2, 2011

Google Circle: Another rumor or an interesting addition to social networking

It is very interesting to hear about Google Circle recipe! I know you could remember how with the introduction of Facebook, the scenario of social networking got complete revamp! The days of Orkut has almost made to vanish! The efforts of search giant "Google" (for its child – Orkut) has been vanquished by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook (Socail N/W). And another blow was from "Twitter"- the micro blogging site.

Well, we expected a fight back from Google! First it came back with "Google Buzz" (2010)! Google was hoping to use it’s the then 174 million Gmail user strength to include automatically in ‘Buzz’. But alas! Unwanted penetration for sharing the contacts among millions made Google to apologize! Yet, some of Google lovers never lost hope on Google team. We were speculating something new from it. But this time there was no concrete presentation from Google! We came to know that a social networking site is expected to get an entry and it will be named "Google Me". However we are yet to see it. But now to keep the hope living some of pundits have kick-started a new game Google Circle’.

Now let us see how the pundits are luring us to think on the new comer. In other words how the new cup of coffee is fuming on the saucer of expectation about the Google Circle!
  • I am Tim O’Reilly: Yes all the credit should go to pundit O’Reilly and his interesting tweet – "I have seen Google Circles, and it looks awesome". All of us know it takes really seconds to spread the news on twitter just like a bushfire. We began hoping against hope to some break to the speedy run of Facebook. But at last Mr. O’Reilly said that he meant to talk about a new research work undergoing in the kitchen of Google R&D department.

  • Beluga coming back: Long back, some googlers were researching on sending message to specific group with desired filter and something like that. However, the project was dismissed due to some unknown reasons. Now some people like to think that Google Circle will be a new social networking site that is coming with several features like picture, video sharing and status update but with great privacy. But the notion or flavor of sending the group messaging of Beluga will be present.

  • Buzz on SXSW in Austin: Yes there was some buzz in the SXSW event 2011 that Google is going to announce its new social networking site Google Circle! And every one of us was waiting for it eagerly. But nothing came out. When Mr. Chris Messina was being contact to confirm on the matter, he said – "didn’t know what was talking about". I would like to remind you that it is Mr. Messina who wore a T-shirt on which there was a line ‘I am feeling social’. As a part of Google social media team, what was written on his T-shirt gave a blow of oxygen to the deem fire (about the rise of Google Circle) inside the hay!

  • Officially it’s a big NO: We may be indulged in the name and game of a new social networking site from the kitchen of Google – Google+1, Google Me, Google Circle (some even like to term it Emerald Sea)! But the fact is very simple – officially there is still no announcement on the project like this. There is no issue in assuming the rise of a new social networking site or an add-on feature on the existing Orkut. Let there be sharing of news to a group or circle sorted out on relevance and it be named as Google Circle. But no announcement yet.
So hopefully you have understood what the fact is. The whole world knows that Google is not going to stay aloof from the competition of establishing its foot mark in the field of social networking. There will be something like Google Circle for sure.

For more webmaster & SEO related information visit onlinewebdirectory.com which is one of the leading web directories for web design, graphic design and seo companies.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Top 10 web design software

Whether the layout design is a pretty simple one or something out of the box, it is always the magic of web design software that help to produce the stunning results! However, as a web design and web development company we may not care about the top 10 web design software - we use so many of those at the time of designing. Hardly there is any doubt about that! However sometimes, our inquisitive minds (may be as clients or the designers) do want to know what are the best web design software?

Now let us see the top 10 web design software that comes in different web design purposes. We will simple have an overview on those with little mention on how they work:

  1. Photoshop: It is a very highly accomplished graphics editor for web designing purposes. Any designer can use this application for manipulating images and creating web graphics in his or her own way. Photoshop offers various tools and options though which automatically design effects to images can be given. Various automations with brushes or the workflow enhancement with Layer Comps can be done. And there are so many other features in Photoshop that help in building the first block of a web page - PSD design.

  2. Dreamweaver: It is one of the most featured-packed software. It comes with various tools and that helps in syntax highlighting, code hinting, project and workflow management options to make team work easy and fruitful. It comes with a built-in FTP client and Live View of the work and source code. Dreamweaver very easily works with other popular software like Photoshop. And for this particular feature sharing smart objects, easy updating and editing of graphical components have gone mush easier.

  3. Fireworks: It is one of the most useful raster and vector graphics editors. Fireworks bring you a too many tools and options that make full web layout prototyping a class to admire. It carries various features, for example, slicing and dicing a design mockup into HTML/CSS can be done amazingly fast. With is software any designer can turn a layout into a PDF with clickable components for interactive and impressive attitude. Similarly a designer can optimize web graphics very lightweight. It is a true magic software to use for the web design purposes!

  4. Kuler: If you want to choose, create, modify, mix and match colors to your heart’s content, Kuler is what you should use. It is the best media to create color swatches, complete with RGB and HEX codes. Using Kuler you can even extract color palettes from illustrations and photographs. It is the best ploy for the designer in color related issues.

  5. Pixlr: If you are looking for really worth using and free image editor you should take the help of Pixlr! The greatest advantage of this editor is its availability in 13 languages. It provides a great alternative to Photoshop. But it does not mean that you will not get the same level of functionality or performance; rather it is little bit cooler to use in designing.  Whether it is the matter of handling layers or array of filters and effects, Pixlr is superb in its performance and output.

  6. Pingdom: It is a full page test software that designer use to find if the web pages are loading in a browser properly with each images, CSS, JavaScript, Flash and frames. The load time of each object is shown with easy visual comparison. You can also order each object into a hierarchy to identify if there are any problem areas or not. Designers like this software to find out if their design efforts 100% perfect or not.

  7. Panic Coda: When a designing team is working on Mac OS X operating system Panic coda is best software to handle the team work. It can reduce or distribute the amount of applications separately (CSS editor, and other tools) designers need to work in a team. With a tabbed interface text editing, file transfers, CSS editing can be separately by individual members yet, monitored by all.

  8. Yuuguu: If you are looking for a multi-platform screen-sharing tool to know how the complete design team is working on a design projects, you have to take the help of this software. Instructing the team members on any issue on the mistakes with an instant messaging was never so easy! Even sharing each others’ screens is possible to keep the project on track to complete perfectly on time. So designers never mind to use this software that ultimately pushes the work process fast and perfect.

  9. BEEdit: It is a HTML and text editor for the Macintosh platform. The moment designers need high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text, they go for it. Its intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit's features like grep pattern matching, search and replacement across multiple design files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding. It has a complete set of robust HTML tools for the designers.

  10. Scite: Another text editing software that designers sometimes find useful is this one. It is a very lightweight program to use in any design situation. When a designer is working with so much heavy software and may come to situations of system collapse or something like that, Scite can be run and removed after text editing work is done.

The above are the top 10 web design software of the present time used mostly by the designers for producing and completing any design project. The software list you find is completely a tentative one, you may find other people showing you the different list of top 10 web design software.

Whatever the case is, if you have a business and want to design a website, you need to find out if the web design and web development company has the expertise in using above software for your project. Ultimately you are looking for best design right? On the other hand, if you are designer, remember these are the software your clients may ask you about. Know how to use these and remain always ready for any project!

The top 10 web design mistakes - You should avoid for better return against your investment in website building

We all aspire that our websites will return us maximum business against the investment done on those. But it does not mean that we think twice on pouring some extra money to improve the return? No, we are ready to go almost all extends to make it attractive to the user eyes and easy to access.

However we find that our initiates fail! Again in most of the cases we go on pouring money, yet the intended result is not found. Now what are the reasons of this type of problems? There may be many a reason for these failures. But the most effective is the design issue!

We all know that design is the first thing to attract the users to a site. Depending on the success of the design, the other parts can work for sure. Whether it is your ecommerce site to showcase and sell the products or a site through which you provide various services, the design has to leave a mark in the mind of the users.

Anyways, plainly speaking, if you can avoid some great mistakes done at the time of designing the templates or the layouts of the websites, you will save money, time and see your websites going more productive.

Let us now see the top 10 web design mistakes that may pull your initiative to sea:

  1. Browser compatibility: The first and vital mistake that may have a deep impact is the compatibility of the design in several browsers. It is found that either for the lack of experience of the designers or for your hurry the designs are not made compatible to all the popular browsers. Mainly the “Internet Explorer”, one of the most used browsers, creates design break issues. So whatever hurry you are having, do not forget to make design of a webpage browser compatible. Otherwise, users will have a bad impression for your website; being irritated, they may not return again.

  2. Splash page: Try to avoid in having a splash page (introductory page) for your website. Remember whatever beautiful the ‘intro’ is, those take time and visitors have less time in their hands (just 30 seconds in general). They may not push the “skip” button and enter your site to see more relevant information! So concentrate or let the designers put effort on the design of the home page.

  3. The color: In whatever structure a webpage is designed, it has to have the sober color in use. Otherwise, the highly glossy or the gloomy colors may irritate the viewers. Do not try to force your personal taste of colors on the site; better try to go by the purpose of the site. In other words, there are some specific match of colors according to the convention of the designs; say the ‘sky blue’ for corporate, ‘red’ for medical purposes, the multi colors for fashion business etc. The color depth and glossiness should not poke eyes.

  4. Animations and JavaScripts: For making a site interactive designers tend to use the animations. The animations may be of Flash, javascripts, 3D and etc. But remember these the excess use of things should not become bar against the overall performance of the site. Many a times JavaScripts are blocked by several browsers while flash players may not be present in user’s machines; even larger 3D and Flash files take time to load and users see the blank pages! These create bad impression in visitors mind.

  5. Missing contact info & irritating forms: It is very much necessary that the websites prominently put the contact information in proper places. The visitors do not have so much time to find out the contact info; rather they should find it prominent in front of their eyes. Whereas sometimes the contact forms are long and do not work properly and users feel bored to fill them up. So it is necessary that you check out that the contact information is well displayed and several forms are well designed and not long for sure.

  6. Irritating Advertisements: It is evident that the advertisements are needed for sure in a webpage. They bring revenue for the owners of the sites. But does it mean that ads have to irritate the viewers with their wrong placements? Sometimes in the layout structures the ads are misplaced among the valuable information or they are paneled in a way that viewers feel irritated. So try to instruct the designers or understand that proper placements of the ads and relevancy with the page information are a must.

  7. Navigation and link: It is more than necessary that the page navigation menus are nicely designed and the links are properly clear to the visitors. Many a time it is found that designers forget to design the navigation menus properly or use the lengthy dropdowns. On the other hand, the links are designed as images (not texts) which create problem for search robots in crawling your links. Even when there are some links in the body texts the colors of those does not change on clicking for helping the visitors understand the visited links. These mistakes somehow may mislead the visitors. Try to avoid these.

  8. Frames and scrollers and fixed width: Sometimes just for the enhancements of the design the frames are used or for fixed width horizontal scroll bar appear on the user machines. Do you think the users have time to scroll horizontally to know your hidden information? No, many a time they avoid these things. So try to convert your fixed width layouts into liquid layouts (100% to fit all the windows) and do not use frames.

  9. Fonts and text format: Most of the times it is found that the designers do care to use light weight images and graphics but do not care the font size, type and text formats. Due to fixed font size or type the viewers feel uneasy to read the information. At the same time there should not be the use of any font family that is not commonly available in user computers. Tyr to always keep the Ariel, Verdana, Tahoma as default. Again you should look into the paragraph format of the texts. The text should not be in long paragraphs. The bulleted texts and small paragraphs help users understand your business motto.

  10. Pop-ups and new windows: Last but not the least is the unnecessary use of the pop-up and opening of the new windows for explanation purposes. Generally in many cases the pop-ups are blocked in user machines and when users are provided with new windows, they either tend to see those or forget coming to the main pages. So your designs have to use “page refresh” on the same window the users have landed.


However these are the 10 design mistakes that designers many a time happen to perform while they are in hurry to meet the deadlines. If you follow the above points, you will notice that these can be easily be avoided. Actually these may be out of lack in professional attitude of the designers or the companies. Always remember that you have to choose a web design company which is grown to avoid these issues neatly to provide you error free and best design layouts. Same applies in the case of a freelance designer. If you can do so, you will save money and time and you will find that your website is keeping mark in the viewers' mind! Three cheers to your success!

Friday, April 1, 2011

Google farmer update - is there anything to worry about

There is nothing to worry about the Google farmer update (some say Panda update) for the SEOs and the website owners who never think to utilize the content (huge volume but low quality or stuffed texts with keywords) of their sites maliciously to get better SERP and page rank. Google has been trying ever to keep its database free of content those are worthless against human legibility and understanding. And this time with Google farmer update it has applied strong filtration by updating the search algorithm. Till date the process has been applied to index of Google.us and it is supposed to be applied to the complete search indices world-wide.

However, let us now see what has happened and what will be the consequences in the search results and the page rank in short:
  • After the Google farmer update the search giant has implemented a filtration to find if the huge volume of content in a site is of poor quality (without valuable information). How far relevancy the texts are having and if there is any repetition of same content or the sentence, phrase to lengthen the volume of the text or there are several copied text in any web page.
  • It has been made sure that the text content is with rich links both inbound and outbound. Google farmer update heavily prioritized the relevancy of links and the web pages with more valid links are given better page rank and SERP. But the content (and the domains) with irrelevant links are scheduled to go to the purgatory – sandbox.
  • The Google farmer update has started a process of checking if the web pages are attempted to be prepared with equal density for all keywords mentioned in the title and meta key words. It is obvious that this type of usage of keywords make the content stuffed unnecessarily. Now onwards there will be greater filtration on these issues.
  • With the implementation of the Google farmer update the process of screening the web pages with higher ratio of ads against the information. It is found that websites are stuffed with advertisements against giving the proper information to the users. This is only done to earn revenue through advertisements. And it is fact that to get advertisement the sites try black-hat process to get visible in SERP.
  • Last but not the least is the priority of visitor acceptability of the site content depending on the analytic reports. Google farmer update has started strictly analyzing how the users are taking the web pages of the sites. Are the visitors staying on pages that are made to deliver information on the business of the sites? On the other hand, if the visitors are trying to “contact us” or “request a quote” on the basis of the reputation of the site? How is the continuous bounce rate of the sites? These things are analyzed to know the visitor preference of the site and depending on these factors; the sites are getting better SERP or page rank.

Hope with the above points you have understood how is going to be the future Google search indices after Google farmer update comes to effect for preventing the search engine optimizers and the website owners who are looking to make the web pages worthless to read by the human beings. We should cheer up the Google Inc. for taking one of the major step in making the website really for the information spreading. Let each and every entity related to website building (web design company, SEO company and others) understand that websites should be built with the primary goal of making business with proper information, not for getting fast higher page rank or SERP. Finally let’s wait for Google farmer update to be applied in the whole indices of Google.