Future Searches

Why Focus on Website Design over Social Media Marketing?

While social media marketing has become overly popular, this is no reason to neglect your own website design. Your website can be much more than just a location to find out about your business, it should be the place to do business. Online marketing brings them to your website, and your site is the place where they do business. You see this with online shopping, but that is not the limit of web-based applications. Facebook is doing a lot behind the scenes. It is collecting a lot of data and it will make a lot of money because of the huge user database. Your online banking is actually an online application at work with you everyday.

Sharing and security

Client-server systems are popular because they focus your data in a single location, and therefore, keeping it more secure. With a well-developed site, you are providing a web-based client-server solution to your staff, your customers and your suppliers. Your site is more than marketing; it is a safe solution for your business interaction.

The Risk of Over-Advertising

The idea of monetizing a website appeals to most web builders, bloggers, and business owners. From conception to launch plans are made on how to profit from the hard work and valuable content placed upon the pages. However many make the fatal mistake of over-advertising on their site. This is one of the common causes for websites to go under. The risk of over-advertising is much greater than the benefits of multiple affiliate links and banners. Here are a few reasons why you should consider moderate advertising.

It’s all about the fans
There is a reason you are prepared to monetize your site. You have noticed the increase in traffic and an ever growing fan base. Littering your page with flashing ads from various and irrelevant affiliates will only drive away traffic rather than keeping them on your site. Choosing your advertising carefully will allow you to hand tailor your affiliates for the traffic and niche that made your site popular. Sometimes less is more and this goes for advertising as well. Keeping moderate and well placed ads can help keep your visitors interested in your sites content while still offering the products or services you want.

Web Page Design: Some Guidelines to Help Reduce the Loading Time

Modern day users want everything at a very fast speed and therefore it’s quite obvious that they will not like to wait for a website to load for long. If your website takes too long to download, chances are high that your viewers will not test their patience but move away to another website. Hence it is important that you development the website in such a manner that it exhibits an improve speed limit that is not only compatible to viewers but also suited with the search engine rankings. Let’s discuss here about some effective tips to follow that will help reduce the loading time of a website design:

To enjoy better downloading speed, it is important that you know the appropriate file formats to use, especially in images. Many a times it is seen that picking the right file format determines the speed of a website largely. While GIF is the best option for colored images to be used in logos, PNG is good for transparent quality image and JPEG is the ultimate choice for colored pictures with proper detailing.

Joomla 1.6.0 Released

It’s been a long wait and finally Joomla has released version 1.6.0! Thanks to everyone who contributed, new version delivers many new features pleasing the site users and administrators like nested categories, ACL, improved language support & SEO, built-in redirects, template styles, & much more.  From my point of view, the most important improvement is the nested categories feature which means there is no more need to use 3rd party components to create a tree category structure.

Joomla created a launch page for the new version and decided giving the new improvements under 4 categories. Here is the official Joomla 1.6.0 features:

Designer Features

• Core layout files are tableless: New for Joomla! 1.6, all core output files are written in XHTML 1.0 Strict. HTML 5 is also supported in Joomla! 1.6.
• New core templates: Joomla! 1.6 ships with new core templates. On the administrator side, Bluestork is the default template, and Hathor is a fully accessible template to support those with various types of disabilities. On the site side, Joomla! 1.6 ships with Atomic and Beez2 (yes, the bees are gone!), plus the legacy Milkyway template.

Yahoo Image Search Filter

This week, Yahoo has announced a very helpful image search filter called Creative Commons license filter.
Users are able to filter their image search results from Flickr according to availability for reuse commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.
Yahoo is the first image search engine to offer this capability. Let’s wait and see what Google will do about it

Alt vs Title for SEO

I am always confused on whether to use <alt> attribute or <title> tag when adding images to my content. I made a research on this issue and here is what I come up with at the end.

Effects of <alt> attribute for SEO

The main purpose of using <alt> is making your content accessible. It enhance your website’s accessibility such as if some one is using a screen reader, can’t load the image for some reason, the browser will show the alternative text giving them a better user experience. The more accessible a website is the more likely it will rank in SERP’s. Using <alt> attribute for images will help search engines to understand what your images are all about and rank your images in the image search result pages such  as Google image and blended search result pages. It is said that Google even use alt attributes as descriptions of images in Google Image so this is a proof <alt> attribute’s success at Google’s end.

Using <alt> tag is simple. Normally, when you add the above image  in to your content, the HTML code looks like this:

<img  src=”http://www.futuresearches.com/wp-content/uploads/SEO.jpg”>

How to Make a Favicon

Favicons are small images shown next to your website’s URL in the address bar of your browser. They not only make URLs  look nice but also increase brand awareness for users. When a user add a website to his favorites, websites with favicons will stand out amongst others which would improve your number of visitors.

How can you make a favicon in Photoshop?

You will make an .ico image with 16 pixels by 16 pixels. First of all, you need to download the ICO plugin for Adobe Photoshop. You can download it from Telegraphics website. When the installation finishes, execute the zip file in to the photoshop/plugins.fileformat folder in your computer.

Open photoshop and select File>New and make a new file with 64 x 64 dimentions. Remember it is best to work with multiples of 16. We will resize our image once it is finished. Create your favicon image as you like. Go to Image>Image Size and change image dimentions to 16 x 16. After  resizing the image, go to File> Save As and save the file as favicon.ico