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Is the content of your website as good and unique as its design?

We pay extra attention to the design of a website. Every detail in its design is checked for functionality. But what about its content?

Believe me, many times I have come across websites that are designed with great detail and features, but hold little value when it comes to their content. Content holds the same value as the design of a website.

Good content is equally important and essential for the success of a website, as a good design is. You might have a web 2.0 website, with cool AJAX features, but if it has content that cannot hold the attention of a visitor, the very purpose of having a valuable website gets diminished.

Many times webmasters flinch when it comes to writing content for their website. They tend to give content the last priority. They do not put its value at par with the design of the website. In reality, content should be ready even before the design of a website begins or it can be written as the design progresses.

If you understand the value of content for your website, you should create it professionally. Pay special attention to grammar and formation of sentences. Do not blindly go after Search Engine Optimization. Your real readers are humans, not machines. Make sure the keywords you target to drive traffic from search engines towards your website, blend with the content, to hold a visitor’s interest.

Having unique content also counts. But to create unique content, passing stuff through the service of Copyscape is not enough. I have never relied on the service of Copyscape for writing original content. I am not disputing its quality. Being a piece of software, it is quite possible for it to report the original content you created, as published on some other website.

Rather, always rely on your strength to write, read and understand words from different perspectives. Have it read by a few other people for views or mistakes that might escape your eyes.

If you are not good with words, have the content outsourced and try to pay the right amount to get the right quality, instead of getting inferior content to save some money. When you hire someone to write content, make sure he or she gets ample time and flexibility to think creatively and come up with the best original content for your website. Do not give unreasonable deadlines just because you were late in getting it ready for the website. Ask for a sample before choosing the content writer. Give instructions clearly about what you want and how you want it written. If a content writer makes a suggestion consider it carefully. It might be good.

So the next time you develop a website or get it designed, keep the value of having good content in mind.

Remember, poor content hurts a website more than anything, as does a poor design.

Signing off, for now… Ap Singh.

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Website Design and Cross Browser compatibility

How many times you have finished designing a website only to find that its not compatible with a certain browser?

If you face the same situation time and again, then you can make sure that your website is compatible across all major browsers by following simple design rules.

Though there is nothing like testing your design in each major browser after making changes to it, but it is a time consuming approach.

My approach is to design the website or web application testing it only in one browser, Firefox. Not only it helps me in cutting down the time to reach the final stage, but it also helps me in concentrating on the code and design of the project.

Later, when there is not much left to be done with the design of the website, I test the code and design in different browsers. For me Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Mozilla 1.0 cover the entire spectrum.

Taming IE is the hardest. Sometimes columns will just vanish or edges will bleed out to push the side columns down towards the bottom. Then there are times when spacing between elements is not correctly displayed.

Mostly the culprit is the margin or border property in the CSS. Try reducing the margin or doing away with the border altogether to sort out the problem in a phased manner.

If you use ‘em’ instead of ‘px’ as units to define width and height of elements, specially ‘div’ elements, then try to keep enough cushion around them by making the content enclosed, compact and padded.

You can never reach 100% cross browser compatibility, especially if your design is fluid in nature. Satisfying each browser completely is not possible, but whats possible is, that your design should not be rigid. It should be flexible in nature so that a few changes that show in one browser do not alter its appearance completely in another.

With Opera 9.X, Firefox 3.X and IE 7 showing greater compliance towards each other, they all  should make it a point to reach a consensus on the CSS rules, that effect the design of a website or web application.

Until then its just hacking and testing of web design to reach cross browser compatibility.

Signing off, for now… Ap Singh.

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Website Update

This is a major overhaul of the website, which had been quite static for a while. I have made it more interactive by turning it into a Blog. The theme has been updated with refreshing new colors. For a user friendly experience, additional navigation links have been placed and pages have been redesigned.

Hope those who visit the site, do enjoy their stay and find information worth reading.

Signing off, for now… Ap Singh.