Tag Archives ⇒ web

Visual Design – Layout

· Brandon Hann

A crucial design element of your website is the layout. Believe it or not, there are phycological studies on the layouts of other media such as magazines and newspapers. Small, but important details including where certain text is, how big the titles of pages are and what colors are used are all attributed to the success or failure of a website.

The best way to get ideas for your own site’s layout is to look at other related websites that contain similar content and see what it is that you like and don’t like about it. What I do is look at a site for a few minutes, close my eyes and then try to remember the things that stood out.

Choosing the right layout

As you scour around the Internet, you may notice design patterns spanned over the various websites you see. You might have noticed that most news sites tend to favor white backgrounds with black text. You’ll notice media sites like YouTube and Hulu that design the rest of the site around their video players.

The point of any layout is to draw attention to a specific area of a page to generate the most focus on that spot. This will ensure that if you’re blogging, your content is being read or if you’re showing videos, that your videos are being watched.

Just take a look at my site. You can see how things are organized within a matter of seconds. Every page conforms to the same layout in general and this was done to keep everything looking clean as well as to allow the content to flow. When you create your own site, you want to make sure that the design flows and matches, but not to mix everything together. This can confuse your visitors and will probably make them leave your site.

Themes and templates

Both of these are generally the same. The difference is how they’re applied. A template is a set of pre-built files that make up a website that allows you to fill in or change information to correspond to your own needs. A theme does the same purpose, but it’s applied to a pre-built structure. The main difference between themes and templates is that you can change the theme of an entire website without affecting too much of the content. A template needs to be re-edited if it’s changed.

If you’re running a blog site, using is theme is the only way to go. This is because WordPress is a full software package all rolled into one that allows you to apply different color and layout themes as needed.

Here are a couple of place to look for great themes and templates:

  • TemplateMonster – This site has thousands and thousands of web templates and they even have themes for content management systems like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. Their prices range from about $20 to $150.
  • WooThemes – WooThemes makes themes specifically for WordPress, ExpressionImage, Drupal and Tumblr. They have some free themes, but the paid ones seem to be of much higher quality and generally have more features.
  • StudioPress – If you want to up the ante (and the price) on quality WordPress themes, you need to go here! In fact, if you want to see a sample of one of the themes they offer, you can look at my other website.
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Site Creation – Memberships

· Brandon Hann

You’ve seen them before–store memberships, clubs and mailing lists. It seems like you can’t go anywhere these days without being offered to sign up for this or sign up for that. As much as this might be irritating to you, don’t take it personally. These businesses are not out to steal your information or upset you in any way. They’re practicing a great business technique that really works!

Offer member incentives


When you run a business, especially one online, you have a unique opportunity to increase customer retention when you offer your them the ability to become members of your website or blog. They not only feel like they belong, but you are able to offer them the latest news, product updates, special discounts and everything in-between. As an example, on my site, you can sign up to the newsletter that I offer. This allows me to communicate just about anything I think you’d be interested in later on down the road.

The reason this is so important is that you may not come back to my site for a long time because you’re not a regular reader, but if you get updates through email, you’re not going to miss anything. Plus, I can offer you the latest tools right when I find out about them.

If you run an ecommerce site, you really want people to become members of your store because you’re inventory is most likely always changing, so it’s even more important for you to get those updates out. This will increase sales and make the customer feel more important. Offer people discounts, free stuff, special “members-only” items, etc. and you’ll win a customer for life!

Managing members

Every site structure is different, so managing your members can be everything from easy to difficult. What you don’t want to do is mis-manage them. This is especially true of email subscribers. You never want to given the impression that you send spam email. You also don’t want to have a huge list of members only to sit on it and not do anything for them.

Staying connected means sending out information, promotions and updates regularly. You’ll need to cater specific needs to your members based completely on the industry that your business is focused in. For example, if you’re in the clothing business, you’ll want to make sure that your updates and promotions are geared around style trends and seasons. You can offer great deals on summer clothing in the winter and vice versa.

Notes

I use a company called Aweber to manage all of my newsletters and mailing lists. Not only do they manage all of your members, but you can create any type of marketing materials you want! You can also setup automatic messaging to send out emails whenever you choose.

Do not waste any more time on this topic! You need to start turning your customers and web traffic into members of your business today!

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No more Google in China

· Brandon Hann

I must say that I think this is great. To clarify, I think the business end of it sure looks grim, but what did China expect after forcing Google to censor it’s web search? For those of you that aren’t aware, China censors the country’s Internet access to block all “offending” subjects from entering their citizen’s computers. What the exact definition of “offending” may be is anyone’s guess, but all the standards are sure to apply.

All this is controlled by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and in total, there are over 60 regulations just on the Internet, which not only includes content blocking, but also the monitoring of Internet usage directly into people’s homes. This is all accomplished by enforcing these regulations at the state-owned ISP level. According to Wikipedia, in December of 1997, these regulations were entered into law:

No unit or individual may use the Internet to create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit the following kinds of information:

  1. Inciting to resist or breaking the Constitution or laws or the implementation of administrative regulations;
  2. Inciting to overthrow the government or the socialist system;
  3. Inciting division of the country, harming national unification;
  4. Inciting hatred or discrimination among nationalities or harming the unity of the nationalities;
  5. Making falsehoods or distorting the truth, spreading rumors, destroying the order of society;
  6. Promoting feudal superstitions, sexually suggestive material, gambling, violence, murder;
  7. Terrorism or inciting others to criminal activity; openly insulting other people or distorting the truth to slander people;
  8. Injuring the reputation of state organs;
  9. Other activities against the Constitution, laws or administrative regulations.

Of course, nobody really wants to promote that kind of stuff, but the idea of a government controlling this content is disturbing to say the least. Imagine how many doors this can open (or close for that matter). It is said that China has the strictest laws about what kind of content can be seen in its country and because of this, they also have the largest number of journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world!

Google says, “no way”.

Google’s position stems from their will to keep the Internet free of censorship and to provide a freedom of self-expression and free speech environment for the whole world to enjoy. And frankly, they do a damn good job of it. At this time, it’s not completely official, but the plan is to be out of China by April 10th. Currently, Google is operating under the Google.cn domain name with censored search results and if the site does go dark, it may still be possible for Chinese web surfers to access Google through our Google.com domain–that is of course if the PRC doesn’t block all of Google entirely.

This is what the homepage of Google.cn appears like today:

Google.cn homepage on April 11th,

Let’s just hope this whole thing isn’t powerful enough to complete sever ties between our two countries.

::UPDATE:: Google.cn is now forwarding traffic to Google.com.hk (the Hong Kong Google) which was supposed to allow Chinese surfers to view uncensored search results, but it looks like it’s backfiring on them because China is till censoring Internet traffic at higher levels. I have a feeling this virtual war is going to be bad.