New CMS System - July 31st, 2006

Here at Just Search, we have recently developed upon OsCommerce’s ecommerce platform to create a search engine friendly shopping cart website. An example of the site can been seen at the following url:http://www.justdesigning.co.uk/osc-test-cart/

Neil wrote in yesterday’s blog on our sister website, JustSearching.co.uk, the benefits of our website template, which features all the usual tools contained within OsCommerce, but has the added benefit of being very search engine friendly. If you would like to find out more about the price involved in setting up a shopping cart website for your own website, please give us a call on 0845 121 1194

Ben Ashton

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To all you print designers - July 7th, 2006

When designing websites, especially ones that use natural text (when designing SEO friendly websites you should always use natural text) make sure you follow a few guidelines.

• Make sure that any fonts you use throughout the site are generic ones (you can get away with logos etc), such as Arial, Verdana, Times etc or as soon as you hand your design masterpiece over to a web designer they might throw it back and make you do it all over again using web friendly fonts. You dont want this!

• Try and keep the layout quite straight forward to a degree, especially if your website relies on a database for it’s information. Otherwise you will find issues will occur with text stretching things that shouldnt be stretched or overlapping onto other objects.

• Design any boxes, borders or backgrounds to be repeatable. When using css to keep loading times down and make the site generally more compliant with web standards, the trick is to take small areas of the site layout and repeat them. Say for instance a border runs from the top of the site to the bottom, a slice would be taken in Fireworks (or some other web graphics package) the full width of the border but only 1 pixel in hieght. The css would repeat the 1 pixel image over and over again for a specified distance. Therefore the browser only has to download a tiny image once, rather than loads of different sized images of the same border. This is useful if you are surrounding a box full of dynamic text with a drop shadow for instance and need it to change size depending on the amount of content.

• If your client is relying on good Search Engine positioning, make your design as text heavy as possible. Put it all in there at the start of your design process and work from that. The more text, the more information there is for a spider to read.
A worthy thing to remember - steer clear of javascript based drop down menus. Unless your web programmer is very clever, you will run the risk of a spider not being able to follow the links embedded in the script to the rest of your website. A bad thing.

There are millions of other things to take into consideration when designing a website, these are just a few.

Tom Tong
Designer / Developer
Just Designing

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