Website Development

Mar 12
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A t-shirt company raising money for cancer

Posted by | Ecommerce, Events, Website Development | No Comments

My name is Sean Hurley, I am an Online Marketing Professional living in Toronto Ontario. I started Dynamic Clothing a few years back (didn’t take off as well as I thought), and still have a good amount of inventory left over. I’m currently participating in the Ontario Ride to Conquer Cancer, and need to raise $2,500 to A t shirt company raising money for cancerbe eligible to take part in the ride. To help me reach my fund-raising goal, I’ve decided to use the remainder of my inventory as a way to raise funds. All sales made on dyanmicclothing.ca will be donated to my ride (except the shipping costs), and I will continue to donate until I reach my goal.

About the Cause

Since 2008, The Ride has surpassed all other cycling events to become Canada’s most successful cycling fundraiser. Raising over $60 million in Toronto alone, Ride funds support the work of The Campbell Family Cancer Research Institute at The Princess Margaret, one of the top 5 cancer research centres in the world.

Thanks to The Ride, funding ensures the sustainability of the most promising cancer research that is taking place at The Princess Margaret. Your support of The Enbridge Ride to Conquer Cancer also impacts hundreds of thousands, as The Princess Margaret is affiliated with and shares its expertise with other cancer centres across Canada and around the world. The Princess Margaret’s vision is to CONQUER CANCER IN OUR LIFETIME.

 

Dec 16
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How fast is your website?

Posted by | User Experience, Website Development | No Comments

How quickly does your website load? Are you running a website that has a lot of images or a lot of javascript? If you notice your website taking longer than 5 seconds to load,  you might want to consider looking into alternative solutions to improve site speed. You may not think it’s an import feature of your website, but if you were to poll all new website visitors, you would find they tend to disagree. Waiting for a website to load is one of my biggest frustrations, and with just a little optimization your website can be drastically improved.

If you are not sure how quickly your website loads, or you would like to learn how to test this before outsourcing your project to a website designer/developer, try using Pingdom. Pingdom is a great solution to either doing a one-time test of your websites performance, or to continually run site monitoring. Take a few minutes and test your website using their “Site performance” tool, and you will know within a few minutes if your website is loading at a reasonable rate or not.

Always keep these type of performance metrics top of mind, because all it takes is one bad experience on your website for someone not to come back.

Dec 13
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Is your site designed for the right browser?

Posted by | Web Design, Website Development | No Comments

Now that there are a handful of really great web browsers in the market, we need to be more aware as site owners and website designers that a website is not complete until we have done extensive cross-browser testing. How should you start? Simple, open your website in all of the major browsers; Chrome, IE (IE 6 too!), FireFox, Safari, and Opera. Now that you have your website open, look for things like correct fonts, page alignment, image breaks (some browsers do not handle .png files correctly), and just an overall layout preview. If you see that your website looks the same across all browsers, you are ready to launch!

If not, make sure your website designer has this task on their todo list before launching, and also double check that they have done it correctly in the past for other clients. Depending on how your website is designed, you will likely not run into any issues. However, if you are doing some complex CSS styling you might notice errors in IE, and Opera.

The cost to design for cross browsers “should” be relatively cheap, but if they are not you can always go back to your Google Analytics and find out which browsers are the most popular when viewing your website. Just like when you are deciding if you need to design for mobile browsing, or if you need to translate your website, Google Analytics is a great tool to help you answer these questions.

Before you contact someone to help you develop cross browser design, do some of your own research ahead of time, so you know what you need and how much business you are losing due to poor brand experience.

Dec 05
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When should I translate my website?

Posted by | Website Development | No Comments

This has been a question on my mind for quiet some time, and I’ve been asked more and more from my clients, if its time to translate their website. Again, Google Analytics enables website owners to identify if they need to translate their content, before the need to speak with a freelance consultant. If you go to your Google Analytics account, click “view report” > “visitors” > and “Languages“, you will see the break down of languages coming to your website. To better understand who is sending these other languages to your site, use the first column, and select “source” from the drop down menu. Now you will see which sites are sending traffic, and which are sending traffic from languages that your website doesn’t support.

As mentioned in my other post regarding “When to make your website mobile“, if you see numbers like 15, 20, and 25% of your site traffic coming from languages you do not currently support, then it might be time to invest in translations. The second question you will ask yourself is, do I need to translate all of my content? If you have not already done your research, you will soon find out that getting your website properly translated can be pretty expensive. What you can do, is look at all of your website traffic coming from a specific language, and then look at the top pages of content to be translated. This will do two things for you; 1. it will save you money, and 2. you can add a clear call-to-action to those pages to see if those languages are interested in your services.

If you would rather save all together, but also offer your website in different languages, you can include Googles Translation Toolkit on your website which allows visitors to translate individual pages or your entire site.

Dec 01
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Should I have a mobile site?

Posted by | Uncategorized, Web Design, Website Development | No Comments

If you had asked me a few years ago if I thought having a mobile site was important, I would have replied “no”. After the release of smartphones, we had to change the way we were designing websites both in content and graphic weight. If you had a website that was too image heavy, or wasn’t coded to be viewed properly on a mobile phone, you would quickly see how horribly it resolved on your phone.

How do I know if my website is mobile ready? An easy, yet not 100% garnered way to determine if your website is mobile ready, would be to open the site on a smartphone, and if it loads quickly without wreaking the layout, then there is a good chance it’s made for mobile viewing. The best way to find this out would be to locate the mobile.css file on your web-serve, and ensure that it’s coded correctly.

If you’re still on the fence about whether or not to hire someone to style your website, do yourself a favor and pay close attention to your website analytics. Most website owners use the free service Google Analytics to see how much traffic is really coming from mobile browsing. If you are seeing an increase month over month, it’s a good indicator that your demographic is starting to use smartphones to browse your website. Most people ask me, what per cent of site traffic should mobile browsing be before I move forward? There are a few ways to answer this question: 1. If you’re  seeing around 20% of total site traffic using a mobile phone, and 2. I respond with another question, “Should you really wait until it’s too late?” Is the cost of hiring someone to convert your site more or less expensive than someone having a bad experience with your brand?

If you need help determining if your website is mobile ready, or if you would like to better understand why it’s more important now than ever to have a mobile site, ask me!

Mar 15
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Drupal 7 is closing the gap on wordpress

Posted by | Website Development | One Comment

Over the past 6 years I’ve been a proud advocate for the open source development called “Drupal“. I have been able to build my own personal brand, develop third-party applications, execute full scale eCommerce websites, and train the most basic users to manage their own websites content.

What I have learned more recently is that the most common CMS (Content Management System) being used by individuals and small business owners is WordPress simply because its easier for an end user to pick up and manage. Where WordPress differs from Drupal is they offered a solution for basic users to pick up a shared hosting account on WordPress.com with zero impact on budget. The life cycle of WordPress is that after you have used their free shared hosted version you will invest your time and money to build out the fully functional development offered at WordPress.org. Drupal has yet to deploy a shared hosting version for basic users.

With the release of Drupal 7 the bridge of development complexity has been removed and now appeals more to basic users. The list of features is long but these were notable upgrades; new administrative menus, module installation (without FTP access), content structure, aggregation hierarchy, and an improved help section.

I highly recommend trying out the new Drupal 7 development if you are able to set up a simple MySQL database, FTP account, and your hosting is running a Linux based server.

Mar 26
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The blog of Sean Hurley

Posted by | Graphic Design, Web Design, Website Development | No Comments

Welcome to the blog of Sean Hurley where I’ll be will posting weekly/monthly on some of my findings in online marketing tips, graphic design, and website design trends for 2010.

Here are some of my favorite blogs:

http://ffffound.com

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com

http://spyrestudios.com

http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk

Apr 14
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Great example of an Error page

Posted by | User Experience, Website Development | No Comments

Having an error page can be a great marketing tool when your site decides to crash. Many website fail to forget about this small but large page on a website. Having this page can make the decision making process even easier for the website visitor. If they only have 1 or 2 options from this error page they can be converted much easier.

Here is a great example of a simple but useful error page that major networking website “Linkedin” uses:

error msg1 Great example of an Error page

Take this example as a guide line for your own Error page and add your own branding on it. Try using some creative images to entice your website visitors. Choose your best “call-to-action” and make it clear what you want to get from your visitors and what they will get from you.

Apr 08
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What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)

Posted by | Website Development | No Comments

Are you experienced in html or php? No, and you own a site with little budget. Try using an industry leader in text editors to take care of your website pages, content editing, other html issues.

A WYSIWYG or “what you see is what you get” text editor is your solution for all website content editing needs. Write full html pages on your website with the ease of a simple light weight editor. as you see below it can be as simple as writing a document in Microsoft word.

Here a just a few screen shots of how an editor should look:

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)

 

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)

 

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)

 

Feel free to ask me anything, anytime! Contact Me