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The Tough Road of Designing Websites
I’ve recently been re-designing the MovServDex website, which won’t be a complete redesign rather some tweaking here and there. But I’ve come across the one part of webdevelopment I keep having trouble with. Creating an interesting and effective design for my visitors.
Don’t get me wrong I sometimes have very good ideas on how to improve the design so visitors are happier. But not always 
. So this time round I’ll hope to include the following in the design:
- Having all pages easily accessible,
which means that a visitor should be able to find any page on the website with any of the most popular browsers (not as easy as it may sound) - Make sure the navigation is clear,
in the past my navigation wasn’t as useful as I hoped. So this time I’ll spend some time listening to my visitors and how they prefer to navigate through the website. - Get a graphical designer involved
I’m not kidding! I had problems with designing images in the past, so why screw it up even further. If you can get a graphical designer to help you then do!
So why am I sharing this with you? Simple I need more input. I know enough to design a good and stable backend system. Which will provide the information to the website, but the actual graphics and lay-out is another thing.
I do have some experience in designing but I could still use help. So if you now of any other things I should keep track of in my redesign then don’t hastate to comment.
Should Blogs Be Part of Your SEO Strategy
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Loading ...It’s been a while since I posted something about optimizing your website for search engines. So to continue my trend, and help you all a little, here’s the next article.
In the past I’ve talked about how to do some small optimizations on your website and how you can track your successes. Now it’s time to look at if and how you can raise rankings by using a blog. I now that there are a lot of SEO companies that claim to use blogs to do just that, but is it possible??
Having a blog can definitely be a positive experience for your users. It gives them the change to share their thoughts. Gives them some more insight into your company or goals. But does this also mean increased rankings.
After all now you’ve started a competition between your blog and your website. You want your website to rank good, but will the blog start to outrank your website. It’s likely to! Especially when you start optimizing it. And corporate blogging is even more difficult, as is explained in ‘A Lot of People Have to Die for Corporate Blogging to Succeed’.
Are you still interested in starting a blog. Then read ‘Optimizing blogs for the Search Engine’ written by Shari Thurow for some pointers on how to optimize it. I also suggest you read the article ‘Email vs. Blogs’, which will help you in what to write and what not to.
Developing For Free or Money
As a developer at one point in your live you will have to make a choice. Will you start developing software that you are going to sell. Or are you developing to aid those that have a need, at no cost what so ever. Or perhaps a in between!
I know your fellow citizens will appreciate it if you don’t develop free software as you will go on welfare. So most choose for the big piles of money and decide to start working for big / small companies that will pay you for your skills.
Personally I believe that’s a shame. Too many developers are going for the big bucks. I still develop website’s and software for free. Even though I have a paid job doing roughly the same. Not just because I think it can help others that need some free software. Doing this will also improve your skills.
So why don’t all developers spent some of their ‘free’ time developing free software. Well most just don’t wanna waist all their time. Good for them! But it’s also a problem when more and more freeware developers do this. Can you imagine what would happen if hospitals couldn’t get candy stripers. Granted not quite the same, but it gets the point across.
Until next time…..
More Netbeans Trouble
As some of you may remember I’ve posted about some of my Netbeans problems in the past and a quick follow up. I guess it’s time for a new follow up, well not exactly but more about that a bit later. In the past I’ve had problems with flickering and the ignorant auto complete. Most of these problems were fixed when I installed Netbeans 5.5.
You noticed how I use most. That’s because I’ve still got problems with Netbeans when I’m switching between applications. Which I do a lot! Every now and then it stops drawing, only way to fix it is forcing it to draw everything. If you experience this problem try scaling the Netbeans window, seems to help.
I personally have no problem with this ‘feature’. What I do mind is the stupid debugger of Netbeans.
Why?
Well I’ll let you in on a little secret, guess it’s story time. I work a lot with web applications. Netbeans can build them and debug them pretty good. As long as you don’t start messing with the defaults that is. For easy deployment we compile all web applications to jar files. This also means I have to use these jar’s when I’m running a local copy for debugging and testing.
What we found out recently is that the Netbeans debugger can’t debug the jar file that belongs to the web application you are debugging????
So when you compile your classes, put them in a jar using the build script and then deploy and debug the project it won’t debug correctly. Netbeans will stop neatly on break points, but stepping through the code is impossible. It just steps to the first included jar it finds.
You might say that’s still a workable situation, but it does mean putting break-points on every line. Which kinda defeats the purpose of a break point!
Let’s here your thoughts about it, especially if you’ve got a solution.
Developing in phases or with blunt force
One of the first things most developers encounter is project management. And no I do not mean they get to manage projects, after all you need seniority for that (or so they say). So far I’ve encountered to types of development and projects.
The first being a type of blunt force development. Build one version test it and hope that it all works out for you! May seem a bit strange but there are a lot of companies that develop programs in this way.
The second way of managing a project is developing in phases. Were each phase adds more functionality and fixes some major bugs of the previous phase. Not a lot of companies actually follow this method of managing a project.
Why do so many companies choose the first method over the second. Well its pretty easy. Applications need to be launched and during the launch you want it to be complete. You don’t want your customer to keep downloading new features after they purchased a supposedly complete application .
In the open source community the second way of managing a project is often chosen. After all users don’t mind to download updates every few weeks to add new features. Nor do they mind it if there are things missing, after all they never paid a dime for the application.
I believe that developing in phases will aid greatly in the stability of the application. Not to mention that it will be more in tune with the users. They use the first release and comment on what they think should change for future releases. These changes can be scheduled easier as more releases are planned. And each release has a separate stage at which the goals are defined.
For commercial products you will probably have to use a combination. Like I said earlier its impossible to release new versions every two weeks or so. But developing the entire program at once will mean less user input in how the application should work. So that leaves one option which will suite most. Develop several smaller beta’s which you will release to a smaller audience. This helps you get user input during development without upsetting users that have to download a new version over and over.
