Web Design for the Holidays
When you think of holiday decorating, several things come to mind; table settings, lights, lawn ornaments, your web site. Wait… your web site?! If you’ve never considered dressing up your homepage for the holidays, maybe this is the year you should start.
Why? Many businesses decorate their physical storefronts during the holiday season. Shouldn’t virtual storefronts receive the same attention? You may think to yourself, “Not many other sites do it…” I can name one site that decorates its homepage on EVERY holiday. It’s called Google!
If you’re a professional web designer, pitching the idea of holiday decorating to your clients may provide you with some extra spending money at the time of year you need it most. You can also let them know that frequently updating the content of their homepage is always a good idea from a search engine marketing and sales standpoint. It shows consumers and search engines that their site is actively expanding and improving and that their information is current.
With so many culturally based holidays you may be concerned about offending someone or leaving someone out. If you don’t know how to design for Chrismahanzakwanukah this year, just focus on the “season”. Adding a little snow and ice to your homepage won’t offend anyone north of the equator. And to our friends to the south I say, “Shut up and enjoy your summer!”
Happy holidays!
Web Design without Tables
I just picked up a great book on designing web sites without using tables titled, “HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, 2nd Edition” by Rachel Andrew & Dan Shafer.
Why drop your dependable table structure in favor of CSS positioning?
- Using CSS reduces the amount of code in your HTML pages and allows you to place your text content at the top of your source code. This helps search engines properly index your pages.
- It makes your pages load faster by eliminating the need for invisible pixel spacer images and allowing web browsers to cache your style references.
- It makes your code more friendly to web browsers with text-to-speech or other accessibility features.
- The CSS approach allows for faster and easier site redesign than table structures by further separating your style from your text content.
If you’re not convinced, download a free preview from the book and try it out.
Embedding Email Message Subject and Body Content into your “mailto:” Links
I’m sure you’re familiar with the properties of an average “mailto:” link. The code uses JavaScript to open your web site visitors’ mail client (eg. Outlook Express) with your email address prefilled in the message “To:” field and looks like this:
<a href="mailto:youraddress">Email Us</a>
Many web designers stop there. But did you know you can also use a mailto:” link to automatically add an email subject, cc, bcc, or message body to your site visitors’ emails? This technique can be especially helpful in organizing your incoming emails because you can specify the content of the subject line.
Here’s some sample code. Feel free to use any combination of the name=value pairs included to achieve your desired results.
<a href="mailto:youraddress?cc=youraddress2&bcc=youraddress3&subject=This is the subject&body=this is the body">Email Us</a>
Inbound Links from Client Web Sites Won’t Improve your Link Popularity
Adding links to your web site from your web design clients is always a good thing if you can talk them into it, but don’t expect big gains in your site’s link popularity from this practice. Why not? Two reasons…
First of all, unless you’re a web design company who creates sites for other web design companies, the content of your clients’ sites won’t be relevant to your products or services. And if you don’t know already, search engines won’t give you piddly in the link popularity department for unrelated links.
Second, if you host sites for your web design clients like we do, it’s likely you’re only dealing with a handful of IP addresses. Search engines stopped giving credit for multiple links to any given site from the same IP address a long time ago.
Don’t let these points stop you from asking your clients for links however. If your design work is worth its salt, inbound links will still give you free referrals from your clients’ site visitors if they’re impressed with your work.
