St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

It’s an important questions for web designers and web design managers. Especially when it come to the more specific question of Which version Of Internet Explorer (IE) are people using.
Nowadays with the advent of HTML 5 being released into the wild and CSS 3 being released into the wild, both before they are even finished by the way, it’s important to know which features you can use in your web designs because most of these new features don’t work in all browsers.

If you turn to Google for the answer to this question you’ll most likely be pointed to a one of the big tech websites like twocows.com or something and there you’ll see an old or a newer chart that shows how many people visited the web site and what browser they were using.  The problem is that they are a tech web site visited by Technical people.  Technical people on tech web sites are far more likely to use web browsers likely Firefox and Opera and less likely web browsers like IE and Chrome because of the security and social issues involved.  (IE is part of a scheme to monopolize the world computer and internet technology, while Chrome is too, it’s also actively defrauds advertisers by making all typed in addresses count as click on an advertisement when it wasn’t.)

So we checked our clients websites, We tried to get a wide sampling of “typical”web sites that have mostly U.S. Based web traffic; we are using fresh (last 30 days), combined data from several web sites and averaged it together and then rounded the results to the nearest whole percentage point:

Here’s what we found (to protect the clients, we are used percentages, not raw numbers):

Browsers:

• IE: 47%
  • The IE browsers by version as a percentage of IE users, not as a percentage of all users:
  • IE 9: 10%
  • IE 8: 65%
  • IE 7: 17%
  • IE 6: 3%
  • IE 5.5: 0%
• Firefox: 17% Continue reading “Which Browsers and Devices are Used the Most?” »

The short answer – Nothing, yet.

HTML 5 features just don't live up to the hype...

In the short term there is no reason at all for most small to medium web design clients to use the newest  features of the latest version of HTML.  I know this is going to probably rile up some web designers out there so let’s explore the issue a little further.  For some it can be very useful, we’ll get into the those few instances further down.

What is HTML?

HTML stands for “Hypertext Markup Language”  it’s the code that tells a web browser how and where to display what on a web page.  Other programming languages can do this too, but it most cases they are taking variables and logic and outputting HTML to the web browser.  HTML is usually combined with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for control the formatting of the HTML elements on a page.  Before CSS was invented HTML was used for the formatting, it still can format the  elements on a page and in some cases, still is.  To keep this conversation simple enough for clients to understand we will speak as little as possible about CSS and the formatting of HTML elements in this article.

Continue reading “HTML 5 – What does it do for the Client?” »

E-Commerce web design for your small business!

Cyber Monday sales up 33% in the last 2 years

Cyber Monday is the busiest e-commerce shopping day of the year, or the day after “Black Friday” or the Monday after Thanksgiving.  More and more people are choosing to not stand in line at the mall and make their purchases online instead.  This is great news for small businesses!  The internet can be a great way to compete against larger chains with more resources.

Last year sales on Cyber Monday were up 12% over the previous year, combined with this years 20% increase, that’s 33% (rounded) more than two years ago.  What will it be next year?

Does your small business sell things online?  Why not?  If not you are missing out on the customers the growing number of customers who are sitting at their computer ready to buy.  They are there with credit card in hand and they will find what they are looking for.  Don’t you want your products to be presented to them as an option?

We can do things for small retailers to help them compete:

Get your products online

The very first step in successful e-commerce.  Not only can we present your products in an attractive internet showcase (website) where they can research them and purchase them, we can also do it in a secure manner that’s makes it easy for the business owner to track sales, add new products, and manage the products you have.

Get you ranked with the Search Engines

90% of visits to all web sites go through a search engine.  At least a basic search engine presence is required as part of any web site’s plan.  A strong search engine presence is the difference that will help you make more profit.  We have a proven track record of successfully placing small businesses on the first page of Google for scientifically selected profitable key phrases.  We certainly can do the same for you.

Several times when our sales reps go on a sales call, they’ve been heard a “no phrase” that they just can’t beat:

We just want a simple web site with no bells and whistles for cheap, really cheap.

Cheap Web Design starts with no bells and whistles. By focusing on only the aspects of a web site that are the most important to the success of a web site, you can save a ton of money!

Since the economy has turned south we’ve heard this numerous times.  The search engine data reflects this trend.  Google says people are searching for the phrase “Cheap Web Design” more than 100 times as much as “inexpensive web design” and over 1000 times as much as “quality web design”.  It’s pretty clear that for a lot of small business, price is the #1 concern when it comes to building their web presence.

There’s no way we’re getting out of the full service web design business, we just love it too much.  But the market is speaking pretty clearly.  We’ve always had quite reasonable prices and gave amazing service, but there’s a lot of small business owners out there with no web site at all or one of those really bad, “make your own web site for free” (which aren’t actually free, just cheap).  We knew we could give the small business community of America a better choice.  So after careful thought, we’ve come up with a new branch of services that offers high quality web sites for cheap! We call it, appropriately: Cheap Web Design

Learn more:

• How can we do web design so cheaply?
  • Basically, we focus on providing only the features of a web site that are the most important to the success of a web site.
  • The above page also tells you about the few things one gives up with a cheap web design package?
• A big part of why we can do web design so cheaply is our streamlined cheap web design process.
• We still use our 2 proof process to ensure high quality web sites . . .

We’re proud to launch our in house made client info and proofing system. Behind a password protected front end we’ve created a custom section for each client with client news just for them, a summary of their account status, proofs of their latest web designs, if any are available and a simple feed back form for approval and feedback on these proofs.
Like we said it’s pass word protected so if you are awaiting a proof we’ll be contacting you soon (if we haven’t already) with your user name and password to the client info center.

Bubbles! Everyone loves bubbles! Okay, maybe not everyone, but I don’t think anyone hates bubbles do they?

Blue Bubbles is a free WordPress Theme from out St Petersburg Web Design team.  The central area is 900 pixels wide, with two columns inside.  It has a horizontal drop down menu.  In fact it’s our special “easy use” drop down menu which eliminates the “mouse chase” effect which make so many drop down difficult to use because the menu disappears unless the mouse isn’t in exactly the right spot.

This is the download page for this free WordPress theme and also the support page.  It’s a pretty straight forward theme, like most of our themes.  Which means it’s easy to use and customize.  Just install it like normal and edit it like one normally would.   If you do have questions, please just post them as comments below.  Links and terms after the jump . . .

Continue reading “Free WordPress Theme – Blue Bubbles” »