Netallianz Web Design

CSS or Cascading Style Sheet is a growing trend in web design. By using CSS, you can do away with more traditional web design techniques (eg use of tables) and create a website which is cleaner in coding and purer in content.
Common elements that are usually included in CSS files include:

• Navigation bar look & feel
• Dimensions and margins of the various sections of a web page
• Background and text colors
• Headers and footers

CSS techniques have developed rapidly over the years, nowadays it is quite common for web designers to minimize graphic files and use CSS to create things such as rounded corners, lines, shades and image transparencies. Image bubbles such as the one below is an example.

CSS and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
CSS allows you to place code-heavy elements in a single file. To include those elements in your web pages, you can simply reference to the CSS file with a single line of code.

By doing this, your web content is cleaner and this helps search engines crawl your site more easily.

WordPress (the world’s most popular blogging application) uses CSS substantially. This is probably one of the reasons why it is very search engine friendly.

More Reading…
CSS Galleries: a showcase of beautiful CSS driven websites….nice place to see what CSS can do.

Noupe.com: a showcase of CSS techniques.

CSS Menu Tab Designer: lets you produce CSS menu tabs and buttons easily.

Web design sometimes involves thinking out-of-the-box.

Last year we were involved in an ecommerce website where our client sought to introduce a horizontal scrolling concept to its product range.

Truly something different! Just think about it….out of fifty websites you visit, how many horizontal scrolling websites do you come across?

We were at a loss as to why we had to do this, apart from the novelty factor of course!

Anyway just a couple of days ago, we came across The Horizontal Way – a collection of websites which use the horizontal scrolling concept.

Eminence Suit is what we would call a partially Horizontal Scrolling site. In comparison, the sites featured in The Horizontal Way are more hard-core and take horizontal scrolling to a new level. If you ever wanted to design such a site, it’s a good reference point.

Ever wondered how you can download an entire website and run it locally on your PC?

Well, you can save it page by page (using File - Save As in your browser) and then rebuild it by changing the navigation links so that all the web pages are correctly linked. Those of you who have tried this will know how hard it is!

Or you can make life easy for yourself and use HT Track, a really cool software which has been around for a couple of years now.

HTTrack works on most websites and can even download Flash SWF files. It is able to follow web links and hence create a correct path for navigating the site after downloading it to your PC.

Read more »

For almost as long as there’s been a World Wide Web, there’s been Yahoo.com.

And for those of you who have been surfing the web long enough, you might remember that the first generation Yahoo looked like a website with lots of links and cartoon icons at the top.

Of course today the website has since evolved into something more serious.

Read more »

The above shows an American Express banner ad that was displayed on AOL recently.What a great idea! If almost every business out there is asking for feedback, why not advertisers?

If this happened, we hopefully won’t see any more of those annoying flash ads which are forced on our face when we visit TheStar homepage!

For advertisers, just think of the possibilities here…. true interactivity can be taken to a new level as web surfers are encouraged to click on the feedback to voice their opinion.

Take a look for example at how CNET asks for ad feedback on their website.

Of course whether this will happen or not is an entirely different thing. Even with the advent of the Internet, many traditional advertising companies have been comfortably sitting in their comfort zone, just like the music label companies before Steve Jobs came along.

Sadly, one-way communication is pretty much still the norm in advertising.

If you are signed up with our Bronze, Silver or Gold Web Hosting package, then CONGRATULATIONS!

Your SmarterMail web mail system has one of the most advanced anti-spam control features on the market.

SmarterMail allows you to be as aggressive as you want when combating spam. This article is rather technical but we hope it helps you fine-tune your spam settings to minimize spam.

HOW IT WORKS
When an email comes in, several spam checks are run based on preset criteria. The checks that fail add points to the email. A final score is calculated after which the system assigns a “spam probability” to the email.

Spam checks include the following:

Bayesian Filtering
Bayesian Filtering applies statistical analysis to determine whether or not an email appears to be spam. Together with blacklists and SPF (Sender Policy Framework), this allows you to be quite sure whether or not an email is spam. Bayesian Filtering can be memory intensive so SmarterMail allows you to set the maximum resources that will be dedicated to this. Read more »

To engage your users, you will first need to know how users think and behave when surfing a website.

SCAN & CLICK

Basically user habits on the web are akin to customer habits in a shop.

Most people will glance at each new page, scan some of the text then click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles what they are looking for.

In fact, large parts of a web page often go unnoticed.

Most users search for something interesting, useful or clickable. As soon as some promising candidates are found, they click. That is why Google Adsense has worked so well over the years!

Read more »

If you send out bulk emails on a regular basis, you may find that your emails do not get sent properly or ends up in the recipient’s junk box from time to time.This usually happens when your email list builds up to 1,000+ people.

Even if you broke down your huge list into groups, perhaps each group in your list exceeds 200 people.

As you know, sending emails to more than 200 people at any one time is a challenging affair!

Poor email deliverability can occur due to the following: Read more »

You may be aware that recently, Microsoft made a US$44.6 billion bid to acquire Yahoo! Inc.

Microsoft is pursuing Yahoo to challenge Google in online ad sales, a market that may reach US$80 billion worldwide by 2011.

Google is currently the market leader in online advertising although it relies on its Google Adwords / Adsense program for a huge chunk of its US$16.6 billion revenue in 2007. Read more »

Ever been to a website where you just can’t find anything?

Or maybe you surf for 10 minutes and finally find what you’re looking for. But you don’t bookmark the page and when you come back, you just can’t find it again.

It’s frustrating, we know.

Most people will not mind surfing a website that has great content, even if it is visually displeasing.

But if your website has poor navigation it will not be as forgivable, even if you have great content. Read more »