Like all progress, whether in internet technology or in any other field, new developments in social networking via the web can both offer great benefits and pose substantial, though often unrecognized, dangers. Human beings are the most sociable of creatures, and almost everyone except for the pathologically anti-social crave interaction with other people with whom they have – or hope to acquire – something in common.

Back in the day, you had to make the physical effort to go out into the world – to school, to the market, to the office – to meet and socialize with others. But the world-wide web has both expanded everyone’s potential range of action and also made it feasible for people to restrict their “socializing” to a solitary experience executed at home, with only an electronic device as a companion.

Are Facebook friends a substitute for the real thing?

Consider the gigantic, dominant construct of the Facebook network. With more than a staggering 800 million active users worldwide, Facebook is the clear world leader in Internet-based social networking. Facebook advertises itself as the ideal tool to “stay connected to friends and family.” And who are we to argue that it isn’t one of the easiest and quickest ways to find out anything and everything that’s happening with any relative, friend or nearly complete stranger you’ve ever encountered and taken 15 seconds to “friend” on Facebook?

But there’s a downside, too. Do you really want to be bothered with what your second-cousin-twice-removed thought about the oatmeal she had for breakfast or some retailer’s daily promotion? And is reading Charley’s Twitter on the TD Eli just scored really just as much fun as cheering together in triumph at the local pub?  When it comes to socializing in-person, we think it’s healthy — and we see what Andy Warhol meant when he famously said, “I have a Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.”

Combining the best of both worlds

For people physically located in the New York-New Jersey area, web developers at Dotcomweavers recently completed www.planadrink.com, an innovative social networking website that uses the power of an online community to organize and facilitate group meet-ups for socializing at local bars and restaurants.

Meeting new people and making friends has always been easier for some people than for others. But one of the best ways to get acquainted with others and develop real friendships is to be introduced and get to know them in the company of people with whom you are comfortable. That’s what Plan A Drink aims to accomplish. Their mottos is, “Have Your People Meet My People.” The idea is to gather six of your close friends and meet another group of friends by connecting online through the website. Facilities built into Plan A Date by our NJ web designers include Facebook connections, messaging, interactive calendars and drag-and-drop invitations — all designed to encourage, arrange and manage these meetings in a convenient, relaxed and congenial setting. Seems like the best of both worlds to us.

Got your own innovative idea for social networking?

Contact the savvy social networking pros at our leading NJ web design firm. We’d love to meet you — online or in-person.

Today we’re going to begin by transporting one of our web designers in New Jersey to another place and time. Let’s say he’s in Morocco in 1901. It’s a clear day, not yet too hot – and he’s hungry.  There’s only one souk in “town,” so that’s where he’s going to search for breakfast. As he arrives at Assad’s, the first vendor’s stall in the market, he spots some lemons that look good enough to eat, so he strikes a bargain there and his shopping is done. Unfortunately, he never gets far enough to find out that Hassan, around the corner, has lemons that are juicier — and he certainly has no way of knowing that still farther along, Sharif has hidden some delectable blood oranges in a sack. The lesson for our time? Doing business today on the web – as in the souk of long ago — is all about visibility, getting the prospective customer to the place where your wares are for sale, and making them attractive.

Attracting shoppers on the web

There are several steps that lead from searches on the web to the actual sales transactions that are the lifeblood of e-commerce. Clearly, your site has to come up when a shopper searches for the type of goods you are offering (in the example above, it might be “delicious fruits for sale in Morocco”), and that’s why SEO and SEM (search engine optimization and marketing) are so important. But once you’ve managed to get a search engine to discover and index your e-commerce site and list you in the search results it returns, how do you get the person who did the search to click through to your site rather than the one that’s displayed at the top? And how do you help them understand what’s different about your site compared to the other search results?

Metas make the difference

That’s where meta tags can make a vital difference. All other things being equal, the text that Google or another engine will show in its results is very likely to be taken from your meta tags – title and/or description – for the page. So you want those tags to be informative, differentiating and persuasive, all in an inviting way.

Here are some tips from our web developers for how to do just that:

• First of all, concentrate on putting your most persuasive marketing message forward in natural language that will peak readers’ interest.
• Remember that Google will only display the first 140 or so characters and spaces, so be concise and mention the main point first.
• Put title and description tags on every page of your site, and don’t repeat them or use boilerplate.
• Don’t keyword-stuff — Google warns that the practice makes you look spammy to them and to users.
• Include structured data about a page that brings together key info on the product offered, such as manufacturer and price.
• You may want to stop the search engines from using DMOZ data about your site from the Open Directory Project if you prefer your own description. Dotcomweavers’web developers can take care of this for you.

These suggestions barely scratch the surface of what can be achieved through informed and artful use of meta tags on your site. For more information from our knowledgeable web developers, contact us today.

An email I received this afternoon from the extremely popular TripAdvisor website — they have more than 20 million members and annual revenue over $500 million — caught my attention for a couple of reasons. First, the email had a spectacular picture of a rainbow over Niagara Falls that it claimed was taken from a hotel room, a striking and attractive image, always a good thing in a broadcast email.

Second, my family enjoys travelling to new and interesting places, and we can do more of that it we do it on the cheap. But how best to avoid flea-bag hotels or those at four-mile “walking distance” from all the local sights? For us, Trip Advisor is our go-to destination-before-the-vacation.  There, on the site’s user forums, we can get all kinds of information about local customs and tourist attractions, read any of more than 50 million reviews of hotels and other attractions we’re considering, and even post our own reviews to benefit fellow travelers. For us, there’s a lot of value in sharing information we’ve gathered in our travels, and learning from the experiences of others all over the world. That’s what website user community forums are all about.

History and components of user forums

The idea for message boards, the precursors to user forums, began way back in the 1970s with Usenet, which was conceived by a couple of Duke University grad students now recognized as proto-web designers. Usenet was set up as a loose group of email-type bulletin boards, where users could post, read and answer messages and questions.

Obviously, web developers have come a long way since then. “Modern” web forums — many of which now have commercial components and can be turned into revenue generators — are prettier and easier-to-use discussion sites with hierarchical or tree-like structures that organize the topics covered. They have certain elements in common:

User Groups — Most forums divide visitors into guests and members, and organize groups by topics. Often, registered members have more privileges, i.e., they can access more areas of the site and can post on specific topics. People who like to visit and read particular sections, but who don’t actively participate, are called lurkers.

Posts and Threads — Each of the topics contained in the forum is known as a thread, and each item in a thread is a post, usually identified with a date stamp and the user name of the poster.

Mods — Site owners themselves, or people they delegate, serve as moderators or mods. They are the only ones with global access to delete threads and messages from the boards, for purposes of keeping them free of spam, removing objectionable or illegal posts, etc.

Dotcomweavers  web designers recently built a user forum for New Jersey-based Cash Flow Navigator

We recently created a personal finance-themed website for www.cashflownavigator.com that uses a robust user forum as part of a strategy to attract members to the new community and keep them coming back. Community involvement is gaining momentum as members post to forums on cash flow, assets, liabilities and numerous related topics. Coming soon is a Financial Providers Forum where you will be able to search a listing of financial services providers, add a financial provider you’ve used to the listing, and comment on financial providers you’ve used.

Our web developers in NJ can also help your business attract new visitors and generate advertising revenue by building a well-designed user forum into your site. Find out more by contacting the New Jersey web design experts at Dotcomweavers today.

Who cares about punctuation, anyway? Isn’t it just the province of musty old grammarians languishing in some ivory tower?  Well, there are some situations where punctuation actually does make a difference. Consider these two sentences:

• “Let’s eat, grandpa!”
• “Let’s eat grandpa!”

Obviously, that extra comma does potentially matter to grandpa.  Still, this kind of situation is not what our customers in New York and New Jersey have in mind when they ask our web designers if punctuation makes any difference on websites.

Google announces it’s paying attention

Google actually made an announcement last month that represented a change in practice in the way its search engine treats punctuation marks. Going forward, it said that it would update its indexing and display results for punctuation marks including exclamation points (!), hash signs (#) and ampersands (&).  It’s unclear to us as web designers what’s to be gained by this action, but it aroused our curiosity enough to run a few checks. We searched Google on the single character “;” and here’s what popped up: a Wikipedia article on semicolons, a tutorial on “How to use the semicolon,” and a discussion of commas versus semicolons. Fascinating stuff to somebody, no doubt, but of little utility to our NJ web developers.

SEO:  Does punctuation play a role?

Web designers developing commercial sites are focused on making those sites successful by getting them noticed by the search engines. Inquiring web designers want to know if there are any punctuation practices they should avoid — and, conversely, if there are any ways they can exploit punctuation to gain an advantage with the search engines.

The accepted wisdom on this subject is that the engines’ spiders basically ignore punctuation in most cases. However, there are a few things that we’ve learned about the subject. A couple tell us that punctuation can hurt your results in some instances. And another couple can actually help the effort, at least to a limited extent.

The good, the bad and the ugly in punctuation

Let’s look at the bad news first. You really can’t use any punctuation marks in your URLs except for an underscore (_) or a hyphen (-). Everything else is going to malfunction.  That may mess up your metatags, too, unless you are a real whiz with the html.

Furthermore, if you use a bunch of commas or pipes so that you can stuff a whole lot of keywords into a small space on your page, you risk annoying the search engines and triggering their spam detectors — which will probably lower your page rank.

Those things said, there’s at least one little trick facilitated by the spiders’ disdain for punctuation that web designers like to take advantage of. Consider the way that many people place keywords when they are searching for something to buy in a specific geographic area.  Suppose I am looking for a hand car wash in North Jersey? Even though it sounds better in your website copy to describe your business as a “North Jersey hand car wash facility,” that’s not the way many people search. They will type “hand car wash North Jersey” in the search bar. BUT — since Google will ignore the period anyway — I can write these folks’ preferred string into my copy as follows: “…come see us in Paterson for the best hand car wash. North Jersey car services have been patronizing us for 20 years….” Clever, right?

The bottom line on punctuation is that you should use it to make your pages and the messages they convey as easy to read and as persuasive as possible. There’s really no point in getting visitors to your web page unless you can keep their interest once they get there.

When it comes to what they want to accomplish when creating or redesigning their commercial websites, it seems only natural that every company our web designers talk to in New Jersey or New York is looking for a way to gain an edge. They all want to develop a look and feel that is more attractive than the competition’s, and that retains visitors long enough for them to engage with the business. A key — but quite possibly under appreciated and overlooked — calculation in website design involves the interplay between screen size/resolution/width and user preferences.

An article on the front page of last week’s New York Times called attention to the growing popularity of 30-inch desktop monitors, and even 55” HDTV screens now have such good built-in web browsers that using a giant TV to access the Internet is well within the range of possibility. Screen resolutions have risen dramatically over time, too, with 1280×1024 now typical. So is it time for web designers to unleash their creativity by using all that space and all those pixels to the fullest?  In particular, how wide should we make the screen?

Page width options

You can choose to make your site’s screen width fixed or flexible.  For fixed, you set specific pixel numbers for the widths of each page division. You can count on the page always looking the same, but visitors’ screen widths and/or browser settings may mean that they will have to scroll horizontally to see the whole page. Those with big screens and high resolution settings may see large amounts of empty space on the screen.

Alternatively, using percentages or ems so that the widths of items are flexible allows the page display to vary depending on the screen and how it’s set. This can be a good thing, but you should keep in mind that when text boxes get too narrow or too wide, they look funny and are hard to read. Sometimes it’s best to use fixed for the text elements and let images and other kinds of divisions flex in size to accommodate various browser widths.

Who’s using the big screens — and who isn’t?

For solutions to design problems, it’s best to look to what equipment visitors use and how they behave.  Workers in high-tech and design industries, as well as those with high-end laptops and affluent consumers who can afford the biggest and newest are the most likely to have access to the web via large, high-resolution monitors. But it’s important to remember that even then, many people keep multiple windows open on different parts of their screens, do not maximize their browsers, and may even choose lower resolution settings for better readability.  If your web designers are using the screen to its fullest, those choices may mean that your visitors will still have to scroll to view your whole page.

Students, workers in companies that keep their outdated computer equipment until it’s beyond repair, or those who favor tablets may be left frustrated by the confusion of navigating your elaborate screen layout.  And let’s not forget that little elephant in the room — the smartphone. Pinching and dragging to view sites created for the biggest screens is a pain, and very few have the manual dexterity to accurately tap on a teeny drop-down.

How the savvy web designers decide

At Dotcomweavers, our web developers strongly believe that a smart way to design an attractive website is to start by studying your intended audience. Check your web logs or other monitoring tools to track what screen resolutions your visitors are using.  Think about the habits of your target demographic. Then design your website to suit the preferences of the customers you expect to use it.

How to Design an UNattractive Website

Website Design Don’ts from Dotcomweavers’ NJ web designers

One of the blessings – but also a curse – that the availability of powerful yet simple-to-use website development tools has bestowed upon us in recent years is that now it seems nearly everybody and his brother consider themselves web designers. In New Jersey, we are well-acquainted with the self-styling phenomenon. To get a taste of the havoc it can wreak in the area of personal style, all you have to do is watch an episode of MTV’s Jersey Shore. Equivalents to Snookie’s poof, J-Wow’s new figure and The Situation’s droopy acid-washed jeans abound in cyber-space, and they certainly aren’t confined to NJ-based websites.

Last week, we had a few things to say about website development technologies that work at cross-purposes with your best intentions. In this installment, our  website designers in NJ focus on just as inadvisable visual design elements that are likely to drive away those visitors you’re trying so hard to acquire and retain.

We caution our clients that it’s really easy to get carried away with all the website design variables that are available out there, at the expense of simplicity and clarity. You don’t want to confuse and alienate your visitors by trying too hard.

Don’t-Do-It Design Basics

Don’t overdo the colors!  Too many colors are chaotic and just annoy people. Choose a palette of complementary colors, using five colors at most, and use them consistently throughout your site. Select your colors based on the emotional response you want from your target audience. Keep it calm if you’re in the finance business, but look for a color scheme that’s more exciting if you’re hyping an event, for example.

Don’t overdo the fonts!  Again, chaos is not appealing. You don’t have to use six different fonts in 12 sizes and include six header styles just because you can. That’s annoying and difficult to scan. Avoid blocks of bold or italic text or all capital letters, too. That’s just hard to read and signals visitors that it’s not worth the trouble.

Don’t overdo the text!  Frankly, your website visitors aren’t interested in those dense 400-word paragraphs that you have stacked up on the page, no matter how brilliant you think they are. If they wanted to read a textbook, they could do that on their Nooks. A good rule of thumb is to have no more than 400-500 words on the whole page and to break them up in small sections with lots of headings that are easy to scan. If you must go on and on, do it in your blog.

Don’t overdo the images!  Tiling images across the entire screen is outdated and distracting. It makes the meaningful content hard to distinguish, especially if the images you tile are large and high-contrast. Avoid a jumble of boxes, animated gifs, and marquee scrolling text, too. Gimmicks don’t work. Clean, coherent design draws the eye exactly where you want it on the page.

Keep It Simple and Clear

At Dotcomweavers in Paramus, NJ, our web designers and developers recognize the virtues of making things clear to your visitors. For examples of how to get your website design right by keeping it crisp and focusing the impact, we invite you to take a look at the designs showcased here on our website and to contact us to discuss your objectives.

What Not to Use

A friend of ours who used to be an English teacher tells us that the absolute worst way to teach kids how to spell is to show them the wrong way to spell commonly misspelled words. And yet our New Jersey web design and development team can’t resist the urge to warn our readers away from some of the most damaging – and easy-to-avoid – pitfalls we have seen a lot of small NJ and NYC businesses fall into when developing their first websites.
Today, we’re going to talk about five website development elements that deserve to be obsolete or even forbidden in effective website design projects. In our next installment, our  website designers in NJ will focus on equivalently inadvisable visual design elements that can do a similar job of undermining your best intentions for your website.
Don’t-Do-It Basics

1. Don’t open with a splash page! We don’t know anybody who likes to cool their heels, waiting for an elaborate but meaningless splash page to load and then display. No matter how gorgeous your creation, displaying it just hinders your visitors’ access to where they want to be, viewing the informational content of your website. It bores them and drives them away. Search engines don’t know what to do with these pages, either. Furthermore, most splash pages are developed in Flash, and even Adobe has announced its intentions to stop supporting that.
2. Don’t resize the browser window! Resist a website designer’s urging to use JavaScript to resize the window to better suit some peculiarity of the design. People have their window sizes set the way they do on purpose – because that’s the way they want to look at the screen – and they are going to be turned off if your site tries to change that.
3. Don’t use frames! Here’s another website design technology that has lost a lot of ground, for good reason. Frames are also a problem for the search engines, and some browsers don’t even support frames. Trying to print content displayed in frames can be an annoying experience, too.
4. Don’t link a page to itself! A link from one part of a single page to another part of that same page just confuses the person who clicks on it. You click on the link, the browser refreshes, and you see the same thing you did before you clicked. It’s natural to assume the link isn’t working, and that does nothing for the website’s credibility.
5. Don’t keyword-stuff! This is our NJ web developers’ new favorite don’t, because it alienates not only your visitors, but also the very search engines you are trying to impress with all those instances of your target keywords. Yes, having keywords on your pages does help the search engines to identify and index your site for those keywords. But Google has become very smart, and it recognizes when you try to trick it by cramming in too many keywords that don’t fit the natural flow of the text. And visitors don’t want to read stilted copy, especially when they can see what you’re doing is luring them to your site by means of SEO-focused artifice rather than providing useful content.

Way back in the last century, even before we started Dotcomweavers as a new jersey based web design company, professionals recognized the immense potential benefits that could come from utilizing a content management system (CMS). By building in a CMS to create, manage, store and deploy content on the websites they designed, they could empower the site’s owners in numerous ways, including:

• Anybody you give access to the system can change and add to the content of your website from anywhere. You don’t need a separate web professional on staff or retainer to keep your site fresh and up-to-date. And the modern CMSs, our web developers NJ team deploys take almost no time for the company’s own authors to learn.

• Design and content are separate, so you can’t “break” the design template while altering the content. Conversely, you can change the design template at any time without having to re-input or reformat the content.
• Because a CMS website is database-driven, you can create and store hundreds of pages or more in the database and the CMS will deploy them dynamically.
• No longer practical only for big spenders
• Back in those days, though, these benefits were just a pipe dream for most small and mid-sized companies. Sure, web developers in NYC or NJ could custom-develop a CMS for you from scratch —but they had to charge so much for development time that the overall cost was prohibitive. As soon as the words “content management system” came up in discussions with web developers, NJ/NY businesses would first react enthusiastically and then beat a hasty retreat when they heard that the price for such a system could easily run into six figures.
• But during the last decade, the advent of open-source blogging software and other inexpensive tools like WordPress and Drupal has made the dream a practical possibility for many more businesses. Our own team of web designers  incorporates a CMS into at least 95% of the sites we build. They really do simplify website updates and enable many of our clients to minimize ongoing website expenses.
• So why wouldn’t every website benefit from using a CMS?
• Although our web developers NJ team members are firm believers in the benefits of a CMS for most types of websites, we also know there are still some instances where they wouldn’t provide enough value to make them worth the trouble:
• Brochure and other static websites. If you don’t plan to change the site much or very often, you don’t need all that power. It would be like using a Ferrari engine to push a baby stroller.
• Websites with limited lifespans. If you’re just building a website for a one-time event, for example, you don’t need to be able to change it.
• Websites of companies that don’t want to “do it themselves” at all, but would rather leave everything in the hands of an individual or a group dedicated exclusively to website maintenance. This is obviously a costly alternative, but some companies can afford it.
• Dotcomeavers web designers in NJ would be happy to discuss your goals and operational preferences with you to determine if a website CMS is right for your business.

The new year’s biggest trade show event — the Consumer Electronics Show that convened January 11-13 in Las Vegas — had the unmistakable aura of the dinosaurs.  While organizers reported that it drew the largest crowd in its history, close to 140,000 attendees, there were definite signs that it is no longer “the source” for all that’s shiny and new and exciting to consumers.

The biggest players aren’t playing that game anymore

For one thing, the biggest name in the business and the universally recognized leader in innovation both signaled that they don’t consider the trade show the place to be.  For the last 15 years, Microsoft has supplied the keynote speaker for CES, but the company says this is the last year in that run. And they aren’t going to have a booth at next year’s show, either. As for Microsoft’s longtime rival, Apple, well, they don’t do trade shows at all. And that policy hasn’t seemed to hurt them one bit.  What products generate more buzz than Apple’s?

Pros and cons of in-person conferences, and trade and consumer events

There are two basic kinds of these events — professional conferences and trade shows. Dotcomweavers recently participated in the first kind at the November 2011 Web 2.0 Expo conference, joining big names like Microsoft and a select group of cutting-edge web developers. New York’s Sheraton Hotel and Towers provided a relatively intimate setting where we had the opportunity to network with our peers and make them aware of exciting developments from our new Jersey based website design company right in the conference’s back yard.

Traditionally, trade shows have been regarded as the premier marketing vehicles for all kinds of products, ranging from esoteric scientific equipment to manufacturing materials and cars and boats. Vendors spend anywhere from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to rent exhibit space, develop elaborate presentations, deploy custom-designed booths, and transport and pay personnel to man them — all for the opportunity to showcase their wares to and answer questions for a group of current customers and potential buyers who are usually more interested in where they are going to eat after attending the day’s events and whether they should go to a nightclub or hit the slots tonight. Is it worth it to exhibit at trade shows today?

A modest proposal — Web-centric marketing can be more effective at a fraction of the cost

One thing our Dotcomweavers’ web designers team has learned over the years in working with hundreds of companies is that today’s consumers and business people are looking for convenience in evaluating and buying products and services. Sure, if they go to a trade show, they can see a lot of products in one place, which is, arguably, convenient. But why travel all the way to a show and spend hours walking past booths for other products that are of no use to you, just so you can see and maybe handle half a dozen versions of the thing you’re looking for? And, in particular, why do that when you can type a few words into a search engine and instantly access all the information you could want about virtually every version of that product category that’s available anywhere in the world?

From a vendor’s point of view, it just makes a lot more sense to spend a fraction of what exhibiting at a single trade show might cost you to transform your website into a search-engine optimized “booth” that attracts unlimited numbers of visitors, turns them on to your products with engaging content and visuals, and actually helps them buy from you (which often isn’t possible at a trade show). Smart businesses of all kinds have been turning to our website design company in New Jersey for help to accomplish these lofty goals, and we see every day as an opportunity to come up with new ways to make marketing more efficient and cost-effective.

With all the talk in recent years about the “paperless” office of the future — which should certainly be here by now, in 2012 — you might not expect much good news for printing- and paper-based companies these days. And yet, if you provide what people want and make it easy for them to find and purchase it the way they prefer, the savvy vendor — in any business, including paper — can capitalize on real opportunities the digitized world presents.

A case in point is Dotcomweavers’ client Paterson Papers and their new e-commerce website www.thepaperstoreandmore.com, recently profiled in North Jersey’s leading print publication, The Record, and in its sister website, northjersey.com:

http://www.northjersey.com/news/135151463_Paterson_Papers_manages_to_adjust_to_a_digital_world.html

Continual innovation keeps company on leading edge of technology

The article describes how Dotcomweavers helped Paterson Papers, now nearly a hundred years old, remain nimble and adjust to the digital world by carrying on and extending the company’s tradition of innovation. Back in the 1950s, the original store installed a vacuum-tube communication system, cutting-edge in its day. They brought in computer systems and software in the early 1980s. And in 1987 they changed the way papers were sold by building the Paper Store and More retail store, enabling short-run printers and other customers to purchase small quantities of a large assortment of papers, the same day, at discounted prices.

Refinements in new e-commerce site

Although Paterson Papers has a well-established paper distribution business and successful stores selling smaller quantities at retail, and has had a website since the late 1990s, they recognized a new opportunity to set themselves apart from the competition once again in the present.

The older Paterson Papers website did have a comprehensive listing of all the products they stock. But — as with competitors’ websites — it was difficult, if not impossible, to buy from them online unless you already knew exactly what brand, weight, color, finish, etc. you needed. In contrast, the new e-store we designed and built for ThePaperStoreandMore makes it simple to browse their offerings, to quickly zoom in on the specific products possessing all the characteristics you need, and to purchase with just a few clicks.

E-store is the face of the future

With the e-store up and running, and the orders starting to come in, the proprietors of Paterson Papers are optimistic about their business going forward in the digital world. Michael Prell, 52, whose great-grandfather, Sam Prell, founded the company in 1914, is quoted in the Record article as saying, “We have always kept up with innovation and will continue.” At Dotcomweavers, we are proud and excited about helping old-line businesses continue to thrive. We truly believe the future is unlimited for those who are able to exploit web technology as it develops.