Monday, October 11, 2010

The Importance of Logo and Web Design in Online Marketing

Among many elements of a successful online business, it is the logo and the web design that plays the most important role. If you want your website to excel high in search engines, you must therefore provide an eye-catching web image and a brand logo. Why? Well basically an online business has a greater chance for success if those visitors and consumers recognize its brand logo. It will also make a business's site more attractive to potential advertisers and partners.

Moreover, a serious online business person should also consider preparing a website that is highly-designed, attractive, easy to navigate, reliable content, informative, and are capable of getting visitors for long and make them come back again.


IMPORTANCE OF BRAND LOGO
When we think of a large business, one of the things that will come to our mind is their logo. Like any other companies, the logo serves as the brand's cornerstone. The company's identity is visually expressed through its logo, which, along the company's name, is the main thing that makes the business unforgettable.

Logo, as defined, is the smallest and the shortest form to convey the identity, thoughts, vision, and intentions of a person, or a corporate. This could be used by social groups or organizations to express their ideas, or views on different social aspects. Logo’s can also be used by a group of educationist, trying to promote physical sciences, social sciences, historical interpretation/facts, geographical facts, and many other educational fields with a view to spread knowledge among the people interested in that area. Logos can be as simple as text to a very nice, cool and hip design.

For most companies, logo designs were very essential for it represents the business' image. The name of your company and its logo are the first thing that people see, so you should really put high emphasis on these. It is a big representation of your company. Logos must reflect very well what company does, services that provides and the image the business they want to represent. The entire company brief should be reflected in one single image named logo.


IMPORTANCE OF WEB DESIGN
Research shows that people creates opinions about the look of your website in 1/20th of a second. The aesthetic of your design is thus an important factor in the success of your website and online business.

A web design is the skill of creating presentations of the page's content that are delivered to the  internet users. The intent of web design is to create a website - a collection of electronic documents and applications that reside on a Web servers. The website may include text, images, sounds and other content, and may be interactive.

Based on this description, we can conclude that a website with less visual details will not possibly make it over the Internet because visitors will not stay long enough at boring and lifeless web pages. Having a visually appealing website will probably get and keep the user's attention - this plays an important role for online business owners. In addition, the design should highly depend on the function of the website. If you're deciding to hire a designer, make sure that he understands your goals fully well.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Testing Tools for Cross-Browser Compatibility

It is a fact that many people today are using different web browsers when surfing for information in the internet. And as a web designer and/or developer, it is your role to ensure that the web pages you've created are compatible for most of the commonly used browsers these days. The term used for describing this kind of work is the “Cross-browser Compatibility”.

Cross-browser Compatibility is defined as all critical elements of a website, web application, HTML construct or client-side script  being viewable in a particular browser. Due to the broadening of the browser market today, the cross-browser compatibility method claims that a website should support browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari in addition to Internet Explorer and Netscape.

Since this compatibility is in demand for web developers like you, here are some useful tools that will help you in testing and fixing cross-browser compatibility.


CROSSBROWSERTESTING.COM


This online site serves as a browser test center wherein you can check your website's cross browser compatibility. The site offers live testing configurations which allow you to test your website live via your browser and remote VNC sessions. And you can also interactively test your ajax, javascript, and flash on all operating systems. Moreover, with Cross Browser Testing, you can check your website's design across every browser.

The site is a huge time saver as well, for it reduces the wait time when requesting a Windows XP, Vista, or Win 7 configuration from around 60 seconds to less than 30 seconds.


BROWSER SHOTS


Browsershots is a free open-source online web application that tests your website's compatibility on different browsers by taking screenshots of your web pages rendered by real browsers on different operating systems. Once you submit your site, a number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to Browsershots' central dedicated servers for review.


BROWSER LAB

Browser Lab is an easier and faster way to do cross- browser testing that integrates with Creative Suite 5 or CS5. By using this tool, you can: fully preview your web pages across multiple browsers and operating systems; quickly and accurately test the web content with powerful diagnostic tools; save money with an online testing lab vs. dedicated testing hardware; and you can launch BrowserLab directly in Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 to help avoid testing disruptions.

With Browser Lab, you can enjoy an always available, up-to-date testing lab without the hassle of maintenance or local upgrades.


SPOON BROWSER SANDBOX


This tool enables you to run several web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera without any installation. The Browser Sandbox is a great resource for Web developers and IT managers interested in testing upcoming Web browsers and technologies without the problems associated with installing a new browser on their desktop.

BROWSRCAMP


Browsrcamp allows you to test the compatibility of your design with Mac OS X browsers. Through this tool, web developers and designers can take control over a Mac OS X system pre-configured with all the Mac browsers. Browsrcamp is supposedly the easiest way to test every aspect of your website on Mac, including Javascript, DHTML, Ajax, and Flash.


LITMUSAPP


The Litmus application allows you to preview your campaigns across 34 email clients and devices in minutes. It will provide you screenshots of your email newsletter as it looks around all major email clients, therefore serves as a comprehensive pre-flight check for every campaign. Also, Litmus can see your email on the most popular mobile devices. It even lets you scroll your email on the device.

LitmusApp is the only service in the world to provide cross-browser landing page and website testing in addition to email previews.


ANYBROWSER SITEVIEWER


In some cases, web designers may have put a lot of time and effort in creating their websites, but that effort is wasted if majority of the Internet users are unable to view it. Some sites are even not usable at all by some users. That is why the AnyBrowser Site Viewer was created. This tool enables you to view your own site as your visitors do.

The tool lets you see HTML pages in different screen sizes. You can move from link to link viewing pages as they’d appear in a variety of browsers and check for text-only purity. Also, the Anybrowser Site Viewer allows you to select specific page elements.


BROWSERA


Browsera is used as a testing tool, not just a screenshot tool. It locates cross-browser layout problems automatically by comparing each browser's output. It also crawls the pages on your site and actually test them for layout inconsistencies and scripting errors. This tool runs entirely in the cloud, so there's no installation required.


NETRENDERER


IE NetRenderer is a free cross-browser compatibility testing tool. This allows you to check how a website is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5, as seen from a high speed data center located in Germany. This web rendering tool is also suited for web designers working on Apple iMac and Linux workstations. It enables to verify web designs natively on all popular Internet Explorer versions, without the need to set aside several physical or virtual Microsoft Windows PCs just for that purpose.