Carol Harkins, Principal
CyberGnarus LLC

Solutions for the Internet

There are a lot of factors that go into your website - visuals, content, keyword phrases.

You want your branding to be consistent, you want visitors to find you, you want your content to add value for both search engines and humans. The visuals are important, although perhaps not in ways that might be obvious.

Your website doesn't need to win a design award (unless you're any kind of artist) to be successful, but it does have to appeal to the subconscious need of your visitors to be "usable."

Ask how we can help!

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Sudoku Solution

Visitors can make a decision in as little as 50 milliseconds of arrival on your homepage, to stay or to click away. Even if they remain, the visual appeal of your site continues to affect their unconscious impression, and ultimately, helps determine if they establish a relationship with you - and buy - or just leave.

DON'T
1. Allow the text to expand to the full width of the window if the visitor maximizes.
Have you ever gone to a website and maximized the window, only to find that each line of the content now stretches the entire 14 - 16 - 20 inches across your monitor screen? Once you read across a line that long to the right side of the screen, how easy is it to decide which line is the next one back at the left side? There's a reason newspaper columns are so narrow. Many websites were created with "fluid" widths a few years ago, when large screens weren't as prevalent as they are today. Don't make your visitors have to play with their window size until they find one that's readable.

2. Use a Flash doorway page.
Not only do your visitors not want to wait for the page to load, your homepage is the single most important page for search engine optimization. Don't waste it (and your money) by creating a Flash homepage that adds nothing to your content.

Browser Differences
Did you know your website can look dramatically different when viewed with different browsers or operating systems?

One of the biggest mistakes made by amateur web designers is to create the site using Internet Explorer version x. They work hard on getting it to look "just right," but they have no idea that other browsers - even other versions of Internet Explorer - will display their pages differently. Often the differences are so glaring that entire blocks of text are missing - or the spacing is off so much that some text is on top of, and thus obscuring, other text. You might need to scroll horizontally in one browser to see what fit perfectly in another.

The first step to solve this problem is knowing it exists. Be sure your site is viewed, at minimum, using Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, on Windows, MAC and Linux platforms. Fixing the problems you find can be extremely frustrating, but the head-in-the-sand solution is not the answer.

Which of the following is not (and never was) a web browser?

• Opera
• Mosaic
• Thallium
• Mozilla
• Konqueror