Themes

From experience, this is the thing most people are interested in to begin with.

How to Install a Theme in Firefox

There are two places you can choose themes from. The first is the Firefox Add-Ons site and the second is the Firefox Personas site.

To Install a Theme From the Firefox Add-Ons Site

• First off, visit the Firefox Add-Ons site
• Click on the image of your desired theme
• When the page loads, click the button that says ‘Add to Firefox’
• When prompted, accept the software installation
• A Firefox dialogue box will open up after it has finished downloading. Click the button that says restart.
• Your browser will open up, sporting the new theme that you just installed. Easy :)

If you want to switch back to another theme you have installed, go to Tools > Add-Ons and click the Themes tab. Select ‘Use Theme’ for the theme you want and hit restart again.

To Install a Theme From the Firefox Personas Site

• First off, visit the Personas site
• The cool thing about this site is that once you install their plugin, you can hover over any of the themes and it will automatically change your browser’s theme on the fly, so you can see what it would look like without needing to restart
• So click the button that says ‘Get Personas For Firefox’ and when prompted accept the installation
• Click the button that says Restart Firefox
• Your browser will open up with the theme you selected and you can also hover over any other theme in the gallery to see what it would look like and click ‘Wear It’ to install it.

Optionally Customise the Layout of Your Buttons and Toolbars

So now your browser looks just the way you want, save for a few buttons that you’d like to have in different positions. You can alter this to some degree too. To do so, right click on the toolbar and select ‘Customise’. A dialogue box will open up and you’ll be able to drag your buttons around your tooolbar until everything is where you want it to be.

How to Install a Theme in Google Chrome

• First off, visit the Chrome Themes Gallery
• Choose the theme you’d like and hit Apply Theme
• The theme will be applied instantly without a need to restart

If you want to revert to the default theme, go to your ‘Settings’ icon, then ‘Options’ and then the tab named Personal Stuff.

Add-ons

Add-ons can improve your browser in just about any way imaginable. I use Firefox as my main browser because it has by far the widest range of addons and plugins available and is a very secure browser. But Chrome has a decent set of extensions and more are appearing all the time, while extensions are even being developed for IE8 now.

How to Install an Add-on in Firefox

• First, go to the Firefox Add-Ons site and pick on of the hundreds of helpful plugins available
• Click on ‘Add to Firefox’
• When prompted, accept the software installation
• Click Restart browser and your addon will have been installed

To see a list of all installed add-ons at any time, go to Tools > Add-Ons and click the ‘Extensions’ tab. While add-ons are very helpful, try not to get carried away installing everything under the sun as they will eventually slow down your browser!

How to Install an Add-on in Chrome

• First, visit the Chrome Extensions site
• Choose your extension and select ‘Install’
• A dialogue box will appear telling you what info it needs access to. If you trust it, select ‘Install’
• The addon will be pinned to your toolbar

To manage your addons, go to your Settings icon and select ‘Extensions’.

How to Install an Add-on in Internet Explorer 8

• First, go to the Internet Explorer Addons site and pick and choose one of the addons
• Click on ‘Add to Internet Explorer’
• When prompted, click on ‘Add’
• The addon should now be installed, though, rather unhelpfully, IE won’t give you a success message

You can view all of your IE8 Add-Ons by going to Tools > Manage Add-Ons

So, you can see how quick and easy it is to install an extension or add-on to whatever modern browser you’re using to add a bit more power or customisation and makes things a little more personal.

In the next post I’ll be writing a brief breakdown of the plugins I use and why they help me during every day tasks.

Check out the other posts from this series:
The Power of the Browser – Choose Your Weapon (Part 1 of 3)
The Power of the Browser – My Browser Breakdown (Part 3 of 3)

So what is a browser?

For most of you, it’s likely to be that little blue ‘e’ you click on your desktop that magically brings the internet to your fingertips. Right now, there are 5 major browsers that are used by around 99% of the UK population online (Source: StatCounter Global Stats). Which prompts me to ask the question: how many of you know what browser you’re using right now? My guess is that about 50% of you are aware of whether you’re using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera or another. For those of you that are aware, how many of you know what version of that browser you are using? Probably half again. Maybe less.

Click the image to view the chart from StatCounter

Just tell me which is the best one so I can move on please

I will. Well, I’ll give you my opinion. But before the bias, it’s a good idea to get your head around some of the vital differences across various browsers and why some are limiting what you can do on the web, while others are opening up opportunities to do things which may just blow your mind. At which point you’ll be able to walk around with the same sense of smugness as me ;)

I’m sure some of you are thinking “I’m not a web designer so why is this even important?”. And it’s a good question. I understand why you might think that. But perhaps the best way to answer it is to talk about the benefits of knowing your browser better.

Performance – You Have to Have it

Each browser has different strengths and weaknesses. I won’t go in to the details which you can see in the following extremely helpful browser performance graphic. But in a nutshell, Chrome is the fastest overall when it comes to displaying websites, blowing away the competition. In second place is Firefox, closely followed by Safari, then Opera, and lagging way back in fifth is the world’s most popular browser – Internet Explorer. For a lot of you, that alone will mean that you choose Chrome as your go-to browser. For others of you, it may prompt a lightbulb moment that maybe IE isn’t necessarily your best bet, even though it comes bundled with Windows on most new PCs (until recently).

Click the image to view the chart from Six Revisions

As you might expect, all these figures show is how quickly they display websites and load various elements of a page such as images, videos, Javascript animations, Flash etc. Although this is very important, as people want more and more instantaneous access, there are other things to consider when choosing your browser.

Security – Do Not Compromise

This section, unfortunately, needs to be dominated by one browser vendor in particular. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been well documented in the last few years for having major security issues in versions 6, 7 and even their most recent version – 8. In fact, these security issues have become so prominent and severe that both the German and French governments have publicly advised against using the browser. Ouch.

Click the image to view the story

It seems hackers target IE browsers more than any other partly due to its global dominance and partly because of its closed source nature. What I mean by ‘closed source’ is that IE browsers don’t allow Joe Bloggs to look at how it is put together. Only Joe Microsoft can do that. While you might think that this level of secrecy should make it more secure than an open source browser such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, the opposite is actually true. How can that be, I hear you ask. Well, open source is, as the name suggests, open. Which means that anybody can look into the code behind the browser and spot vulnerabilities or security flaws and offer suggested fixes to the makers of the browser. Not just the guys at Microsoft. It’s a self-improvement cycle and it’s aided by the thousands of developers around the world who are allowed to contribute to it.

The very nature of open source software and the community behind it is what drives true progression in this extremely competitive environment. This is why you’ll find very few web designers and developers who use any version of Internet Explorer as their primary browser.

Why, then, does IE still manage to dominate the browser market today. The answer, quite simply, is that it is bundled with every version of Windows. At least it was until February this year. But that’s an entirely new topic.

Graphics – Display Beautiful Things Beautifully

Different browsers have different capabilities when it comes to displaying images, graphics, text and various other elements. Just like all TVs are different, so are browsers. These interesting benchmark tests – Text Rendering and Image Rendering (Source: graphicrating) show that this is an area where Internet Explorer finally does something right, topping the table ahead of the other 4 main browsers in text rendering and coming in second for image rendering. With images, Firefox surprisingly lags behind in last place. Although, since these tests were carried out, Firefox has made significant improvements to it’s graphics engine. Another example of community-lead development. Chrome features well in the images test but not so well with text, while Opera and Safari come in no higher than third in either test.

Click the image to visit the graphicrating website

Supporting Web Standards – Build it Right

This may sound like a really boring subject, but when you see it in action, you’ll understand why it’s important, so bear with me.

Many people look at websites and believe they are not dissimilar to printed works. Draw a blue box, stick it there. Write out menu links, stick ‘em over there. And everything will stay where it is. If it were that easy, I would do it for free :)

Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. The way a website displays relies on various different coding languages used by the web designer. The language that controls the visual layout of all modern websites is called CSS (cascading stylesheets). Now, the problem with this is that all browsers interpret CSS slightly differently.

As a visual example of what that means to you as the end-user, let’s have a look at some screenshots of this website displayed in Internet Explorer 6 – which has notoriously poor support for web standards.

Extra white-space is thrown in, things are mis-aligned and the main body background image has disappeared altogether

IE6 doesn't support transparency in images and instead puts an ugly grey box around them. More white-space is thrown in and some floated elements drop below eachother

If you’re viewing this site in recent versions (at time of writing) of Firefox, Opera, Safari or Chrome, it should look pretty much as intended.

This inconsistency across browsers means designers often need to spend many hours correcting bugs and issues in older, poorer browsers (quite possibly for a very small user base), even though it may display perfectly well in modern ones. This usually means writing a general stylesheet, then another one for IE6 and sometimes even one more more for IE7, because each one displays websites differently. But with so many people still flogging the dead horse of IE6, can you really afford not to design for it?

The end result, as you might expect, is that the designer needs to offset the extra hours against the client by charging more. It’s a necessary evil and will never be completely eradicated unless it can be guaranteed that all browsers will behave consistently. But with the rate at which new technology and devices are coming into the market, it looks as though there will forever be this necessity for fixing things across different platforms.

Incidentally, WHD renders reasonably well in IE6 – I just turned off the IE6 stylesheet for the purpose of this post :)

Your turn to take part. Go to this website and wait a few seconds until the number stops increasing. That number is the generic score given to your browser for its adherence to web standards. The Acid3 test is:-

…the third in a series of test pages written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.

(Source: The Web Standards Project)

Given that the Acid Test is the standard to which many developers and designers build websites to, it would help if all browsers were made to support the same high standards. Unfortunately, no matter how well built a website is, some browsers such as IE6 have such poor support for web standards, that until there is a major shift in the amount of people using it, the web will never fulfill its potential. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of designers, developers, companies and organisations taking action and trying to hasten the demise of IE6. Here are just a handful -

• Bring Down IE6
• IE6 No More
• IE6 Funeral
• End 6
• Hey IT
• Stop Living in the Past

Of course, not everybody is able to upgrade their browser. Some companies won’t allow you to for fear of breaking their outdated systems that rely on it. Which is fair enough. But you have to ask the question of whether it can really be safe/productive running systems on a browser with such well-documented security and performance issues and whether the benefits of running a more modern and powerful browser outweigh the cost of upgrading aged systems.

There is so much more that can be said about the merits and drawbacks of designing for antiquated browsers. But to keeps things light, we’ll leave those for another day.

Customisation – Make it Yours

If I lost your attention in the previous section, this is where I’m hoping to get it back. When I talk to people about browsers (yes, I do talk to people about browsers), this is normally when they actually start to listen!

Providing you’re using a browser that supports add-ons and extensions you can do just about anything you can think of with it. Currently, the most highly customisable browsers are Firefox first and Chrome second. You can give your browser a theme, install countless helpful tools, edit the layout of your buttons, block pop-ups and ads and much much more.

Want to publish Facebook updates without having to visit the Facebook site? You can do that from a toolbar. Want to keep track of Twitter feeds without visiting the Twitter site? You can do that with an add-on. Translate entire websites into any language? Instant screenshots? Export saved passwords? Sync bookmarks across computers? Instant messenger in the browser? Customise Google’s appearance? Share news within 2 clicks? Email notifier? Whatever you can think of, somebody has built an add-on just for that. Not to mention the hundreds of themes you can install to give your browser a completely personalised look and feel.

Click the image to view the different themes available for Firefox

In the next post I’ll go into a little more detail about ways you can customise and improve your browser through the use of add-ons and plugins.

Check out the other posts from this series:
The Power of the Browser – Make it Yours (Part 2 of 3)
The Power of the Browser – My Browser Breakdown (Part 3 of 3)

So, with that in mind, I’ve put together a question and answer post based on some of the questions I’m regularly asked about SEO. Hopefully it will help to explain some of the more basic ideas behind this tricky subject.

Right, you mentioned SEO – what’s that?

Well, let me give you a quick definition by someone who is an expert:

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines

(Source: SEOmoz)

Essentially, it’s making your website popular/useful enough to people to warrant it appearing higher up the search engine rankings.

That’s a strange way to start a conversation. Anyway, I get that, but what does ‘active practice’ mean and what does it actually entail?

Well, this is where I need to exercise a degree of self-control and refrain from attempting to explain every single aspect of SEO. There are hundreds of ways I as a web designer and you as the client can contribute to improving your website’s SEO.

I can:

• ensure content is correctly and efficiently structured, ie – the main content’s title uses heading level 1, the second uses heading level 2 etc
• use alt and title tags for all images and give them meaningful descriptions
• write clean, accessible code that adheres to web standards
• provide a sitemap of all pages on the site
• submit the website to multiple search engines

You can:

• promote your website through various social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter
• attempt to get other related or mutually beneficial websites to link to you
• write keyword-rich and relevant content for your pages (content is king)
• include a regularly updated blog documenting useful news and information about your business/website
• get involved in other blogs in your field to drive traffic to your site

These are just some of the basic ways to go about it, but none of them will guarantee you a top spot in search engines.

Our sitemap showing our site's structure

Why can’t you guarantee me a top spot in search engines?

Well, let’s think about it. If you have a website that sells pink teddy bears (for example) and you want to be number 1 in Google for when somebody searches on the term ‘Pink teddy bear’, you have to take into account everybody else who wants to be number 1 for the same term. If I search that right now I’m told there are over 3 million results. All of them want to be number one. So why should yours be rated higher than anybody elses?

What affects my position in search engine rankings?

The short answer is more things than I care to look into. A slightly longer answer is that nobody knows exactly how results are calculated. And certainly nobody, other than the search engines themselves, can guarantee ranking positions. Not only do they change all the time but they are also different depending on which search engine you are using. so if you search for ‘pink teddy bear’ in Google, you’ll get different results than if you’d searched for it in Bing. And none of it is controlled by us.

Among the many factors affecting a website’s search engine performance are:

• keyword use in titles
• keyword density of main content
• quality of inbound links
• relevance of outbound links
• site structure and hierarchy
• click-through rate from search engine pages

For a (much) more detailed look at what can affect your search engine rankings, take a look at this excellent article on ranking factors by SEOmoz.

Holy crap, there’s a lot more to it than I thought. What else should I keep my eye on?

So we’ve touched on search engine optimisation. But with the continual rise and increasing involvement in social media, what people say and do online is becoming easier and quicker to spread across the web. Whether you mean it to or not. This has given rise to a new wave of thinking and, unfortunately, yet another abbreviation. This time known as SMO – social media optimisation. Without getting too deep into social media (another cavernous subject) it basically revolves around being active on websites such as Digg, Facebook, Twitter and the like. But more than that, it’s about being active with the purpose of driving traffic to your site by being influential, controversial, insightful, helpful or just about any other way you can think of that will peak people’s interest and tempt them to check out your site.

SMO is going to grow and grow, especially as leaders in the web world such as Google adapt their methods and algorithms for throwing up new and popular content. Let’s look at an example. If you were to search the term “world cup results” in Google right now (at time of writing), you’ll be shown a list of live scores right on the results page. A little further down there is a section called ‘Latest results for world cup results’ which gives you a real-time feed of articles about the World Cup from respectable websites around the globe. Try this with the term “#worldcup” and you’ll get a bunch of live Twitter comments.

Real-time results for '#worldcup'

Conclusion

If your business functions primarily online and that’s where you get most of your exposure, SEO and SMO are areas you have to address. You may not want to or you may not see them as sustainable or viable options, but this is the way the web world is going. As with everything in life, it’s about striking the perfect balance. A balance between a good, solid, search engine friendly website and active online promotion. Cloud computing, real-time search, person to person interaction, personal views and opinions. It cannot be ignored. And with all the benefits and excitement it can bring, why would you want to?

Simplicity

There are a lot of web designers and web design companies out there. We know how important your website is to you and that you will most likely do a fair bit of research to find the right agency to take on your project. We also know that people (including us) hate nothing more than hidden costs. Especially when you find something that looks like a good deal. So with exactly that in mind, we’ve decided to stick our prices on the site.

Because of the amount of features we offer with our CMS and e-Commerce packages the figures cannot be 100% accurate until we have enough details from you. It is simply not possible. Price is dependent on many issues, including how much content you want, what functionality, the level of design sophistication, how quickly you need it etc etc. We don’t offer rigid, set-price websites in the CMS and e-Commerce packages because our work is not rigid or one-dimensional.

Hang on a sec, don’t you offer a £500 Startup Package deal?

Yes we do. And at the risk of sounding slightly hypocritical, we do this for good reason. In our experience, some clients want nothing more than a very simple site set up as quickly as possible and that doesn’t require too many features or functions. These sites tend to be simpler and a little less customised/complex, so the price is far less likely to fluctuate. This is why we have the Startup Package at a set price. It is still possible to request extra features or functionality with this package, for which we will then rework the price.

Efficiency

We get a lot of random emails asking about pricing….because we haven’t (up until now) displayed any figures. Some people might not be expecting the figures we offer back to them, while others are more than happy with them. The point is, by giving you an idea of what you need to pay before you have to contact us we know that when we do get an email from you, you are serious about the project.

You get an idea of the budget up front. We know we are dealing with genuine clients. What could be more satisfying.

Confidence

We are confident in our work. More importantly, we are confident in our attitude towards our work.

Our prices are not high when compared to a lot of agencies. The main reason for this is that we specialise in working with startups and small businesses, who we realise will not always have a lot of spare capital. At the same time, we are also aware that we are not the cheapest agency around. Why? Because we believe in the quality of our work and because we work hard for you. We work with you and we help you grow. We do not disappear after we’ve collected our fees. And because of this, we believe the prices we have set are very reasonable.

The overview

Social media is the concept of interacting with others through various forms of online technologies. This can be through commenting on a blog, sharing photos, sharing videos and a whole range of other approaches. Wikipedia give a pretty good definition:

Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many).

(Source: Wikipedia)

Right, but what does that actually mean?

Well, rather than speaking at people….you can speak to people. It turns one-way communication into two-way communication. Too many companies are all too willing to promote themselves or their products but are not interested in listening to their customers….unless it is in a sale situation. How do you expect to build a good customer relationship if you aren’t willing to listen, learn and adapt?

Whether you choose to believe it or not, social media has developed into an essential tool for every successful company out there. You probably already interact with various forms of social media every day and you may not even realise it. Every time you log into facebook, every time you create a new tweet, every time you visit YouTube, every time you upload to Flickr, every time you browse Wikipedia, every time you check your RSS feeds – you are engaging in social media. You may not be uploading videos to Youtube yourself and you may only use Facebook to see what other people are up to, but you are still playing a part in online social interaction. Just to varying degrees. Every action you take in these situations will have a consequence. Hopefully positive….sometimes negative. Learning to manipulate these situations in your favour is all part and parcel of mastering the social media sphere.

What benefits does all this online sharing and chit chat have then?

It’s very easy to dismiss this area of the web as wishy washy and unnecessary due to its difficulty to measure in terms of conversion-goals and ROI. So let’s look at it from another perspective using a basic example.

Example:

The time comes when I need to buy a new laptop (more regularly than you might think!). I log into Twitter to find that a whole bunch of my friends have all recently purchased new laptops, of which 90% went for the exact same model and are tweeting like crazy about how good it is. It’s going to take a lot to get me to think about buying any other model. This is because I’m likely to to be more open to my friends’ suggestions than say Google’s results for ‘Top of the range laptop’, simply because I’ll know the results haven’t been generated by a cold, calculated algorithm like Google’s. These results have come from real life people who I know and trust and can give real life feedback. The results from my friends are personal. I know them and they know me. I know what they need to do with their laptop, and I now know whether the product they’ve opted for would suit me.

The same principle can be applied to just about any situation. People are far more likely to trust a friend’s suggestion over one where they don’t know the source of where it came from.

Search engine rankings

One particularly important aspect of developing a good social media persona that people do not often realise, is the effect on their website’s search engine ranking. The more you engage with websites such as Twitter, Flickr and Youtube etc, the more links you are likely to generate to your website. These links can come from people who are interested in what you’ve said, want to use your article/post/message to explain something to others, or any number of different reasons. Once you start to develop lots of incoming links and establish yourself as an authority on any topic, search engines will reward you by moving you up the rankings. This will likely result in even more people visiting your site. It is a continuous cycle that continually promotes you and what you do.

Cost effective

The majority of social media outlets are extremely cost effective….because you needn’t pay a penny for them. It takes nothing more than a passion for what you do and little bit of time to set yourself up. Yet the returns can make a huge impact on the success of your business. Any remotely sane businessman will be able to see benefit in that.

Human recommendation and interaction

The goalposts are constantly moving. People are becoming so used to the endless advertising they are faced with every day that it’s becoming easy to ignore it, and although people will tire of banner ads and posters, people will never tire of communicating with other people. As previously mentioned, the persuasive powers of individual people you know and trust are far greater than something that has been created as a catch-all as a result of a few half-witted board meetings. This is why we have testimonials, even though they are not necessarily always reliable sources. This is why just about every large corporation out there has a blog of some description, and quite likely somebody monitoring Twitter for instances of their name cropping up that they may be able to address.

Lead generation

Being involved in online social media opens up new avenues for lead generation. With so much link exposure and brand promotion as happens through sites like Twitter, it is possible to stretch the reach of your brand and business further than you can with any other media outlet, save for TV ads. But the ace in the pack for social media here is that while TV ads are broadcast at people, those who go online in search of something will be proactively seeking it when they stumble across a link to your site. Lucky coincidence? Or excellent brand management by yourself?

Summary

If used appropriately, social media can be far more rewarding than you may realise at first. People like to talk to people. Having a website is one thing, but if you don’t have an evident human side behind it that is easy to access, people won’t be comfortable approaching you. People like to know that once they engage you, you will be there with them to answer questions, troubleshoot and generally help them out if they need it. So if it’s becoming more of a requirement to show this human side, why not go a step further and use these plentiful social media outlets to your advantage and promote your best qualities through them?

It’s both a blessing and a curse that the web moves so quickly. But one thing is certain. If you don’t keep up, you’ll get left behind. Those who prosper will be those who understand the importance of a well-rounded online persona.