Beyond the text and images

The quality of a webpage is not measured solely by reason of her beauty, but also based on your code, performance and effectiveness.


When you make decisions about investments in technology, trading volume figures are a key information that allows us to more easily choose the best solution among the various options the market offers. There is, for example, select a payroll system for 100 workers for 5000 employees. The complexity and requirements between a stage and another are very different, so we must choose the solution that best meets our requirements and help us to meet business objectives raised.

In Internet marketing projects often faced with a situation like this. The complexity of an integrated website, say, 20 pages, is much lower than a site that will publish a catalog of 1000 products. In the first case, if we make a mistake in the design of the site will be relatively easy to straighten the road, most likely we can easily invest in the development of a second site. Not so when it is a high volume site, since in that case will not be as easy disposal and justify a second investment in its redesign.

It is therefore very important that you as a leader responsible for the design of your website, know from the outset to identify what are the key to the success of the project, identify potential areas of risk and what tools (programming languages, platforms , development standards, etc.). will be using for web site development.

Effects of bad programming

The problems that confront us daily to surf the Internet, such as slow deployment of pages, animations that we can not see out of position content, text with font sizes too small or extremely large, not having control over text size , strange behavior when using different browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Safari), difficulty navigating the site, among others, these are all issues directly related to programming and design standards.

We have around as an example the extreme case of a website to promote equipment and industrial tools designed format film (!), With great content (approximately 600 products), but with great difficulties in navigation caused by the extensive time deployment and dynamic menus, which by design format featuring movie ends you only 20% of the capacity of the screen to display the product of interest.

Various programming scripts

A bitter reality is that most people do not know if your website is programmed in HTML, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, JAVA, JavaScript, PERL or other programming language (script), if a manager has used content (CMS) and what specific product, if the management software is proprietary or is a widely used commercial software, if your site is not actually integrated web pages but rather it is a movie (flash ), if CSS has been used as a mechanism to manage the design style of the pages and if the programming standards align with best practices recommended by the W3C.

In general the clients put all their attention on the visual appearance of the site only in how they look attractive and pleasant pages when accessing the site, completely ignoring what programming standards have been applied in the development of the site, what tools were employed, if the texts are actually images (which has an adverse impact in terms of performance and effectiveness of the site) and, more importantly, whether or not quality programming.

Benefits of efficient code

Web pages are themselves computer programs, applications whose specific function is to display text and images in an attractive and highly readable. A code of safe, clean and efficient not only allows us to sleep peacefully at night, but we also provides the following benefits:

• Visitors will experience much more enjoyable
• Pages will automatically adapt to different types of customers
• Your company will have a quality website
• The pages have a high performance
• Improves efficiency of the site
• The work site maintenance is easier
• It boosts the search engine positioning
• Compatibility with different browsers
• Site Portability
• Easy to adapt to new technologies

Proper programming of web pages will enable your company to have a website efficient, rapid deployment of pages, greater ease of site maintenance, better search engine positioning and above all, most importantly, more satisfied guests for ease of navigation and server response times. Definitely not the same as the customer having to wait several seconds for it to download a movie to display the information is virtually instantaneous.

Unfortunately, businesses find the poor quality of a code until the moment when problems arise. At that time they learn it will be difficult to change providers, either because management software is the owner of the site (designed by the agency) does not have a copy of the database, the site is actually a movie, techniques have been used obsolete design or just the code is of such low quality that it is not worth trying to recover.

Platform and development standards

In web design, it is important what you see, it is even more important what you do not see. In general, people tend to call a place by design, rather than its content, effectiveness and quality of programming. However, after everything is said and done during the development project, is the source code which will speak for the site. Therefore, we suggest you pay more attention to the following aspects should be given priority along with the aesthetics of the site:

• Design standards (CSS, W3C, etc.).
• Programming language (HTML, PHP, ASP, JAVA, PERL, etc.).
• Programming Techniques
• Ability to promotion (SEO)
• Ability to generate traffic ( world ranking)
If you are in charge of your company web site and is currently assessing proposals for agencies and web design, you should inquire a little more about the tools, platforms and techniques that each of these agencies use to develop their website. Not only that, but you find out why this platform is being proposed specifically to develop your company website.

It is important that you know for every need there is a solution. What works for a company, not necessarily work for your company. There are web design agencies offer a unique solution, the same tool for all cases, regardless of whether the client is a consortium or an SME, if you sell industrial products or consulting services, if they require only promotion or sale also online. Ensure the development platform is specifically selected based on the present and future requirements of your business.

A couple of questions on time to the web design agency, sufficient to avoid problems tomorrow with the performance of your website and thus can better achieve the goals originally proposed in its draft Internet marketing.