Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

1) More screen space. Make your icons small. Go to View - Toolbars - Customize and check the “Use small icons” box.

2) Smart keywords. If there’s a search you use a lot (let’s say IMDB.com’s people search), this is an awesome tool that not many people use. Right-click on the search box, select “Add a Keyword for this search”, give the keyword a name and an easy-to-type and easy-to-remember shortcut name (let’s say “actor”) and save it. Now, when you want to do an actor search, go to Firefox’s address bar, type “actor” and the name of the actor and press return. Instant search! You can do this with any search box.

3) Keyboard shortcuts. This is where you become a real Jedi. It just takes a little while to learn these, but once you do, your browsing will be super fast. Here are some of the most common (and my personal favs):

* Spacebar (page down)
* Shift-Spacebar (page up)
* Ctrl+F (find)
* Alt-N (find next)
* Ctrl+D (bookmark page)
* Ctrl+T (new tab)
* Ctrl+K (go to search box)
* Ctrl+L (go to address bar)
* Ctrl+= (increase text size)
* Ctrl+- (decrease text size)
* Ctrl-W (close tab)
* F5 (reload)
* Alt-Home (go to home page)

4) Auto-complete. This is another keyboard shortcut, but it’s not commonly known and very useful. Go to the address bar (Control-L) and type the name of the site without the “www” or the “.com”. Let’s say “google”. Then press Control-Enter, and it will automatically fill in the “www” and the “.com” and take you there - like magic! For .net addresses, press Shift-Enter, and for .org addresses, press Control-Shift-Enter.

5) Tab navigation. Instead of using the mouse to select different tabs that you have open, use the keyboard. Here are the shortcuts:

* Ctrl+Tab (rotate forward among tabs)
* Ctrl+Shft+Tab (rotate to the previous tab)
* Ctrl+1-9 (choose a number to jump to a specific tab)

6) Mouse shortcuts. Sometimes you’re already using your mouse and it’s easier to use a mouse shortcut than to go back to the keyboard. Master these cool ones:

* Middle click on link (opens in new tab)
* Shift-scroll down (previous page)
* Shift-scroll up (next page)
* Ctrl-scroll up (decrease text size)
* Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size)
* Middle click on a tab (closes tab)

While designing the navigation for your site keep the following points in mind:

* Organized Links
Make sure your links are well organized according to the order of importance. Visitors should be easily able to find what they are looking for under different categories.
E.g. All our main links are found on the top i.e. our services, products,portfolio, resources etc.Other interesting links are found on the right of the page. These are common and consistent throughout the site.
Finally if the web page belongs to a guide E.g web design guide you will find the related links below the right menu and also at the bottom of the page.

Note: Related links are very important as visitors coming to a particular page will probably be interested in more information you have under the same topic.

* Clear and Prominent
Once you have decided on your navigation links, you need to think of the best place to put them. Navigation should be clear and consistent. Try to design your navigation on the top or on the left as these are the first places our eyes go to. Also locate the primary links high enough on the page so that they are visible without scrolling. Navigation images should be seamlessly integrated into the site design. Avoid putting navigation links at the bottom of the page as visitors will need to scroll right down to see the links. If you like you could put the important links at the top AND bottom of the page just to make sure your visitors don’t miss the link.

* Consistent
Navigation should be clear and consistent. The important links of your website should be on every page, in the same location, and in the same sequence. Don’t confuse your visitors by putting your navigation links in different places in different pages.

* Easy to understand
Make your links easy to understand and to the point. Usually you won’t have enough place to have long links so make use of the space wisely. Visitors need to know where they will go on clicking on a particular link, so make sure your links are understandable or nobody is going to click on your links, which will defeat the purpose of designing a good navigation system.

* DHTML Menus
If you have a large number of links under categories and sub-categories you could use navigation menus to organize your links. There are many cut ‘n’ paste scripts available on the Net that you could use to create great navigation systems. A favorite resource center is SimplyTheBest.net, you’ll find tons of useful navigation menus that are very easy to install on your site.

Every website needs a Sitemap big or small. Sitemap should be linked to from every page on your site. A site map will help users and search engine robots find all the important pages on your site with just two clicks. This is especially helpful if your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu like java script or images based navigation. For WordPress blogs I recommend downloading this free sitemap generator plugin. You can see example on my sitemap page.

Smaller sites can use second navigation bar in the footer that will act as a small mini site map. This is nothing more than all your important pages as links in the footer.

By submitting a XML Sitemap to a search engine, you are making easier for that engine’s crawlers to crawl and index pages of your site. As Google describes it in this article

“Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can’t reach all areas of a website through a browseable interface.”

For regular websites there are many free online xml sitemap generators, just Google it but for your WordPress blog you can use this free Google XML sitemap generator plugin as it will also create Robots.txt file which is the next Free SEO Tip.

A really common format for sites right now is what l called a “Shell Site”. These sites are where the navigation is developed and then the content is shoved into that format or shell. What he found was that when a user is looking for information, shell sites are very hard to use. Because the links are the same on all navigation within the site, they don’t add anything new once they have been reviewed. Thus, when a user is looking for information, the navigation shell is usually discarded as an information source immediately.

Set up your blog so that the side navigation bar is present on all pages.

Make sure your archives and previous posts are accessible from all pages of your blog so they get spidered easily.

We have seen a large number of computers coming in with problems navigation on the Internet. Also unable to go to Windows update and virus update sites. Here is a quick fix that also seems to speed navigation up some.

Just for safety create a copy of the file before making changes.

goto

C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ (Windows XP)

C:\I386 (Windows 2000)

Open the host with notepad.

remove all entries bellow

127.0.0.1 localhost

then save and close.

Ctrl + Alt + End: Open the NT Security dialog.

Alt + PageUp: Switch between programs.

Alt + PageDown: Switch between programs in reverse.

Alt + Insert: Cycle through the programs in most recently used order.

Alt + Home: Display start menu.

Ctrl + Alt + Break: Switch the client computer between a window and a full screen.

Alt + Delete: Display the Windows menu.

Ctrl + Alt + NumpadMinus: Place a snapshot of the entire client window area on the Terminal       server clipboard and provide the same functionality as pressing Alt + PrintScreen on a local       computer.

Ctrl + Alt + NumpadPlus: Place a snapshot of the active window in the client on the Terminal       server clipboard and provide the same functionality as pressing PrintScreen on a local       computer.

This is the second part of the essential SEO tips for WordPress blogs covering the topics of Google Sitemaps plugins, pings and ping servers, valid (X)HTML, importance of a layout that puts post content ahead of sidebars and navigation, and displaying post excerpts and teaser text on the home page.