Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

The design of components can go a long way in determining how much a game is enjoyed. A good game does not necessarily require good components but they certainly don’t hurt. Imagine playing Chess with flat, cardboard counters. It’s still the same game but would it be as enjoyable an experience?

* Tigris & Euphrates tilesMake tiles smaller than they spaces they’re placed on. If your game includes playing tiles onto spaces such that they’re next to each other, it’s better if the tiles are slightly smaller than the spaces they’re placed on. This means that they can be slightly bumped and moved without disturbing all the others. Good: Tigris & Euphrates (Hans im Glück); Bad: Streetcar (Mayfair Games).
* Use highly contrasting/distinguishable colours for player pieces. This is a bit tricky as many people suffer from (one of several forms of) colour blindness. So, there’s no list of colours that will be guaranteed to be easily distinguishable for everybody. Further, the particular colours available to you (as determined by your parts manufacturer) can vary widely so it’s a really good idea to ask for samples to determine that the blue and green are not identical (as an example). With this in mind it’s almost never a good idea to include both orange and red as player colours.
* Use shapes as well as colours to distinguish pieces. A fair percentage of the population have trouble distinguishing certain colours, even colours that many other people see with a high degree of contrast. Adding different shapes or graphics can help tremendously, even for those of us who do not suffer from colour blindness. For example, every city in Trans America has a unique shape corresponding to the five colours. Ursuppe is another example that uses different shapes in addition to colour to distinguish the players’ amoebae. It’s also important to use graphics in a way that helps differentiate colours. An example of a poor design is Schotten-Totten in which there are nine cards in each of six colours. Each card has a picture of a Scotsman, from a feeble codger for the 1’s to a great strapping lad for the 9’s. It might seem that pairing the picture with the value to be a natural choice. However, it does nothing to help those who have difficulty differentiating colours. A superior method would be to pair the picture with the suit (so that all the red cards show the strapping lad for example). This would allow a colour blind individual to distinguish the suits from each another. Zirkus Flohcati employs just such a method and is far more useful as a result.

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Visit your favorite news page and read the caption under the picture—or view the picture itself in a size you can see. An elegant new zoom feature lets you swoop in and see entire web pages. They scale in the way you’d expect them to, with all the elements of a page’s layout expanding equally, so you can zero in on what matters.

1. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but search engines don’t read pictures. Make sure your key search terms are written out in text, not part of a graphic title you hire somebody to prepare for you. That also means you should not just show pictures of toys, but also write out the names, and possibly a keyword description with the title.

2. Have several pages of articles related to your website’s topic. Use a different keyword search term for each article. For instance, one article might use frequently the term “safe toys for babies”, while another might use the term “baby safety”.

3. What’s the URL of your website? Your name won’t help you there. Your key search term will. In this instance, I might pick www.baby-toy-safety.com, for example (if that is one of your top keyword phrases). Hire somebody who knows what he is doing to develop the right keyword strategy for you BEFORE you choose your domain name.

4. What’s the title of your page? I don’t know how many times I see titles such as “Article” or “Contact us”. Don’t expect the search engine robots to get all excited about that term. And don’t expect anybody to search for that term, either. Much better to title your page “Free article on safe toys for babies” or “Contact the *Baby Toy Expert* today”. By the way, this is the single most important place to include your keyword phrases.

5. What about that navigation menu that appears on every single page of your website? Does it say “Contact the baby toy expert?” Or “about the baby toy expert”. Or links about baby toys?” Need I say more?

While most are conscious about ranking well in SERPs many overlook the need to optimise for image search. Image search should NOT be overlooked since it can bring in considerable amount of traffic. As an example, in my personal blog it’s really funny how the search term “Mila Jovovich” gives me the most search traffic and how a vast majority of that traffic comes from image search. Note too that I only posted about Mila Jovovich a couple of times. Goes to show that you just don’t know what will really bring you lots of traffic.

To make sure you don’t miss out on the traffic image search can bring (if you post images on your blog!) here are the factors you should take note of:

1. text surrounding the image - Note that the distance of the text from the image also counts so it makes sense to place the image as near as possible to the related text.

2. text of pages linking to the picture

3. the number of websites containing the same or similar image - This helps determine relevancy of image to the search term

4. size of image - Usually the image with higher resolution ranks better. Note though that users can filter search results by file size. The reasoning behind this may be more for the viewing pleasure since a higher resolution image looks better.

5. Remember though that loading your page with lots of high resolution images may bog down your site causing it to have a longer loading time. Make sure you do not sacrifice usability and accessibility!

6. link relationships between images - Images that are linked together and have related associated text will help determine relevancy

7. frequency of image’s appearance in website - This pertains to logos and other recurring images. It helps determine importance and relevance of image to the website topic.

8. face and name detection - The more faces on an image the higher it is usually ranked. On the other hand if a specific name is queried then a single face with the person searched for will rank better.