As graphic designers, web designers & developers theres never enough information you can know. No-one is the GURU of I KNOW ALL WEB DESIGN SECRETS! but we can have some great tools up our sleeves to give us assistance and even an edge against everyone else.
Google, bing, yahoo and so-on are all the biggest names in the industry, i'm actually sick of hearing their names ! Hahaha but seriously everyday people like myself ravel through worlds of information trying to get an edge on the other guys out there. Each engine has its own set of so called webmaster tools, and again each has their own type of search engine indexing. This is where the engines crawl our websites and put the results in their search databases, now on the other end of the stick is the users. People like you and i that surf the web looking at sites and then passing that info onto friends, family and so-on.
How often do we at the development end ever ask the users what they like, dislike about our websites? I know i've tried but generally its hard enough to get the user to stay on the site in the first place than to also ask them to fill in a survey or poll. I'm trying hard now to get many bendigo business owners to just see my site and the benefits i can give them as a freelance developer/designer, if only they knew i'm the guy they need to upgrade their page so it works & actually attracts users not repels them. *Anyhowwwwwwwww*
If only we had a tool in our basket of tricks that could see the users mind, or better yet see their screen. A great tool i stumbled across the other week is Googles Browser size! If you haven't seen nor used it yet i suggest you do so, this little beauty allows us to get an idea of what our website looks like to web surfers, in many browser sizes and the stats of what parts of a screen are potentially overlooked.
It actually very simple, yet it gives you new insight into how well we currently use the real estate on our webpages. Since we as developers, designers and alike generally have high-resolution displays that can fit almost anything. We know that our site's navigation is the coolest in the world and we can get to any page in next to no time, But in most cases our bias experience of the web at large is different from that of our prospected clients. Go on and try it on your website, see all the parts you thought worked that actually maybe 5% will see IF they stay long enough!
Once you've been and had a play with Googles Browser Size tool then think a little deeper, i did and it can get really scary! My point is if you think of SEO and ranking in search results then imagine how much more there is to being 1st place on search results? When it comes to rankings we usually tend to think in numbers: 1st rank, 5th rank or in blocks: top 10, top 5, top 3, etc. But when you think about rankings in terms of above search volumes, competition research, etc. it turns out there's so much more to the game we've been missing until now.
Thanks for listening, i hope this helps many of you? Until next time..........
Regards
Kanedogg!
