Web Design Ethiopia

Query-based search engines generally work by comparing a user’s query against an index that cross-references web pages. Although each search engine behaves slightly differently behind the scenes, there are some common traits across most systems.

Matches are often based on the number of times that a search term appears in your document, weighted by the length of your document (shorter documents with the same number of matches are better) and the overall frequency of the word (rare words are weighted more heavily than common words).

There are several ways to increase the chances that your web site will appear in search listing: be sure that your pages include HTML, text, include <alt> tags for all your images, include metatags on every page, and follow good writing practice.

Make sure your pages include text! Without text, the search engines will have little from which to gauge the content of your page. The only information about your images that crawlers can get is from the names and <alt> tags. So be sure to include relevant <alt> tags that mention something about the content of your images, not just that they are images (e.g., <alt = “this is a picture” >).

While some people will tell you that it is best to have huge pages full of text in order to receive the best rankings in a search index, this is not always the case. Some indexes divide by the number of words, and thus more words will actually decrease the quality ranking associated with a match.

Responding To Problems
When you find problems with a live site, it is critical that you address these problems right away. Major or minor errors in a live web site lead users to perceive that site as unreliable or unprofessional. Misspellings can damage users’ trust in your site as much as broken functionality can. It is imperative that you address all problems as soon as they are noticed.

A quick response to problems should also become part of your quality assurance process. You should be sure to include time immediately after the launch to take care of any potential snags you may have missed in your user testing and earlier quality assurance measures.

A checklist like that in Form 11-5 can augment your quality assurance procedure to allow for rapid verification that a site remain stable as minor updates occur. (Download from http://www.mkp.com/uew/.)

Of course, when large-scale updates occur, the complete quality assurance procedure should be repeated. And for large, regularly updated sites, a custom checklist can address specific problems that are known to occur as well as include content-specific guidelines and other recurring administrative procedures.

Begin Maintenance Schedule
A regular maintenance schedule should be developed well in advance of your launch, but here is where you put it into action. You should include procedures for regular maintenance and slack time for unexpected maintenance.

Be sure to develop a maintenance schedule that covers the following: updating time-sensitive content (e.g., what’s new! items, interest rates, sale prices, submission deadlines, etc.), fixing unexpected or newly found errors and bugs, and running functionality tests of new releases of browsers, server software, and all changes and updates that have been made.

Plan Major Updates and Revisions
In addition to small changes, bug fixes, and client requests, it’s very likely that you’ll need to make major updates and revisions at some point. Major updates generally consist of functional changes, major interface revisions, and large-scale redesigns that require the effort of a substantial percentage of the original design team.

Revisions and changes to the web site should be driven by a combination of marketing needs, functionality innovation, and user performance measures form the current site. In other words, a redesign doesn’t need to happen just because someone decides the site needs a new look.

While this may be the impetus, and indeed where the cash comes form, when you plan updates make sure you have thoroughly investigated current use and problems with the current interface.

Throughout all of your basic maintenance procedures, you should be recording all problems and changes that either are too insignificant to change in the current version or require too much effort to be done on a regular maintenance schedule.

These problems can then be addressed when developing an update schedule for your web site. In addition, you should consider major functional changes and large-scale revisions and updates.

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