Rage Design has been designing cutting edge websites for over ten years. With the movement of technology and online marketing, it is essential that websites receive the time and attention required to attract appropriate visitors and drive enquiries and business. Rage Design do not create production line template websites, but invest a high level of time and creativity to create the most effective solutions for businesses and organisations. Every website designed at Rage Design is created to specific standards to fulfill the branding, positioning and objectives of the company. Rage Design has extensive experience in designing websites for Public Sector, Retail, Sports, Leisure and engineering. The way a website looks now is more important than ever, along with all other areas of an online marketing mix - it is imperative when a potential client or visitor views your site, the information required is professionally presented and allows ease of navigation allowing visitors to find information with ease and efficiency. The design of a website has to carry all the correct messages and ultimately promote new business, raise revenue, provide information and add value. Rage Design specialise in the construction of Content and Non Content Managed, Optimised websites. Many examples of our work are showcased on this website.


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For more information about website design history please click here Web design is a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic media content delivery via Internet in the form of technologies (such as markup languages) suitable for interpretation and display by a web browser or other web-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The intent of web design is to create a web site (a collection of electronic files residing on one or more web servers) that presents content (including interactive features or interfaces) to the end user in the form of web pages once requested. Such elements as text, forms, and bit-mapped images (GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs) can be placed on the page using HTML, XHTML, or XML tags. Displaying more complex media (vector graphics, animations, videos, sounds) usually requires plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, Java run-time environment, etc. Plug-ins are also embedded into web pages by using HTML or XHTML tags. Improvements in the various browsers' compliance with W3C standards prompted a widespread acceptance of XHTML and XML in conjunction with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to position and manipulate web page elements. The latest standards and proposals aim at leading to the various browsers' ability to deliver a wide variety of media and accessibility options to the client possibly without employing plug-ins. Typically web pages are classified as static or dynamic. Static pages don't change content and layout with every request unless a human (web master or programmer) manually updates the page. Dynamic pages adapt their content and/or appearance depending on the end-user's input or interaction or changes in the computing environment (user, time, database modifications, etc.) Content can be changed on the client side (end-user's computer) by using client-side scripting languages (JavaScript, JScript, Actionscript, media players and PDF reader plug-ins, etc.) to alter DOM elements (DHTML). Dynamic content is often compiled on the server utilizing server-side scripting languages (PHP, ASP, Perl, Coldfusion, JSP, Python, etc.). Both approaches are usually used in complex applications. With growing specialization within communication design and information technology fields, there is a strong tendency to draw a clear line between web design specifically for web pages and web development for the overall logistics of all web-based services History Tim Berners-Lee published what is considered to be the first website in August 1991.[1] Berners-Lee was the first to combine Internet communication (which had been carrying email and the Usenet for decades) with hypertext (which had also been around for decades, but limited to browsing information stored on a single computer, such as interactive CD-ROM design). Websites are written in a markup language called HTML, and early versions of HTML were very basic, only giving websites basic structure (headings and paragraphs), and the ability to link using hypertext. This was new and different from existing forms of communication - users could easily navigate to other pages by following hyperlinks from page to page. As the Web and web design progressed, the markup language changed to become more complex and flexible, giving the ability to add objects like images and tables to a page. Features like tables, which were originally intended to be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible layout devices. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), table-based layout is increasingly regarded as outdated. Database integration technologies such as server-side scripting and design standards like W3C further changed and enhanced the way the Web is made. As times change, websites are changing the code on the inside and visual design on the outside with ever-evolving programs and utilities. With the progression of the Web, thousands of web design companies have been established around the world to serve the growing demand for such work. As with much of the information technology industry, many web design companies have been established in technology parks in the developing world as well as many Western design companies setting up offices in countries such as India, Romania, and Russia to take advantage of the relatively lower labor rates found in such countries. Web site design A Web site is a collection of information about a particular topic or subject. Designing a web site is defined as the arrangement and creation of web pages that in turn make up a web site. A web page consists of information for which the web site is developed. A web site might be compared to a book, where each page of the book is a web page. There are many aspects (design concerns) in this process, and due to the rapid development of the Internet, new aspects may emerge. For non-commercial web sites, the goals may vary depending on the desired exposure and response. For typical commercial web sites, the basic aspects of design are: The content: the substance, and information on the site should be relevant to the site and should target the area of the public that the website is concerned with. The usability: the site should be user-friendly, with the interface and navigation simple and reliable. The appearance: the graphics and text should include a single style that flows throughout, to show consistency. The style should be professional, appealing and relevant. The visibility: the site must also be easy to find via most, if not all, major search engines and advertisement media. A web site typically consists of text and images. The first page of a web site is known as the Home page or Index. Some web sites use what is commonly called a Splash Page. Splash pages might include a welcome message, language or region selection, or disclaimer. Each web page within a web site is an HTML file which has its own URL. After each web page is created, they are typically linked together using a navigation menu composed of hyperlinks. Faster browsing speeds have led to shorter attention spans and more demanding online visitors and this has resulted in less use of Splash Pages, particularly where commercial web sites are concerned. Once a web site is completed, it must be published or uploaded in order to be viewable to the public over the internet. This may be done using an FTP client. Once published, the web master may use a variety of techniques to increase the traffic, or hits, that the web site receives. This may include submitting the web site to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, exchanging links with other web sites, creating affiliations with similar web sites, etc. Multidisciplinary requirements Web site design crosses multiple disciplines of information systems, information technology and communication design. The web site is an information system whose components are sometimes classified as front-end and back-end. The observable content (e.g. page layout, user interface, graphics, text, audio) is known as the front-end. The back-end comprises the organization and efficiency of the source code, invisible scripted functions, and the server-side components that process the output from the front-end. Depending on the size of a Web development project, it may be carried out by a multi-skilled individual (sometimes called a web master), or a project manager may oversee collaborative design between group members with specialized skills. Issues As in collaborative designs, there are conflicts between differing goals and methods of web site designs. These are a few of the ongoing ones. Lack of collaboration in design In the early stages of the web, there wasn't as much collaboration between web designs and larger advertising campaigns, customer transactions, social networking, intranets and extranets as there is now. Web pages were mainly static online brochures disconnected from the larger projects. Many web pages are still disconnected from larger projects. Special design considerations are necessary for use within these larger projects. These design considerations are often overlooked, especially in cases where there is a lack of leadership, lack of understanding of why and technical knowledge of how to integrate, or lack of concern for the larger project in order to facilitate collaboration. This often results in unhealthy competition or compromise between departments, and less than optimal use of web pages. Liquid versus fixed layouts On the web the designer has no control over several factors, including the size of the browser window, the web browser used, the input devices used (mouse, touch screen, voice command, text, cell phone number pad, etc.) and the size and characteristics of available fonts. Some designers choose to control the appearance of the elements on the screen by using specific width designations. This control may be achieved through the use of a HTML table-based design or a more semantic div-based design through the use of CSS. Whenever the text, images, and layout of a design do not change as the browser changes, this is referred to as a fixed width design. Proponents of fixed width design prefer precise control over the layout of a site and the precision placement of objects on the page. Other designers choose a liquid design. A liquid design is one where the design moves to flow content into the whole screen, or a portion of the screen, no matter what the size of the browser window. Proponents of liquid design prefer greater compatibility and using the screen space available. Liquid design can be achieved through the use of CSS, by avoiding styling the page altogether, or by using HTML tables (or more semantic divs) set to a percentage of the page. Both liquid and fixed design developers must make decisions about how the design should degrade on higher and lower screen resolutions. Sometimes the pragmatic choice is made to flow the design between a minimum and a maximum width. This allows the designer to avoid coding for the browser choices making up The Long Tail, while still using all available screen space. Depending on the purpose of the content, a web designer may decide to use either fixed or liquid layouts on a case-by-case basis. Similar to liquid layout is the optional fit to window feature with Adobe Flash content. This is a fixed layout that optimally scales the content of the page without changing the arrangement or text wrapping when the browser is resized. Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a proprietary, robust graphics animation or application development program used to create and deliver dynamic content, media (such as sound and video), and interactive applications over the web via the browser. Flash is not a standard produced by a vendor-neutral standards organization like most of the core protocols and formats on the Internet. Flash is much more restrictive than the open HTML format, though, requiring a proprietary plugin to be seen, and it does not integrate with most web browser UI features like the "Back" button. According to a study,[2] 98% of US Web users have the Flash Player installed.[3] Numbers vary depending on the detection scheme and research demographics.[4] Many graphic artists use Flash because it gives them exact control over every part of the design, and anything can be animated and generally "jazzed up". Some application designers enjoy Flash because it lets them create applications that do not have to be refreshed or go to a new web page every time an action occurs. Flash can use embedded fonts instead of the standard fonts installed on most computers. There are many sites which forgo HTML entirely for Flash. Other sites may use Flash content combined with HTML as conservatively as gifs or jpegs would be used, but with smaller vector file sizes and the option of faster loading animations. Flash may also be used to protect content from unauthorized duplication or searching. Alternatively, small, dynamic Flash objects may be used to replace standard HTML elements (such as headers or menu links) with advanced typography not possible via regular HTML or CSS (see Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). Flash detractors claim that Flash websites tend to be poorly designed, and often use confusing and non-standard user-interfaces, such as the inability to scale according to the size of the web browser, or it's incompatibility with common browser features such as the back button. Up until recently, search engines have been unable to index Flash objects, which has prevented sites from having their contents easily found. This is because many search engine crawlers rely on text to index websites. It is possible to specify alternate content to be displayed for browsers that do not support Flash. Using alternate content also helps search engines to understand the page, and can result in much better visibility for the page. However, the vast majority of Flash websites are not disability accessible (for screen readers, for example) or Section 508 compliant. An additional issue is that sites which commonly use alternate content for search engines to their human visitors are usually judged to be spamming search engines and are automatically banned. The most recent incarnation of Flash's scripting language (called "ActionScript", which is an ECMA language similar to JavaScript) incorporates long-awaited usability features, such as respecting the browser's font size and allowing blind users to use screen readers. Actionscript 2.0 is an Object-Oriented language, allowing the use of CSS, XML, and the design of class-based web applications. CSS versus tables for layout For more details on this topic, see Tableless web design. When Netscape Navigator 4 dominated the browser market, the popular solution available for designers to lay out a Web page was by using tables. Often even simple designs for a page would require dozens of tables nested in each other. Many web templates in Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG editors still use this technique today. Navigator 4 didn't support CSS to a useful degree, so it simply wasn't used. After the browser wars subsided, and the dominant browsers such as Internet Explorer became more W3C compliant, designers started turning toward CSS as an alternate means of laying out their pages. CSS proponents say that tables should be used only for tabular data, not for layout. Using CSS instead of tables also returns HTML to a semantic markup, which helps bots and search engines understand what's going on in a web page. All modern Web browsers support CSS with different degrees of limitations. However, one of the main points against CSS is that by relying on it exclusively, control is essentially relinquished as each browser has its own quirks which result in a slightly different page display. This is especially a problem as not every browser supports the same subset of CSS rules. For designers who are used to table-based layouts, developing Web sites in CSS often becomes a matter of trying to replicate what can be done with tables, leading some to find CSS design rather cumbersome due to lack of familiarity. For example, at one time it was rather difficult to produce certain design elements, such as vertical positioning, and full-length footers in a design using absolute positions. With the abundance of CSS resources available online today, though, designing with reasonable adherence to standards involves little more than applying CSS 2.1 or CSS 3 to properly structured markup. These days most modern browsers have solved most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts possible. However, some people continue to use old browsers, and designers need to keep this in mind, and allow for graceful degrading of pages in older browsers. Most notable among these old browsers are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5, which, according to some web designers, are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that holds the World Wide Web back from converting to CSS design. However, the W3 Consortium has made CSS in combination with XHTML the standard for web design. Form versus Function Some web developers have a graphic arts background and may pay more attention to how a page looks than considering other issues such as how visitors are going to find the page via a search engine. Some might rely more on advertising than search engines to attract visitors to the site. On the other side of the issue, search engine optimisation consultants (SEOs) are concerned with how well a web site works technically and textually: how much traffic it generates via search engines, and how many sales it makes, assuming looks don't contribute to the sales. As a result, the designers and SEOs often end up in disputes where the designer wants more 'pretty' graphics, and the SEO wants lots of 'ugly' keyword-rich text, bullet lists, and text links. One could argue that this is a false dichotomy due to the possibility that a web design may integrate the two disciplines for a collaborative and synergistic solution. Because some graphics serve communication purposes in addition to aesthetics, how well a site works may depend on the graphic designer's visual communication ideas as well as the SEO considerations. Another problem when using lots of graphics on a page is that download times can be greatly lengthened, often irritating the user. This has become less of a problem as the internet has evolved with high-speed internet and the use of vector graphics. This is an engineering challenge to increase bandwidth in addition to an artistic challenge to minimize graphics and graphic file sizes. This is an on-going challenge as increased bandwidth invites increased amounts of content. Accessible Web design Main article: Web accessibility To be accessible, web pages and sites must conform to certain accessibility principles. These can be grouped into the following main areas: • use semantic markup that provides a meaningful structure to the document (i.e. web page) • Semantic markup also refers to semantically organizing the web page structure and publishing web services description accordingly so that they can be recognized by other web services on different web pages. Standards for semantic web are set by IEEE • use a valid markup language that conforms to a published DTD or Schema • provide text equivalents for any non-text components (e.g. images, multimedia) • use hyperlinks that make sense when read out of context. (e.g. avoid "Click Here.") • don't use frames • use CSS rather than HTML Tables for layout. author the page so that when the source code is read line-by-line by user agents (such as a screen readers) it remains intelligible. (Using tables for design will often result in information that is not.) However, W3C permits an exception where tables for layout either make sense when linearized or an alternate version (perhaps linearized) is made available. Website accessibility is also changing as it is impacted by Content Management Systems that allow changes to be made to webpages without the need of obtaining programming language knowledge. Website Planning Before creating and uploading a website, it is important to take the time to plan exactly what is needed in the website. Thoroughly considering the audience or target market, as well as defining the purpose and deciding what content will be developed are extremely important. Purpose It is essential to define the purpose of the website as one of the first steps in the planning process. A purpose statement should show focus based on what the website will accomplish and what the users will get from it. A clearly defined purpose will help the rest of the planning process as the audience is identified and the content of the site is developed. Setting short and long term goals for the website will help make the purpose clear and plan for the future when expansion, modification, and improvement will take place. Also, goal-setting practices and measurable objectives should be identified to track the progress of the site and determine success. Audience Defining the audience is a key step in the website planning process. The audience is the group of people who are expected to visit your website - the market being targeted. These people will be viewing the website for a specific reason and it is important to know exactly what they are looking for when they visit the site. A clearly defined purpose or goal of the site as well as an understanding of what visitors want to do or feel when they come to your site will help to identify the target audience. Upon considering who is most likely to need or use the content, a list of characteristics common to the users such as: • Audience Characteristics • Information Preferences • Computer Specifications • Web Experience Taking into account the characteristics of the audience will allow an effective website to be created that will deliver the desired content to the target audience. [Content Content evaluation and organization requires that the purpose of the website be clearly defined. Collecting a list of the necessary content then organizing it according to the audience's needs is a key step in website planning. In the process of gathering the content being offered, any items that do not support the defined purpose or accomplish target audience objectives should be removed. It is a good idea to test the content and purpose on a focus group and compare the offerings to the audience needs. The next step is to organize the basic information structure by categorizing the content and organizing it according to user needs. Each category should be named with a concise and descriptive title that will become a link on the website. Planning for the site's content ensures that the wants or needs of the target audience and the purpose of the site will be fulfilled. Compatibility and restrictions Because of the market share of modern browsers (depending on your target market), the compatibility of your website with the viewers is restricted. For instance, a website that is designed for the majority of websurfers will be limited to the use of valid XHTML 1.0 Strict or older, Cascading Style Sheets Level 1, and 1024x768 display resolution. This is because Internet Explorer is not fully W3C standards compliant with the modularity of XHTML 1.1 and the majority of CSS beyond 1. A target market of more alternative browser (e.g. Firefox and Opera) users allow for more W3C compliance and thus a greater range of options for a web designer. Another restriction on webpage design is the use of different Image file formats. The majority of users can support GIF, JPEG, and PNG (with restrictions). Again Internet Explorer is the major restriction here, not fully supporting PNG's advanced transparency features, resulting in the GIF format still being the most widely used graphic file format for transparent images. Many website incompatibilities go unnoticed by the designer and unreported by the users. The only way to be certain a website will work on a particular platform is to test it on that platform. Planning documentation Documentation is used to visually plan the site while taking into account the purpose, audience and content, to design the site structure, content and interactions that are most suitable for the website. Documentation may be considered a prototype for the website - a model which allows the website layout to be reviewed, resulting in suggested changes, improvements and/or enhancements. This review process increases the likelihood of success of the website. First, the content is categorized and the information structure is formulated. The information structure is used to develop a document or visual diagram called a site map. This creates a visual of how the web pages will be interconnected, which helps in deciding what content will be placed on what pages. There are three main ways of diagramming the website structure: Linear Website Diagrams will allow the users to move in a predetermined sequence; Hierarchical structures (of Tree Design Website Diagrams) provide more than one path for users to take to their destination; Branch Design Website Diagrams allow for many interconnections between web pages such as hyperlinks within sentences. In addition to planning the structure, the layout and interface of individual pages may be planned using a storyboard. In the process of storyboarding, a record is made of the description, purpose and title of each page in the site, and they are linked together according to the most effective and logical diagram type. Depending on the number of pages required for the website, documentation methods may include using pieces of paper and drawing lines to connect them, or creating the storyboard using computer software. Some or all of the individual pages may be designed in greater detail as a website wireframe, a mock up model or comprehensive layout of what the page will actually look like. This is often done in a graphic program, or layout design program. The wireframe has no working functionality, only planning.

Rage Design are specialists in the design and implementation of shopping carts. If your business or organisation has products to sell, then your website is a fantastic platform to promote and sell them, more so if your business is retail based, then it is imperative you have a shopping cart on your website. With the correct influence of design and navigation your website can create a virtual shop that is open 24 hours a day, never has a sick day and is never closed. In a recent study with the downturn in traditional retail business, it is no surprise that Internet based businesses grew by a third. If you are looking to redesign your website, then it is imperative that a shopping cart is added to the overall structure of the website. If you would like to discuss your Website and Shopping Cart strategy please contact us. For more information on Shopping Carts Please read on

line shopping is the process consumers go through to purchase products or services over the Internet. An online shop, eshop, e-store, internet shop, webshop, webstore, online store, or virtual store evokes the physical analogy of buying products or services at a bricks-and-mortar retailer or in a shopping mall.

The metaphor of an online catalog is also used, by analogy with mail order catalogs. All types of stores have retail web sites, including those that do and do not also have physical storefronts and paper catalogs.

Online shopping is a type of electronic commerce used for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions.

The term"Webshop"also refers to a place of business where web development, web hosting and other types of web related activities take place (Web refers to the World Wide Web and "shop" has a colloquial meaning used to describe the place where one's occupation is carried out).

History

Since about 1990, online shopping has emerged into every corner of life, linking people to the culture of capitalism in frequent and daily ways. It lets us buy what we want, when we want at our convenience , and helps us to imagine ourselves buying, owning, and having positive outcomes by the goods available out there on the web. Shopping has been a way of identifying oneself in today's culture by what we purchase and how we use our purchases. Online shopping has always been a middle to high class commodity since its first arrival on the internet in society. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created The World Wide Web Browser.. A few years later in 1994 other advances took place such as Online Banking, After that, the next big development was the opening of an online pizza shop by Pizza Hut. In that same year Netscape introduced SSL encryption to enable encryption over the data transferred online which has become essential for online shopping. In 1995, Amazon started up with online shopping, then in 1996, eBay opened up for online shopping as well. The idea of online shopping pre-dates the World Wide Web for there were earlier experiments involving real-time transaction processing from a domestic television. The technology, based on Videotex, was first demonstrated by Michael Aldrich in 1979 who designed and installed systems in the UK, including the first Tesco pilot system in the 1980s.

Customers

In general, shopping has always catered to middle class and upper class women. Shopping is fragmented and pyramid-shaped. At the pinnacle are elegant boutiques for the affluent, a huge belt of inelegant but ruthlessly efficient “discounters” flog plenty at the pyramid's precarious middle. According to the anaylsis of Susan D. Davis, at its base are the world's workers and poor, on whose cheapened labor the rest of the pyramid depends for its incredible abundanc]. Shopping has evolved from single stores to large malls with different services such as offering delivery, attentive service and store credit and accepting return. . These new additions to shopping have encouraged and targeted middle class women.

In recent years, online shopping has become popular; however, it still caters to the middle and upper class. In order to shop online, one must be able to have access to a computer, a bank account and a debit card. Shopping has evolved with the growth of technology. According to research found in the Journal of Electronic Commerce, if we focus on the demographic characteristics of the in-home shopper, in general, the higher the level of education, income, and occupation of the head of the household, the more favourable the perception of non-store shopping.[4]. It should be remembered that an influential factor in consumer attitude towards non-store shopping is exposure to technology, since it has been demonstrated that increased exposure to technology increases the probability of developing favourable attitudes towards new shopping channels.

Online shopping widened the target audience to men and women of the middle class. At first, main users of online shopping were young men with a high level of income and a university education. This profile is changing. For example, in USA in the early years of Internet there were very few women users, but by 2001 women were 52.8% of the online population. Sociocultural pressure has made men generally more independent in their purchase decisions, while women place greater value on personal contact and social relations. In addition, male shoppers are more independent when deciding on purchasing products because unlike women, they don't necessarily need to see or try on the product.

Trends

One third of people that shop online use a search engine to find what they are looking for and about one fourth of people find websites by word of mouth. [5]. Word of mouth has increased as a leading way that people find websites to shop from. When an online shopper has a good first experience with a certain website sixty percent of the time they will return to that website to buy more.

Books are one of the things bought most online, however clothes, shoes and accessories are all very popular things to buy online. Cosmetics, nutrition products and groceries are increasingly being purchased online.[5]. About one fourth of travelers are buying their plane tickets online because it is a quick and easy way to compare airline travel and make a purchase. Online shopping provides more freedom and control than shopping in a store.

According to sociological perspective online shopping is arguably the most predictable way to shop.[1]. One knows exactly what website to go to, how much the product will cost, and how long it will take for the product to reach them. Online shopping has become extremely routine and predictable, which is one of it's great appeals to the consumer.

Logistics

Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly, or do a search across many different vendors using a shopping search engine.

Once a particular product has been found on the web site of the seller, most online retailers use shopping cart software to allow the consumer to accumulate multiple items and to adjust quantities, by analogy with filling a physical shopping cart or basket in a conventional store. A "checkout" process follows (continuing the physical-store analogy) in which payment and delivery information is collected, if necessary. Some stores allow consumers to sign up for a permanent online account so that some or all of this information only needs to be entered once. The consumer often receives an e-mail confirmation once the transaction is complete. Less sophisticated stores may rely on consumers to phone or e-mail their orders (though credit card numbers are not accepted by e-mail, for security reasons).

Payment

Online shoppers commonly use credit card to make payments, however some systems enable users to create accounts and pay by alternative means, such as:

 

Debit card Various types of electronic money Cash on delivery (C.O.D., offered by very few online stores) Cheque Wire transfer/delivery on payment Postal money order PayPal Google Checkout Moneybookers Reverse SMS billing to mobile phones Gift cards Direct debit in some countries Some sites will not allow international credit cards and billing address and shipping address have to be in the same country in which site does its business. Other sites allow customers from anywhere to send gifts anywhere. The financial part of a transaction might be processed in real time (for example, letting the consumer know their credit card was declined before they log off), or might be done later as part of the fulfillment process. While credit cards are currently the most popular means of paying for online goods and services, alternative online payments will account for 26% of e-commerce volume by 2009 according to Celent.

 

Product delivery

Once a payment has been accepted the goods or services can be delivered in the following ways.
Download:This is the method often used for digital media products such as software, music, movies, or images.
Shipping:The product is shipped to the customer's address.
Drop shipping:The order is passed to the manufacturer or third-party distributor, who ships the item directly to the consumer, bypassing the retailer's physical location to save time, money, and space.
In-store pickup:The customer orders online, finds a local store using locator software and picks the product up at the closest store. This is the method often used in the bricks and clicks business model.
In the case of buying an admission ticket one may get a code, or a ticket that can be printed out. At the premises it is made sure that the same right of admission is not used twice.

Shopping cart systems

Simple systems allow the offline administration of products and categories. The shop is then generated as HTML files and graphics that can be uploaded to a webspace. These systems do not use an online database. A high end solution can be bought or rented as a standalone program or as an addition to an enterprise resource planning program. It is usually installed on the company's own webserver and may integrate into the existing supply chain so that ordering, payment, delivery, accounting and warehousing can be automated to a large extent. Other solutions allow the user to register and create an online shop on a portal that hosts multiple shops at the same time. open source shopping cart packages include advanced platforms such as Interchange, and off the shelf solutions as osCommerce, Magento, Zen Cart and VirtueMart. Commercial systems can also be tailored to ones needs so that the shop does not have to be created from scratch. By using a framework already existing, software modules for different functionalities required by a webshop can be adapted and combined.

Design

Why does electronic shopping exist? For customers it is not only because of the high level of convenience, but also because of the broader selection; competitive pricing and greater access to information. [7][8]. For organisations it increases their customer value and the building of sustainable capabilities, next to the increased profits[9]. There are a number of [online store] options. Yahoo, Ebay and Amazon have store builders. [WebStore by Amazon] passes down the features from Amazon to the merchant's personalized store. [Ebay] integrates its store solution with sales on ebay.

 

Information load

Designers of online shops should consider the effects of information load. Mehrabian and Russel (1974) introduced the concept of information rate (load) as the complex spatial and temporal arrangements of stimuli within a setting.The notion of information load is directly related to concerns about whether consumers can be given too much information in virtual shopping environments. Compared with conventional retail shopping, computer shopping enriches the information environment of virtual shopping by providing additional product information, such as comparative products and services, as well as various alternatives and attributes of each alternative, etc.

Two major sub-dimensions have been identified for information load: complexity and novelty. Complexity refers to the number of different elements or features of a site, which can be the result of increased information diversity. Novelty involves the unexpected, suppressing, new, or unfamiliar aspects of the site. A research by Huang (2000) showed that the novelty dimension kept consumers exploring the shopping sites, whereas the complexity dimension has the potential to induce impulse purchases.

Consumer expectations

The main idea of online shopping is not in having a good looking website that could be listed in a lot of search engines and it is not about the art behind the site. It also is not only just about disseminating information, because it is all about building relationships and making money. Mostly, organisations try to adopt techniques of online shopping without understanding these techniques and/or without a sound business model. Rather than supporting the organization's culture and brand name, the website should satisfy consumer's expectations. Many researchers notify that the uniqueness of the web has dissolved and the need for the design, which will be user centered, is very important. Companies should always remember that there are certain things, such as understanding the customer's wants and needs, living up to promises, never go out of style, because they give reason to come back. And the reason will stay if consumers always get what they expect. McDonaldization theory can be used in terms of online shopping, because online shopping is becoming more and more popular and website that wants to gain more shoppers will use four major principles of McDonaldization: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control.

organisations , which want people to shop more online for them, should consume extensive amounts of time and money to define, design, develop, test, implement, and maintain website. Also if company wants their website to be popular among online shoppers it should leave the user with a positive impression about the organization, so consumers can get an impression that the company cares about them. The organization that wants to be acceptable in online shopping needs to remember, that it is easier to lose a customer then to gain one. Lots of researchers state that even when site was a “top-rated”, it would go nowhere if the organization failed to live up to common etiquette, such as returning e-mails in a timely fashion, notifying customers of problems, being honest, and being good stewards of the customers' data. organisations that want to keep their customers or gain new ones try to get rid of all mistakes and be more appealing to be more desirable for online shoppers. And this is why many designers of webshops considered research outcomes concerning consumer expectations. Research conducted by Elliot and Fowell (2000) revealed satisfactory and unsatisfactory customer experiences.

Satisfactory:

Increased customization, e.g., “capability to treat customers as individuals”.
Convenience in purchasing “anytime, from anywhere, to anywhere”.
Responsiveness in product delivery, e.g., “instantaneous distribution of digital products and services”.
Cost savings through lower prices, e.g., “site aims at providing lower costs and latest information on music scene”.
Able to fulfill most shoppersneeds. Comparison shop several online stores at once.

 

Unsatisfactory (unsatisfactory experiences):

Security
Ease of use
Poor levels of service
Costs
Product delivered did not meet expectations.

User interface:

It is important to take the country and customers into account. For example, in Japan privacy is very important and emotional involvement is more important on a pension's site then on a shopping site. Next to that, there is a difference in experience: experienced users focus more on the variables that directly influence the task, while novice users are focusing more on understanding the information.

There are several techniques for the inspection of the usability. The ones used in the research of Chen & Macredie (2005) are Heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthrough and the user testing. Every technique has its own (dis-)advantages and it is therefore important to check per situation which technique is appropriate.

When the customers went to the online shop, a couple of factors determine whether they will return to the site. The most important factors are the ease of use and the presence of user-friendly features.

 

Market share

E-commerce product sales totaled $146.4 billion in the United States in 2006, representing about 6% of retail product sales in the country. The $18.3 billion worth of clothes sold online represented about 10% of the domestic market.

For developing countries and low-income households in developed countries, adoption of e-commerce in place of or in addition to conventional methods is limited by a lack of affordable Internet access.

Convenience

Online stores are usually available 24 hours a day, and many consumers have Internet access both at work and at home. A visit to a conventional retail store requires travel and must take place during business hours.

Searching or browsing an online catalog can be faster than browsing the aisles of a physical store. Consumers with dial-up Internet connections rather than broadband have much longer load times for content-rich web sites and have a considerably slower online shopping experience.

Some consumers prefer interacting with people rather than computers (and vice versa), sometimes because they find computers hard to use. Not all online retailers have succeeded in making their sites easy to use or reliable.

In most cases, merchandise must be shipped to the consumer, introducing a significant delay and potentially uncertainty about whether or not the item was actually in stock at the time of purchase. Bricks-and-clicks stores offer the ability to buy online but pick up in a nearby store. Many stores give the consumer the delivery company's tracking number for their package when shipped, so they can check its status online and know exactly when it will arrive. For efficiency reasons, online stores generally do not ship products immediately upon receiving an order. Orders are only filled during warehouse operating hours, and there may be a delay of anywhere from a few minutes to a few days to a few weeks before in-stock items are actually packaged and shipped. Many retailers inform customers how long they can expect to wait before receiving a package, and whether or not they generally have a fulfillment backlog. A quick response time is sometimes an important factor in consumers' choice of merchant. A weakness of online shopping is that, even if a purchase can be made 24 hours a day, the customer must often be at home during normal business hours to accept the delivery. For many professionals this can be difficult, and absence at the time of delivery can result in delays, or in some cases, return of the item to the retailer. Automated delivery booths, such as DHL's Packstation, have tried to address this problem.

In the event of a problem with the item - it is not what the consumer ordered, or it is not what they expected - consumers are concerned with the ease with which they can return an item for the correct one or for a refund. Consumers may need to contact the retailer, visit the post office and pay return shipping, and then wait for a replacement or refund. Some online companies have more generous return policies to compensate for the traditional advantage of physical stores. For example, the online shoe retailer Zappos.com includes labels for free return shipping, and does not charge a restocking fee, even for returns which are not the result of merchant error. (Note: In the United Kingdom, Online shops are prohibited from charging a restocking fee if the consumer cancels their order in accordance with the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Act 2000.

Information and reviews

Online stores must describe products for sale with text, photos, and multimedia files, whereas in a physical retail store, the actual product and the manufacturer's packaging will be available for direct inspection (which might involve a test drive, fitting, or other experimentation).

Some online stores provide or link to supplemental product information, such as instructions, safety procedures, demonstrations, or manufacturer specifications. Some provide background information, advice, or how-to guides designed to help consumers decide which product to buy.

Some stores even allow customers to comment or rate their items. There are also dedicated review sites that host user reviews for different products.

In a conventional retail store, clerks are generally available to answer questions. Some online stores have real-time chat features, but most rely on e-mail or phone calls to handle customer questions.

Price and selection

One advantage of shopping online is being able to quickly seek out deals for items or services with many different vendors (though some local search engines do exist to help consumers locate products for sale in nearby stores). Search engines and online price comparison services can be used to look up sellers of a particular product or service.

 

Shoppers find a greater selection online in certain market segments (for example, computers and consumer electronics) and in some cases lower prices. This is due to a relaxation of certain constraints, such as the size of a "brick-and-mortar" store, lower stocking costs (or none, if drop shipping is used), and lower staffing overhead.

Shipping costs (if applicable) reduce the price advantage of online merchandise, though depending on the jurisdiction, a lack of sales tax may compensate for this.

Shipping a small number of items, especially from another country, is much more expensive than making the larger shipments bricks-and-mortar retailers order. Some retailers (especially those selling small, high-value items like electronics) offer free shipping on sufficiently large orders.

Fraud and security concerns

Given the lack of ability to inspect merchandise before purchase, consumers are at higher risk of fraud on the part of the merchant than in a physical store. Merchants also risk fraudulent purchases using stolen credit cards or fraudulent repudiation of the online purchase. With a warehouse instead of a retail storefront, merchants face less risk from physical theft.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption has generally solved the problem of credit card numbers being intercepted in transit between the consumer and the merchant. Identity theft is still a concern for consumers when hackers break into a merchant's web site and steal names, addresses and credit card numbers. A number of high-profile break-ins in the 2000s has prompted some U.S. states to require disclosure to consumers when this happens. Computer security has thus become a major concern for merchants and e-commerce service providers, who deploy countermeasures such as firewalls and anti-virus software to protect their networks.

Phishing is another danger, where consumers are fooled into thinking they are dealing with a reputable retailer, when they have actually been manipulated into feeding private information to a system operated by a malicious party. On the other hand, dealing with an automated system instead of a population of store clerks reduces the risk of employees stealing consumer information, or dumpster diving of paper receipts. Denial of service attacks are a minor risk for merchants, as are server and network outages.

Quality seals can be placed on the Shop webpage if it has undergone an independent assessment and meets all requirements of the company issuing the seal. The purpose of these seals is to increase the confidence of the online shoppers; the existence of many different seals, or seals unfamiliar to consumers, may foil this effort to a certain extent. A number of resources offer advice on how consumers can protect themselves when using online retailer services.[20] These include:

Sticking with known stores, or attempting to find independent consumer reviews of their experiences; also ensuring that there is comprehensive contact information on the website before using the service, and noting if the retailer has enrolled in industry oversight programs such as trustmark or trust seal.

Ensuring that the retailer has an acceptable privacy policy posted. For example note if the retailer does not explicitly state that it will not share private information with others without consent.

Ensuring that the vendor address is protected with SSL (see above) when entering credit card information. If it does the address on the credit card information entry screen will start with "HTTPS".

Using strong passwords, without personal information. Another option is a "pass phrase," which might be something along the lines: "I shop 4 good a buy!!" These are difficult to hack, and provides a variety of upper, lower, and special characters and could be site specific and easy to remember.

Although the benefits of online shopping are considerable, when the process goes poorly it can create a thorny situation. A few problems that shoppers potentially face include identity theft, faulty products, and the accumulation of spyware. Most large online corporations are inventing new ways to make fraud more difficult, however, the criminals are constantly responding to these developments with new ways to manipulate the system. Even though these efforts are making it easier to protect yourself online, it is a constant fight to maintain the lead. It is advisable to be aware of the most current technology and scams out there to fully protect yourself and your finances.[21].

One of the hardest areas to deal with in online shopping is the delivery of the products. Most companies offer shipping insurance in case the product is lost or damaged; however, if the buyer opts not to purchase insurance on their products, they are generally out of luck. Some shipping companies will offer refunds or compensation for the damage, but it is up to their discretion if this will happen. It is important to realize that once the product leaves the hands of the seller, they have no responsibility (provided the product is what the buyer ordered and is in the specified condition).

Privacy

Privacy of personal information is a significant issue for some consumers. Different legal jurisdictions have different laws concerning consumer privacy, and different levels of enforcement. Many consumers wish to avoid spam and telemarketing which could result from supplying contact information to an online merchant. In response, many merchants promise not to use consumer information for these purposes, or provide a mechanism to opt-out of such contacts.

Brick-and-mortar stores also collect consumer information. Some ask for address and phone number at checkout, though consumers may refuse to provide it. Many larger stores use the address information encoded on consumers' credit cards (often without their knowledge) to add them to a catalog mailing list. This information is obviously not accessible to the merchant when paying in cash.

Product suitability

CategoryU.S. online sales (2006)

Apparel, accessories and footwear

$18.3 billion
Computer hardware and software$17.2 billion
Autos and auto parts$16.7 billion
Home furnishings$10.0 billion
Total products sales (excluding travel)$146.4 billion
Travel$73.5 billion

Many successful purely virtual companies deal with digital products, (including information storage, retrieval, and modification), music, movies, office supplies, education, communication, software, photography, and financial transactions. Examples of this type of company include: Google, eBay and Paypal. Other successful marketers use Drop shipping or affiliate marketing techniques to facilitate transactions of tangible goods without maintaining real inventory. Examples include numerous sellers on eBay.

Some non-digital products have been more successful than others for online stores. Profitable items often have a high value-to-weight ratio, they may involve embarrassing purchases, they may typically go to people in remote locations, and they may have shut-ins as their typical purchasers.[citation needed] Items which can fit through a standard letterbox - such as music CDs, DVDs and books - are particularly suitable for a virtual marketer, and indeed Amazon.com, one of the few enduring dot-com companies, has historically concentrated on this field.[citation needed]

Products such as spare parts, both for consumer items like washing machines and for industrial equipment like centrifugal pumps, also seem good candidates for selling online. Retailers often need to order spare parts specially, since they typically do not stock them at consumer outlets - in such cases, e-commerce solutions in spares do not compete with retail stores, only with other ordering systems. A factor for success in this niche can consist of providing customers with exact, reliable information about which part number their particular version of a product needs, for example by providing parts lists keyed by serial number.[citation needed]

Products less suitable for e-commerce include products that have a low value-to-weight ratio, products that have a smell, taste, or touch component, products that need trial fittings - most notably clothing - and products where colour integrity appears important. Nonetheless, Tesco.com has had success delivering groceries in the UK, albeit that many of its goods are of a generic quality, and clothing sold through the internet is big business in the U.S. Also, the recycling program Cheapcycle sells goods over the internet, but avoids the low value-to-weight ratio problem by creating different groups for various regions, so that shipping costs remain low.[citation needed]

Aggregation

High-volume websites, such as Yahoo!, Amazon.com and eBay, offer hosting services for online stores to small retailers. These stores are presented within an integrated navigation framework. Collections of online stores are sometimes known as virtual shopping malls or online marketplaces.

Become.com is a product price comparison service and discovery shopping search engine with a mission to help shoppers make ideal buying decisions. Dulance was a price engine that specialized in searching for hard-to-find products often sold by small independent online retailers ("The Long Tail").

Viewing the best online marketing tools available for its clients, - when a website is planned to be redesigned and structured, Rage always works through the online options to enhance and maximise visitor numbers and revenue for its clients. Search Engine Optimisation in by far one of the best marketing investments any organisation can make. If a client decides to use SEO when a strategy is put together and discussed with the client. This includes Keyword Research and the required depth of relevant content required to populate the website, to help and boost rankings with the search engines. Naturally the key objective is to ensure the website attracts the correct number and level of visitors, who in turn find the right information and make an enquiries or purchases through the website. Rage Design apply this by programming the correct keywords and phrases. Rage Design conduct specialised keyword research to ensure the major search engines list and rank the website under the most relevant keywords and phrases. Naturally with the website being content rich, it provides the keywords that makes the site rich in content and relevancy. In return, the site could return hundreds if not thousands of relevant searches on the major search engines. Other strategic approaches with SEO include internal navigation - as observed on many well known websites, one major problem for visitors is getting lost and not locating the correct information. Statistics prove visitors only stay on websites for approximately six seconds, if they haven't located what they are looking for, after this time, they head for a competitor website and leave. It is imperative that internal navigation makes the website easy to find relevant information. This includes internal linking and referencing throughout the website. It is also important to understand that search engines do not recognise images and graphics, they base indexing on content (copy) - therefore as part of the SEO strategy Rage Design work through the images on the website programming ALT IMAGE TAGS for each graphic and image on the website - this allows the search engines to index the content on those images and understand them. The final stages of our SEO strategy is to ensure a Google Site map is installed on the website - this allows the Search Engines to get access to the website and navigate with ease to gather and index information. Once a website has been optimised Rage Design will resubmit the website to Google and Yahoo for indexing - A professionally optimized website will also be shared with other Search Engines and Directories meaning your site could well be ranked on hundreds of other search engines and directories.

After submission Rage Design makes the recommendation that the client allows approximately three months for the website to gain respectable rankings on the search engines. Further to this it is Rage Design's policy to review the rankings of the website every quarter, unless the client is changing content for example all the time, for example weekly changes to products pages, then it is not necessary to have a monthly retainer to uphold the positioning of the website.

The quality of your data is only as good as the information you collect and the strength of your market is knowing how big and approachable it is. You will only understand your prospects and clients if you ask questions that will enable you to develop and fine tune your products and services.

If you plan to invest in the design of a new website, one essential element is to remember the importance of collecting information about your visitors and customers. Gathering an e-mail database for monthly newsletters and product offers will add an extra element to your e-marketing strategy and boost online sales and enquiries. It is also essential in the building of visitor trends, buying behaviour and prospect lists. Modern day technology has provided clients an excellent platform to segment products and services to prospects looking for the things you sell.

In designing your website, Rage Design will assist in the development and requirements of all your data collection needs. Built into the design of the website we will integrate Customer Reaction and Feedback Forms, E-Mail Collection Forms, Free Trials and Shopping Cart Data Collection and general Contact Us information.

For more information about Data Collection please contact us today.

The use of flash and multimedia on a website can liven the promotional and sale of products through a website. Our flash and multimedia services also extend email promotions, cd's, exhibitions all the way to designing and programming sections of Piccadilly illuminations. Rage Design can design and program flash movies through many mediums. Keeping clients and prospects up to date is an important consideration and one of the best mediums to achieve this is Video and Pod Casts. At Rage Design, we can help you with the planning and production of Pod Casts and upload to your website.



Bringing a websites to life allows the visitor experience to become enjoyable and informative - with competitor websites available, it is imperative to keep visitors on your website as long as possible. With the latest technology companies can bring websites to life and offer more to those who visit.

With the availability of video and podcasts, clients and visitors can now receive company information without the need to read pages of content. New products and services can be promoted to the outside world with the use of video, flash and podcasts.

Rage Design has recently placed video on websites for Hearing Dogs and The Met Police.

Rage Design can edit, produce and place videos and podcasts within your website - if you are considering a new company website, then this is an important element to consider. For more information please contact us.

Rage Design specialise in the production of automated E-brochures - if your website holds catalogues and brochures and your products needs showcasing, then E-Catalogues and E-Brochures can bring your portfolio of products and services to life - as shown in the example on this page which we produced for Solosports - the brochure gives the impression of a 3D, real life glossy printed catalogue that really does inspire for each page to be turned. As competition increases across industries, the way a product is featured is paramount - if the visitor to the website does not get the information they are looking for and the presentation of your products do not inspire, then sadly it's your competitors that will win the business.

Bringing music to your website brings a whole new experience for visitors - a presentation of music promoting your products, services or shopping cart page can encapsulate the right atmosphere to a website and create a new experience for the visitor. Music can also be used for e-catalogues, podcasts and flash movies.

Composed and created in-house using Logic, Rage Design can make music that is bespoke to your company for use with your website, or for other specific e-media campaigns.

We regularly check the positioning of keywords and phrases for our clients - please click on one of the PDF's to read the successes of our optimisation and how keywords and phrases are competing and ranking on Google and Yahoo.

Please click here to download and view one of our SEO case studies

Causeway Case Study

Haringtons Case Study

Prince Case Study

TMD Case Study

Rage Design use the best online marketing solutions for its clients - From the offset when a website is scheduled for redesign and restructure, Rage works through the online options to enhance and maximise visitor numbers and revenue for its clients. Search Engine Optimisation is by far one of the best marketing investments any organisation can make. If a client decides to use SEO, then a strategy is put together and discussed with the client. This includes keyword research, the required depth of relevant content required to populate the website for search engines to index. Naturally the key objective is to ensure the website attracts the right caliber of visitors, who in turn would find the information they seek, making an enquiry or sale through the website. Rage Design apply its specialty in this field and also ask the client for what they perceive as being relevant keywords and phrases - from this Rage Design conduct specialised keyword research to ensure these keywords are being searched for on the major search engines. Naturally if the website is content rich, providing the keywords tie in with the content and relevancy of the site then the website could return hundreds if not thousands of relevant keywords and phrases indexed on the major search engines. Other strategic approaches with SEO include internal navigation - as observed on many well know websites, one major problem is getting lost and not finding the right information- as statistics prove, visitors only stay on websites for approximately six seconds, after this time, they head for a competitor website and leave, if the information is not found. It is imperative that internal navigation makes the website easy and apt for searching and finding relevant information. This includes internal linking and referencing throughout the website. It is also important to understand that search engines do not see images and graphics, they base indexing on content (copy) - therefore as part of the SEO strategy Rage Design work through the images on the website and create ALT IMAGE TAGS for each graphic and image on the website - this enable search engines to index the content placed on images. The final touches of SEO strategy is to ensure a Google Site map is installed on the website - this allows the Search Engines to get access to your website and navigate with ease in order to gather and index information. Once a website has been optimised Rage Design will resubmit the website to Google and Yahoo for indexing. Hundred of Search Engines and Directories share information with Google and Yahoo, so a well ranked website will also appear on other search engines, maximising visits to the website.

After submission Rage Design expects the site to improve search engine rankings within three months. Further to this it is Rage Design's policy to review the rankings of the website every quarter, unless the client is changing content for example all the time, with products pages, then it is not necessary to have a monthly retainer to uphold the positioning of the website. Most of our high performing rankings have held for over two years with no further work.

Keyword Analysis is to determine the best keywords and phrases for Search Engine Optimisation. These keywords and phrases identify the likely searches made by potential prospects for related products and services. In order to captialise on searches made by people who are looking for products and services that your company sells, it is essential that your metatags includes both competitive and non competitive keywords. Once a spider has indexed your website, it will include other related keywords potentially meaning your website could be found under hundreds of related keyword searches. Rage Design use industry professional programs indicating the most relevant keywords to capitalize on for your website.

Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.

The meta element has four valid attributes: content, http-equiv, name and scheme. Of these, only content is a required attribute.

An example of the use of the meta element

In one form, meta elements can specify HTTP headers which should be sent before the actual content when the HTML page is served from web server to client. For example:

This specifies the page should be served with an HTTP header called 'Content-Type' that has a value 'text/html'. This is a typical use of the meta element, which specifies the document type so a client (browser or otherwise) knows what content type to render.

In the general form, a meta element specifies name and associated content attributes describing aspects of the HTML page. For example:

<meta name="keywords"  content="wikipedia,encyclopedia" />
In this example, the meta  element identifies itself as containing the 'keywords' relevant to the  document, Wikipedia and encyclopedia.

Meta tags can be used to indicate the location a business serves:

 

<meta name="zipcode"  content="45212,45208,45218,etc." />
In this example, geographical  information is given according to zip codes.

Meta element use in search engine optimisation

Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting the site.

They have been the focus of a field of marketing research known as search engine optimisation (SEO), where different methods are explored to provide a user's site with a higher ranking on search engines. In the mid to late 1990s, search engines were reliant on meta data to correctly classify a web page and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines — and thus, high traffic to the web site.

As search engine traffic achieved greater significance in online marketing plans, consultants were brought in who were well versed in how search engines perceive a web site. These consultants used a variety of techniques (legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.

Meta elements have significantly less effect on search engine results pages today than they did in the 1990s and their utility has decreased dramatically as search engine robots have become more sophisticated. This is due in part to the nearly infinite re-occurrence (keyword stuffing) of meta elements and/or to attempts by unscrupulous website placement consultants to manipulate (spamdexing) or otherwise circumvent search engine ranking algorithms.

While search engine optimisation can improve search engine ranking, consumers of such services should be careful to employ only reputable providers. Given the extraordinary competition and technological craftsmanship required for top search engine placement, the implication of the term "search engine optimisation" has deteriorated over the last decade. Where it once implied bringing a website to the top of a search engine's results page, for the average consumer it now implies a relationship with keyword spamming or optimizing a site's internal search engine for improved performance.

Major search engine robots are more likely to quantify such extant factors as the volume of incoming links from related websites, quantity and quality of content, technical precision of source code, spelling, functional v. broken hyperlinks, volume and consistency of searches and/or viewer traffic, time within website, page views, revisits, click-throughs, technical user-features, uniqueness, redundancy, relevance, advertising revenue yield, freshness, geography, language and other intrinsic characteristics.

The keywords attribute

The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements[1]. By late 1997, however, search engine providers realized that information stored in meta elements, especially the keyword attribute, was often unreliable and misleading, and at worst, used to draw users into spam sites. (Unscrupulous webmasters could easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to draw people to their site.)

Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements. In July 2002 AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them[2].

No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any impact on ranking at any of the major search engine today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself. 37 leaders in search engine optimisation concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none[3].

The description attribute

Unlike the keyword attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like Yahoo and Live Search, while Google will fall back on this tag when information about the page itself is requested (e.g. using the related: query). The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a web page's content. This allows the webpage authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content. The description is often, but not always, displayed on search engine results pages, so it can impact click-through rates. Industry commentators have suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking pages.[4] W3C doesn't specify the size of this description meta tag, but almost all search engines recommend it to be shorter than 200 characters of plain text.

The language attribute

The language attribute tells search engines what natural language the website is written in (e.g. English, Urdu or French), as opposed to the coding language (e.g. HTML). It is normally a 2 letter abbreviation for the language name. It is of most use when a website is written in multiple languages and can be included on each page to tell search engines in which language a particular page is written.

The robots attribute

The robots attribute controls whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not. The noindex value prevents a page from being indexed, and nofollow prevents links from being crawled. Other values are available that can influence how a search engine indexes pages, and how those pages appear on the search results. The robots attribute is supported by several major search engines [6]. There are several additional values for the robots meta attribute that are relevant to search engines, such as NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET, which are meant to tell search engines what not to do with a web pages content. [7]. Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of your website. A more reliable and efficient method is the use of the Robots.txt file (Robots Exclusion Standard).NOINDEX tag tells a search engine not to index a specific page. NOFOLLOW tag tells a search engine not to follow the links on a specific page. NOARCHIVE tag tells a search engine not to store a cached copy of your page. NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your a search engine listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results.

Additional attributes for search engines

NOODP

The search engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN use in some cases the title and abstract of the Open Directory Project (ODP) listing of a web site for the title and/or description (also called snippet or abstract) in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To give webmasters the option to specify that the ODP content should not be used for listings of their website, Microsoft introduced in May 2006 the new "NOODP" value for the "robots" element of the meta tags [8]. Google followed in July 2006[9] and Yahoo! in October 2006[10].

The syntax is the same for all search engines who support the tag.

<META NAME="ROBOTS"  CONTENT="NOODP">

Webmasters can decide if they want to disallow the use of their ODP listing on a per search engine basis

Google: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT"  CONTENT="NOODP">

Yahoo! <META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP">

MSN and Live Search: <META NAME="msnbot"  CONTENT="NOODP">

NOYDIR

 

Yahoo! also used next to the ODP listing the content from their own Yahoo! directory but introduced in February 2007 a meta tag that provides webmasters with the option to opt-out of this[11].

 

Yahoo! Directory titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages if the NOYDIR tag is being added to a web page.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

<META NAME="Slurp"  CONTENT="NOYDIR">

Robots-NoContent

Yahoo! also introduced in May 2007 the attribute value: class="robots-nocontent".[12] This is not a meta tag, but an attribute and value, which can be used throughout web page tags where needed. Content of the page where this attribute is being used will be ignored by the Yahoo! crawler and not included in the search engine's index.

Examples for the use of the robots-nocontent tag:

<div class="robots-nocontent">excluded  content</div>

<span  class="robots-nocontent">excluded content</span>

<p class="robots-nocontent">excluded  content</p>

Academic studies

Google does not use HTML keyword or meta tag elements for indexing. The Director of Research at Google, Monika Henziger, was quoted (in 2002) as saying, "Currently we don't trust metadata" Other search engines developed techniques to penalize web sites considered to be "cheating the system". For example, a web site repeating the same meta keyword several times may have its ranking decreased by a search engine trying to eliminate this practice, though that is unlikely. It is more likely that a search engine will ignore the meta keyword element completely, and most do regardless of how many words used in the element.

Google does, however, use meta tag elements for displaying site links. The title tags are used to create the link in search results:

<title>Site name - Page title  - Keyword description</title>
The meta description often  appears inGooglesearch results to describe the link:

<meta name="description"  content="A blurb to describe the content of the page appears here" />

Redirects

Meta refresh elements can be used to instruct a web browser to automatically refresh a web page after a given time interval. It is also possible to specify an alternative URL and use this technique in order to redirect the user to a different location. Using a meta refresh in this way and solely by itself rarely achieves the desired result. For Internet Explorer's security settings, under the miscellaneous category, meta refresh can be turned off by the user, thereby disabling its redirect ability entirely.

Many web design tutorials also point out that client side redirecting tends to interfere with the normal functioning of a web browser's "back" button. After being redirected, clicking the back button will cause the user to go back to the redirect page, which redirects them again. Some modern browsers seem to overcome this problem however, including Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

It should be noted that auto-redirects via markup (versus server side redirects) are not in compliance with the W3C's - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 (guideline 7.5).[14]

HTTP message headers

Meta elements of the form <meta  http-equiv="foo" content="bar">can be used as alternatives to http headers. For example, <meta  http-equiv="expires" content="Wed, 21 Jun 2006 14:25:27  GMT">would tell the browser that  the page "expires" on June 21 2006 21:05:27 GMT and that it may  safely cache the page until then.

Alternative to meta elements

An alternative to meta elements for enhanced subject access within a web site is the use of a back-of-book-style index for the web site. See examples at the web sites of the Australian Society of Indexers and the American Society of Indexers.

In 1994, ALIWEB, which was likely the first web search engine, also used an index file to provide the type of information commonly found in meta keywords attributes.

Rage Designs optimisation services include working with clients to build relevant content for search engine optimisation. SEO Content Writing is somewhat different to traditional copywriting. Part of the indexing process requires the linking of relevant content, this is achieved with Search Engine Robots and Spiders indexing keywords and phrases that link with the services or products organisations sell or relevancy. As opposed to traditional copywrting, content writing requires the use of relevant keywords with specialist editing to ensure the balance is achieved between being readable for the visitor and useful for the search engines. Content actually  attributes a high percentage of the requirements to achieve respectable rankings and is an imperative element in the overall SEO strategy. Rage Design recommends editing existing copy for the whole site. Although this sounds like a mammoth task, many organisations already have  collateral that produced in PDF's and printed material. Providing this information is available electronically, it can be edited and used to help develop the content of the website. Providing this information is available electronically, it can be edited and used to help develop the content of the website.

If you would like more information on content writing please contact us.

Once a site has been designed and optimised Rage Design install Google Approved sitemaps. This is an intelligent way of allowing the search engines to navigate around your website and index information accordingly. Google provide their own specialised sitemap which we incorporate into new websites and optimisation projects. In additional to our other optimisation services Google Approved Sitemaps are a part of the overall SEO strategy.

The internal navigation of a website is imperative for both the visitor and the search engines - firstly the visitor needs to find their way around your website with ease and the ability to locate the product, service or information they seek. Search Engine Spiders are very similar, the easier a website makes it for the spider, the more information they are able to index. In all, the easier the availability of information, the better the chances are for respectable rankings.

Reciprocal Linking is a vital element of your SEO strategy - many website go to the pains of building a website and having many elements of SEO completed, but neglect the completion of links. As it stands at present, reciprocal links make up for a third of the required algorithm for Search Engines and in turn makes a big difference to the way your website is positioned on them. Reciprocal linking is the hyperlink on your website to other websites who are companies providing services that are relevant to your industry, so the balance has to be right when including these on your website, its not simply numbers. Rage Design can work with you as part of a link building program and help build these up on your website. For more information on linking please contact us.

Reciprocal link

Areciprocal linkis a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites to ensure mutual traffic. Example: Alice and Bob have websites. If Bob's website links to Alice's website, and Alice's website links to Bob's website, the websites are reciprocally linked. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories, in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites is an important part of the search engine optimisation process because Google uses link popularity algorithms (defined as the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy.

Three way linking

See also: WebringThree way linking (siteA ⇒ siteB ⇒ siteC ⇒ siteA) is a special type of reciprocal linking. The attempt of this link building method is to create more "natural" links in the eyes of search engines. The value of links by three-way linking can then be better than normal reciprocal links, which are usually done between two domains.

Automated linking

In order to take advantage of the need for inbound links to rank well in the search engines, a number of automatic link exchange services have been launched. Members of these schemes will typically agree to have several links added to all their web pages in return for getting similar links back from other sites.

Link exchange

An alternative to the automated linking above is a link exchange forum, in which members will advertise the sites that they want to get links to, and will in turn offer reciprocal or three way links back to the sites that link to them. The links generated through such services are subject to editorial review.

One-way linking

One-way link is a term used among webmasters for link building methods. It is a hyperlink that points to a website without any reciprocal link; thus the link goes "one-way" in direction. It is suspected by many industry consultants that this type of link would be considered more natural in the eyes of search engines. One-way links are also called Incoming Links or Inbound Links.

An effective way to build this type of one-way linking is by distributing articles through content sites and article directories. These articles generally contain an About The Author box that contains a one-way link back to the author's URL. When publishers use these articles, those one-way links help authors increase their page rank.

Multi-way linking

Multi-way linkingis a technique used for website promotion whereby websites may create similar one-way links that each involves 3 or more partner sites. This provides each website with a one-way non-reciprocal link. This technique has evolved from reciprocal linking. According to Google and Yahoo, the latest search algorithms have evolved to hold less favor towards websites that contain a high percentage of reciprocated links, and a higher favor towards websites that maintain a high level of incoming non-reciprocated (one-way) links.

The term multi-way simply refers to the fact that the link exchange is between 3 or more websites, however each link is singular by only pointing to one other website. Other means of linking that may increase your web presence may also include other indirect methods such as loading images, videos, content or RSS feeds from a third partners website.

Link campaign

Link campaignsare a form of online marketing and SEO. A business seeking to increase the number of visitors to its web site can ask its strategic partners, professional organisations , chambers of commerce, suppliers, and customers to add links from their web sites. A link campaign may involve mutual links back and forth between related sites, but it doesn't have to require the reciprocation of links.

Incestuous linking

Incestuous linkingis an SEO strategy used by a webmaster to promote a collection of their own web sites, or those of close friends.

Due to the domination of the search engine market by Google, and its underlying PageRank technology, sites are deemed to be more important if they have large numbers of inbound links. If those inbound links are also from highly ranked web sites, they will boost the web site further. With the take-up of blogging and social networking sites such as MySpace, this has resulted in lots of web sites that are inter-linked and can artificially improve the ranking of a web site without merit, i.e. without valuable or unique content.

When the sites are not directly owned, this is referred to as a web clique.

Overlinking

Overlinkingin a webpage or another hyperlinked text is the characteristic of having too many hyperlinks.[1][2]

It is characterized by:
A large proportion of the words in each sentence being rendered as links.    Links that have little information content, such as linking on specific years like 1995, or unnecessary linking of common words used in the common way, for which the reader can be expected to understand the word's full meaning in context, without any hyperlink help.    A link for any single term is excessively repeated in the same article. "Excessive" is usually more than one link for the same term in a line or a paragraph, since in this case one or more duplicate links will almost certainly then appear needlessly on the viewer's screen.

Underlinking

The opposites of overlinking arenull linkingandunderlinking, which are phenomena in which hyperlinks are reduced to such a degree as to remove all pointers to a likely-needed context of an unusual term, in the text-area where the term occurs. [2] Underlinking results whenever a reader encounters an odd term in an article (perhaps not even for the first time), and wants to briefly browse more deeply at that point, but he or she cannot without an extensive search of the article for a (possibly non-existent) instance of the linked term.

The extreme case of underlinking is a dead-end page, a page with no links at all. Usability experts discourage making dead-end pages. [3]

Link doping
See also: Google bomb

Link dopingrefers to the practice and effects of embedding a large number of gratuitous hyperlinks on a website, in exchange for reciprocal links. Mainly used when describing blogs, link doping usually implies that a person hyperlinks to sites he or she has never visited, in return for a place on the website's blogroll, for the sole purpose of inflating the apparent popularity of his or her website. Since the search algorithms of many web directories and search engines rely on the number of hyperlinks to a website to determine its importance or influence, link doping can result in a high placement or ranking for the offending website.

Originally used in an essay published in Sobriquet Magazine and on Blogcritics.org, link doping has been confused with the related practice of excessive hyperlinking, also known as "link whoring". While the two phrases may be used interchangeably to describe gratuitous linking, link doping carries the additional connotation of deliberately striving to attain a certain level of success for one's website without having earned it through hard work (as an average athlete on steroids might perform better than a naturally gifted athlete not on performance-enhancing drugs).

Free for all linking

Afree for all(FFA) link page is a web page set up ostensibly to improve the search engine placement of a particular web site. Webmasters typically will use software to place a link to their site on hundreds of FFA sites, hoping that the resulting incoming links will increase the ranking of their site in search engines. Experts in SEO techniques do not place much value on FFAs. First, most FFAs only maintain a small number of links for a short time, too short for most search engines to pick up. Second, the high "human" traffic to FFA sites is almost completely other webmasters visiting the site to place their own links manually. Finally, search engine algorithms count more than link numbers, they also check relevancy which the unrelated links on FFA sites do not have. Another drawback to FFAs is the amount of spam e-mail webmasters will receive from members of the FFA. Using an FFA can be considered a form of spamdexing

Link popularity

Link popularityis a measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. In theory, off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings. Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility of a web site among the top of the search results. Indeed, some search engines require at least one or more links coming to a web site, otherwise they will drop it from their index.

Search engines such as Google use a special link analysis system to rank web pages. Citations from other WWW authors help to define a site's reputation. The philosophy of link popularity is that important sites will attract many links. Content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of them.[4]

Link bait

Link baitis any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything "interesting enough to catch people's attention."[5] Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.

Link bait in search engine optimisation

The quantity and quality of inbound links are two of the many metrics used by a search engine ranking algorithm to rank a website. Link bait creation falls under the task of link building, and aims to increase the quantity of high-quality, relevant links to a website. Part of successful linkbaiting is devising a mini-PR campaign around the release of a link bait article so that bloggers and social media users are made aware and can help promote the piece in tandem. Social media traffic can generate a substantial amount of links to a single web page. Sustainable link bait is rooted in quality content.

Types of link bait

Although there are no clear-cut subdivisions within link bait, many attempt to divide them into types of hooks. This is a short list of some of the most common approaches with brief descriptions:

Informational hooks- Provide information that a reader may find very useful. Some rare tips and tricks or any personal experience through which readers can benefit.

News hooks- Provide fresh information and obtain citations and links as the news spreads.

Humor hooks- Tell a funny story or a joke. A bizarre picture of your subject or mocking cartoons can also prove to be link bait.

Evil hooks- Saying something unpopular or mean may also yield a lot of attention. Writing about something that is not appealing about a product or a popular blogger. Provide strong reasons for it.

Tool hooks- Create some sort of tool that is useful enough that people link to it.

Widgets hooks- A badge or tool, that can be placed or embedded on other websites, with a link included.

Forum signature linking

Forum signature linking is a technique used to build backlinks to a website. This is the process of using forum communities that allow outbound hyperlinks in their member's signature. This can be a fast method to build up inbound links to a website; it can also produce some targeted traffic if the website is relevant to the forum topic. It should be stated that forums using the nofollow attribute will have no actual Search Engine optimisation value.

Link broker

Alink brokeris a company that allows you to buy or rent links. Link brokerages function in a few different ways but all offer the same service: selling or renting you links. The quality of the sites, the links they sell and the prices vary greatly, as do the effects those links can have at the search engines

Blind link

Some links are created to intentionally hide the ultimate destination of a link until the user has clicked on it. It's accomplished via redirection (possibly a URL shortening service) or client-side JavaScript. Blind links are usually used for deceptive or advertising reasons, and are most associated with TGPs and Rickrolling.

Blog Comments

Leaving a comment on a blog can result in a relevant do follow link to the individual's website. Most of the time however leaving a comment on a blog turns into a no follow link, which is almost useless in the eyes of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. On the other hand, most blog comments get clicked on by the readers of the blog if the comment is well thought out and pertains to the discussion of the other commenters and the post on the blog.

Google is a Search Engine and Yahoo is a Directory and both apply their own ‘Bot' and ‘Spidering' methods to index and rank websites in accordance to their own content and programming requirements. In addition to this both use their own methods to trawl the internet to update their own search results, for example with Google this is known as the ‘Google Dance' - this means if your website has been on the internet for sometime but not used or updated, then Google may remove pages from its search results. If your website has been redesigned or optimised and the updated website has not been indexed on the search engines, it maybe necessary to submit your website to Google and Yahoo. As these two are the main search engines, other not so well known search engines feed from their data, and this is the reason your website will appear on other web based search engines and directories. If your website is likely to change with content and product types then it is important the site contains the relevant tagging and programming to inform the search engines and spiders to update content as often as required.

For more information on Search Engine Submission please contact Rage Design.

Rage Design highly recommends the use of Google Analytics with all new website builds. Google Analytics paints the real picture in the performance of your website, for example who is visiting, where they visitors coming from geographically, what are the favourite pages and how long they are staying. This is critical in the display and arrangement of content, services and products. Google Analytics allows users to gather critical data, using the findings to improve content and presentation of websites. Google Analytics also provides detailed visitor numbers and as mentioned, the favourite pages - therefore allowing a marketing department to assess the effectiveness of campaigns by the number of visitors to specific pages. This can paint a more detailed picture for future web based marketing and allow better investment of funds. If you have a current website without Google Analytics and would like it installed, please contact us. Also if you approach Rage Design for a new website, we would recommend you install it for all these reasons. For a small investment we can install this on your website and provide you with an easy to understand training session. For more information please contact Rage Design.

Google Analytics(abbreviatedGA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.

GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

Integrated with AdWords, users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using GA, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimise or cull campaigns.

GA's approach is to show high level dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. Through the use of GA analysis, poor performing pages can be identified using techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation.

In order to promote the products and services on your website or other marketing and sales activity, it is imperative that your clients and website visitors receive all the  information needed to retain the interest in your products and services. One of the most cost effective, successful and measured methods is by email communication. However unless your company already has a substantial email database, purchasing one can be extremely expensive. One of the easiest ways of collecting emails is through your website, and one of the most successful ways of communicating with your client and visitor base is by email newsletters and promotional online media. This can be collected on your website and merged into a database ready for you to email out, as part, or in addition to online marketing and promotional campaigns . As part of an email marketing strategy Rage Design can also check the validity of your current email addresses and provide reports detailing the number of hotspots or areas of interest, the success of the email/ newsletter and which links recipients click on when receiving the email.

For more information about Email Subscription and other E-Marketing services please contact Rage Design

Rage Design can create Customer Reaction Forms on your website to collect vital market intelligence. This can be based on a traditional likert scale questionnaire, for example collecting information whether a customer or visitor really likes your service or really dislikes it. Along with Google Analytics you can assertain which web pages and products are working along with your levels of service. Customer reaction forms can be translated into hard reports that would enable the web stakeholder the ability of communicating these reports to management and other departments and make the basis of future sales and marketing strategies. Customer Reaction Reports can also incentivies customers to complete the forms and be introduced to specific promotions, and also assist in the build up of email addresses for future correspondence, for example through newsletters etc. If you would like to discuss Customer Reaction Forms with Rage Design in a new or existing website, please contact us.

If your organisation needs to keep clients and prospects informed of events and dates of interest, then an interactive online calendar could point visitors in the right direction.

Rage Design can integrate an eye catching calendar design into your website and build a content managed element for you to update and keep online visitors informed of events and dates of interest.

A recent example of this was built into the Met Police BPA website which included the requirement for an online calender - because of the number of events through the year, the  online calender keeps MetBPA members and visitors up to date.

If you would like more information about developing online calendars for your website please contact us.

When visiting your website clients, customers and visitors may need to contact you for more information, or have a general enquiry that needs attention from yourselves. It is common practice these days that people do not tend to simply find the telephone number and contact you themselves, in fact it is more likely they will ask you to contact them. Again it has become common practice now for people to visit a companies website and contact the organisation here. For the sake of professionalism from your side it is important all the questions you need to gather the information are available when you receive the email, with the correct forms completed, so whoever receives the information will know to send to Customer Services, Sales or indeed one of the Directors. All enquiries from a contact page tend to go to one person; from there the email is forwarded on to the relevant department. It would save much time if you knew who was contacting you, what their enquiry related to and what time and date they would like to be contacted back. Rage Design can create general contact forms and ensure the delivery of enquires are delivered to the organisations stakeholder in the correct format for the quick extrapolation of this information. Likewise Rage Design can also design numerous contact forms through the website for different sections - such as sales, franchising, new product development, returns etc. This all depends on the depth of the site and the organisation in question.

If your website is likely to gather information and questions about its visitors, then it is highly likely this will be driven by SQL technology, this in turn will convert the information requested into understandable databases and forms for you to extrapolate and use accordingly.

If you are planning a new website design with more functionality and the ability to obtain more information through the use of databases and forms please call Rage Design.

For more information about SQL Data Driven Technology please read on.

SQL (Structured Query Language) (pronounced /?skju?'?l / officially, although the unofficial pronunciation /'si?kw?l/ is often used) (see below), is a database computer language designed for the retrieval and management of data in relational database management systems (RDBMS), database schema creation and modification, and database object access control management.