It's always a bonus to uncover a shortcut or program enhancement, and here we bring you 100 tips and tricks that we hope will make your computing experience quicker, simpler or more rewarding.
Building better Websites
1 Don't forget that a significant number of people (especially males) are colour blind. Making a site that they can use is easy. Examine a screenshot in Photoshop. Just check that the text and navigation is visible in greyscale mode, and also in each of the red, green and blue channels.
2 As well as having www.domain.com pointing at your site, also set up eee.domain.com and qqq.domain.com. These are really common typing errors.
3 If your site address is hard to spell (for example, www.laphroaig.com), register a few misspelled versions as well. Speak to the people in your post room – they'll know most common misspellings – they see them on envelopes every day.
4 Bad links can be serious, so start to spot those 404 errors as soon as they happen. It's better to find out that you've messed up an important link on your front page before you run your monthly logfile analysis. Or before you notice a drop in the order volumes. Or before you notice a drop in the company bank account. Reconfigure your Web server to use a special 404 page. Then make that page run a script to send you an email.
5 Set a 'strategic imperative' for your site and then judge all new development proposals against it, rejecting those that don't fit. Not only will this preserve your budget, it will also keep your site manageable and tightly focused.
6 One of the easiest ways to speed up your site is to reuse the same graphics on different pages, so that they're served from the browser's cache. But for this to work, you MUST use absolute rather than relative paths to those images.
7 Design your site and navigation around how people browse and shop rather than shoehorning something around your existing systems and legacy databases. Total DVD (www.totaldvd.com.au) is a top example of building a shopping system around the shopper with features like referrals, reviews and activities. At the other end of the spectrum, dance music record shop Juno (www.juno.co.uk) serves a niche audience that knows exactly what it wants to buy. As a result, it can forego images and graphics and provide a tight, highly categorised and targeted shopping procedure. The key here is to know your audience, and then give them what they want. Not the other way around.
8 Don't just assume that you can reuse pictures from your adverts or brochures – they may have restricted usage rights. Always check first – if someone were to sue you it could cost a small fortune.
9 Conventional site-testing labs are very expensive to equip and run, but products such as Connectix Virtual PC or VMware Workstation will enable you to have many different browsers and OS versions available on a single PC.
10 There are all kinds of tricks you can use to get better search engine rankings. Many think the best tip is 'don't use them'. The search engines will eventually spot the tricks and penalise sites using them. The only sensible way to a high ranking is relevant and constantly updated content, with lots of links from other genuine sites.