First of all, it’s also wordpress based. As an added spice, it is not just a regular blog. It is not a fully functioning network integrated with facebook (one can log into praisevoice.com with their facebook account), but it is wordpress based. Though I don’t want to go into details of the site either, I simply want to mention it was designed in the Janvier Design studios. Its traffic soared an amazing 3700%. I as  stunned! The site is literally  on steroids give how high its traffic shot both in the number of visitors, average time on site, pageviews and pageview/user.

This was achieved by simply hooking the site to wordpress and its new amazingly easy to work with plugin buddypress. I am 100% certain that Buddypress is an amazing opening in the future of the web and its social side. In less than a month, I can account for “miracles” in terms of boosting a site.Now I can really about boosting a website traffic without investing a penny with Search engines or other marketing schemes. 100% raw, natural and focused traffic.

Do you want the same? Contact Janvier designs for a free Quote !

1. Keep it simple.
   Ever wondered why Google doesn’t make their site so complicated and yet stays as the top online portal for the past few years? Because they keep it simple. Visitors are not looking for “CSS wizards”. As a matter of fact, just a small portion of them actually know what  CSS is, let alone knowing what it does. Visitors want information really easily. So, the easier to navigate the site you design, the better the user experience will be.
2. Graphics moderation is key.
   Clogging your pages with so many graphics means one thing: search engines won’t like you. Why?
   • First, because Search engines don’t understand the data contained in the graphics than the graphic’s title and hopefully its URL.
   • Graphics don’t make your site any faster. Actually, they slow it down and this can meaning nothing but bad news, because your site load time is one the key parameters search engines consider while indexing pages  from your site.
   • Graphics are relatively larger files than average text or html files. So, for an account with limited  bandwidth thi can be a source of trouble.
3. Be at their place. Will you?
   When you design a page or a bunch of them, very likely it’s for someone else. Some audience out there. If you were part of that audience, how would you like them? Ask yourself that question, to avoid being part of the 85%  webmasters who will see their websites go down in less than a year because they failed  to consider this trivial but rather  crucial info.  I see web designers who spend so much time on “flashy” techniques and forget what really matters;  User Experience!!
4. Color combination.
   It may not be your choice, but from different surveys and polls data, most web surfers preffer clear backgrounds to dark ones. In other words, a white background and a black font is better than a black baground with a yellow font. Google chooses that combination. So does  Yahoo! and many others including wikipedia, facebook,… Do you think it’s a coincidence? Think again.
5. Be unique
   Yes…Uniqueness is quality. Even if you use a highly popular theme or template like the wordpress omni theme, make sure you can get a professional designer to customize it for you to give it a unique look. This is because you simply don’t want to have a site looking like your competitor’s  who might buy the same template!

With these few  design tips, I hope you can a new insight in making your pages more appealing and more attractive. The main point to focus on is the visitor, because in the end their behaviour  will read the final verdict for the content and organization for your site.

Visit all Website tips and see for yourself what Janvier Designs can do!

Request a free quote by filling in the following form.

She wanted a wordpress based website and stakes couldn’t be any better. I love wordpress, especially that it is very standards compliant and comes with a swarm of plugins that can be customized to suit one’s needs. I used the revolution lifestyle templateby Brian gardner to make this site look newer and this what Erica had to say “Absolutely fantastic” !!

I have had my share of absurd ideas from my early childhood, but the one to become my own boss as a web designer was probably the most profound. At least in the eyes of certain people. I decided to leave it all behind, to look  nowhere else but inside and unleash the designer in me. The truth is, I have fallen in love with php Programming since 2005 when I was trying to “automate”  my then static  website. I wanted to store information in a “table” of some kind instead of having to edit the page every time I need  to carry out a change. With a little search on google, almost accidentally I realized what I was trying to do was exactly what server-side programming is all about. PHP became  my language of choice and I haven’t looked  back ever since. In September 2006, I was “playing” in the CPANEL of  bluehost (my host)  and I realized they had a fantastico  icon. I followed the link and landed on a bunch of applications that could be installed on a mouse click. In the days that followed I targeted wordpress because it was  different from what I was used to. It turned out that wordpress is undoubtedly the best content management system  for publishing on the Internet  today! Since then, I have developed some skills  and a better understanding of programming generally and the Internet in particular.

I have a few  reasons I chose to be a designer and I will detail them shortly below.

1. A skill in demand.

   Today millions of websites and blogs are create every single day for various reasons. You will be surprised  how many people lack the skills to maintain their own websites and blogs and yet want an “Online presence”. That’s where designers like me come in. Designing  a  functionally professional website requires to create a database that stores the info, interactive scripts  that fetch the info from the database and populate the pages and/or the other way around, design the pages to give them an acceptably attractive look, optimize the site for Search engines, and collect relevant  information from visitors for analysis or other purposes.  These are skills I acquired over the years and that may be useful to someone.

2. I love it!

   Usually I refer to it as “web programming”. That is, designing and maintaining applications that interact to make websites more interesting. This may be in server-side languages such as PHP or ASP, or client side in Java, javascipt or any other. I almost don’t play with “basic html” anymore because I am more interested in generating it dynamically.

3. Flexibility.

   One other reason I am so sold to web design and web development  is the flexibility to do things as they make sense. So, in the morning if I am not pretty sure about a script A that requires a little more thinking I can do graphics or the other way around. I can work from 7Am to 7 pm or 2 Am to 11 Am. This enhances my creativity and relieves a lot of pressure and stress off my shoulders. I love web design as a job!

4. IT’S AN ART

   Of course it is! From my early childhood I loved drawing, singing and “making things”.  I have an artistically creative mind  I did not get to develop fully because I focused more on learning Science and mathematics.  When I am designing, I let my mind wonder, explore, experiment. I change things around, add, remove, join,.. It allows me to unleash the artist in me, not necessarily in the traditional sense of the word, and that’s what I love about it.

I have a few other reasons I choose to bring my web design skills out, but I will limit myself to letting you explore the site. If you have any question, use the contact me page and let me know. I will answer all the questions personally as accurately as possible.