presentation landing pages

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Installing RMagick on Leopard is quite a painful process, well, the gem is not the problem, the dependencies are, but lucky me I came across Solomon White’s post.

I don’t like Fink or Ports very much, so Solomon’s little script saved me a lot of time and headache, thanks for that!

It looks like some hosts are not up all the time, if you run into problems just google for the files and download them into your folder, then continue to run the script below.

install_rmagick

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Hello, here is a reproduction of the classic Shape example adapted for haskell (The equivalent of “hello world” in the OOP world).

With haskell classes and three different data types (think Java interfaces)

-- define the shape data types
data Triangle = Triangle
data Square = Square
data Octagon = Octagon

class Shape s where
  sides :: s -> Integer

instance Shape Triangle where
  sides _ = 3

instance Shape Square where
  sides _ = 4

instance Shape Octagon where
  sides _ = 8

GHCi output

*Main> sides Triangle
3
*Main> sides Square
4
*Main> sides Octagon
8

With one haskell datatype and runtime pattern matching (think erlang or “parametric polymorphism”)

-- define the instances of shape
data Shape =
  Triangle |
  Square |
  Octagon

sides Triangle = 3
sides Square = 4
sides Octagon = 8

GHCi output

*Main> sides Triangle
3
*Main> sides Square
4
*Main> sides Octagon
8

Which do you like better?

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How many times have you gone to a website and been completely disappointed with the design and user interface that you left? Without even checking what you came to the site for? By show of hands there are a lot of us out there.

I am sure that there are people out there that think that web design is left up to those with creative minds, artists, who have the chance to express their voice with a website to the entire world. But in reality there is a lot more that goes into it, or so we hope. Now I am not saying that anyone could design a website, nothing could be further from the truth. There are a lot questions that must be answered before you can design a site successfully.

Take a moment and think about your favorite website… what do you like about it? Is it the colors? Or a cool looking logo? Is it the user interface? (how easy it is to navigate through the website) Or does it have nothing to do with the look, is it all about the content?

Now take another moment and think about the worst website you have come across… what was it that made you cringe when you arrived? Was there music playing? Did it have banners flashing or moving objects? Was it over crowded with no rhyme or reason to the information? Was it impossible to find the information that you came to the website for?

This happens to so many web users, they go onto a website looking for something specific and they end up leaving after ten seconds because they cannot stand the music or the waving flag in the corner. As anyone can attest to, distractions are easy to come by and makes us move on even faster.

You do not need to have a background in design, art, or web design to understand how the fundamentals of a website should work. You do however need to have background in those things plus an understanding of the fundamentals of consumers who surf the web to make a good looking website with a great user interface. People always want the best of both worlds: they want websites to look amazing, and they also want them to be easy to navigate and the information readily available with little effort to find it.

Being in the web development world it is simple to pick up on the latest trends of website production. These days a website needs to be eye catching without all those silly distractions like music and flying objects. The website also needs to look advanced for it’s time. People need to be able to find the navigation easy to maneuver through and whatever information they are looking for can only be less than two clicks away. Anything longer than two clicks will make your website visitor go bye-bye.

Take my test: go to three of you favorite websites and see if they have the above criteria, and go to three websites you hate the most and find out what they are missing. Tell me what you find.

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It is amazing how many people who have websites for their business ask this question. They do not understand why they are not seeing a drastic change in their business just by putting themselves on the web. They think, “Billy from We are Web Designs said all I needed to do was get my business on the web and I would see results”. Well in this day and age it’s just about having presence on the web, there are many other factors.

Let’s start with design, when was your site developed? How is the user interface? (by user interface I mean how easy it is to navigate through the site and find what you are looking for) Would you say that it has a modern look or can you tell what year it was made. You should be asking yourself these questions all the time. With the age of the internet you have to be constantly be upgrading your look. I am not saying that you need to redo your website every year but you need to change with the tides. Think about your favorite websites, is your site up to par with their design? Not only are you up to par with design but is it easy to get the information you are providing? Are you sending a clear message?

I have been reading lots of marketing books lately and they are all saying the same thing. Consumers have changed the way they buy things. Push marketing is no longer effective, we cannot tell our customers to buy our product because they need it, we need to use the pull method. The pull method is to draw the customer in with information, and lots of it. Think about yourself as a consumer for a second, when you decide to buy something now, like a digital camera, do you just go to your local electronics store and buy the first one on sale or do you research all of the latest trends and then you research who has the best deal, not just in town, but on the web. Well this is what everyone is doing. Consumers want to look for the information on what they are buying and they want to be able to get the information at any time. So what should your site do? It should draw people in with readily available and easily accessible information. When they go to your site they should be able to find what they are looking for in two clicks of a mouse. If the information is further than that they will move onto the next site. Same thing goes for look and feel of your site. If they do not like the way it looks than they will also move onto the next one. Isn’t it amazing how many things you have to think of when developing you website (this is why there are professionals, this is what they know so you don’t have to!)

The last thing that has impact on people coming to your site is finding you on the web. This subject could take pages and pages to talk about, but I will be brief. People need to be able to get to your site easily and fast. Here are some things to think about: what kind of domain name do I have? Is it long, or confusing? Is it hard to spell? What do I talk about on my homepage? Do I have any content on my homepage? Have you searched for yourself through a search engine like google or yahoo? What page were you on? These are just a few of the things to think about.

People do not realize all the different things that account for their ranking on a search engine. This type of marketing is called SEO, or search engine optimization, and the whole point of SEO is to get your site on the first page of the search, because as we all know, no one really moves on to the second page. We are talking prime real estate here people!

Since SEO is such an extensive subject and even I am yet to have a full grip on it, I will wait to expand until next time.

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