We rarely design a website these days without some sort of content management tool. Simply put, a content management system (CMS) supports the creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of information on your website. See a page that’s out of date? Update it. Want to add a new page, add it. The system takes care of the details.

Every website developed by Nerdwerx is optimized for speed. However, because of content management systems, it’s easy for an end user to unexpectedly add images to their website that are not optimized or in the right format, slowing down the site for their viewers. Because we know that users abandon slow sites, caution must be taken to keep your site running smoothly.

The following article really highlights the differences between three major image formats: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/gif-jpg-png-whats-difference/

SEO is a continuous process which requires a huge amount of effort and time dedicated in regularly updating and revising a website. This can be a tedious work, most especially for beginners who are up against a very tight competition. However, through reliable companies that offer services for search engine optimization, even starters can get high ranking and increase traffic volume to their sites. All it takes is to choose the right SEO company to handle your needs and maintain your site. But how do you really know which company will provide the best services to your advantage?

The Proof Is In Front Of You

First off, determine if the SEO company in question is able to gauge its own ability and giving its own rank as a company. It is best to know if the company positions itself as a reliable one, but still make sure to be wary of their proposals. Oftentimes, companies who assure to get your site fully optimized in just a span of four weeks are giving false promises and unrealistic goals. A dependable SEO company should be able to help you set realistic goals, familiarize you on how search engine promotion occurs and how positioning is calculated through algorithm.

Moreover, SEO involves a lot of technical jargon. The company must be able to explain to you what these terms mean in a straightforward and comprehensible manner.

When hunting for a SEO company, ask if they can provide you with analysis reports regarding your website’s ranking, design, content, etc. They should give you detailed analysis of your website in all aspects relating to elements that may affect indexing of your webpages.

Also ask for the SEO tools and methods that the company utilizes in keyword analysis and keyword search. Does the company use effective tools? If you are not too familiar with such tools, you can conduct research on the basic tools available for optimization. Ask about specific strategies that the company plans to employ for your site to get high ranking.

The company should also be able to know the significance of qualified traffic over plain traffic. One of your objectives is to increase traffic volume to your site. However, you do not want to get customers who just come across your site because of unrelated keywords. You get increased bounce rate–surfers visit your webpage then leave–rather than increased sales. Qualified traffic is your major concern; you want customers who are truly interested in purchasing products and availing services that your business offers.

About Nerdwerx

As a Quad City SEO company, we develop awesome websites, design compelling graphics for the web, exceed at performing search engine optimization, and are social media marketing gurus. Whether you need to utilize our SEO services for your current website, develop a brand identity for your custom social networking site, or something in-between, we offer superior one-stop services as a web design company and SEO company for the Quad City area. Tired of reading? Talk to us now: Call us at 877-505-NERD.

Sweet! Nerdwerx was featured in QC Magazine for the May/June issue. Take a look if you’re interested.

When we multitask, we get stupid.
The brain slows down when it has to juggle tasks.

In one experiment, researchers asked adults between the ages of 18 and 32 to identify two images: colored crosses and geometric shapes, such as triangles. Seems simple enough, right? But when the participants saw colored crosses and shapes at the same time, they needed almost a full second of reaction time to press a button. Even then, they often made mistakes. If the participants were asked to identify the images one at a time—crosses first, then shapes—the process went almost twice as quickly.

Switching from task to task creates other problems. We can forget what we were doing or planned to do. The to-do list in our brains is known as working memory, and it keeps track of all the short-term stuff we need to remember, like an e-mail address someone just gave us.

But the contents of our working memory can evaporate like water in a desert; after only about two seconds, things begin to disappear. Within 15 seconds of considering a new problem, you’ll have forgotten the old problem. In some cases, the forgetting rate can be as high as 40 percent. Workplace studies have found that it takes up to 15 minutes to regain a deep state of concentration after a distraction.

This squares with what researchers found when they looked at the work habits of Microsoft employees. A group of them took, on average, 15 minutes to get back to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer codes, after they responded to incoming e-mails. Why so long? Typically, the employees strayed off to reply to other messages or browse the Web.

In workplace cubicles, we’re safe (most of the time). But out in the real world, multitasking can be dangerous. In 1999, the U.S. Army studied the effect talking on a cell phone had on driving ability. Its conclusion? “All forms of cellular phone usage lead to significant decreases in abilities to respond to highway traffic situations.”

This was especially true for older drivers. The older we are, the harder it becomes to screen out distractions. The decline is noticeable after age 40.

We see, but we don’t see.
Sometimes a person can look directly at something and still not see it. In experiments done in the early 1990s, researchers found that a surprising number of participants were unaware of certain objects that were presented to them in visual tests. This tendency held true not only when the presented objects were small but when they were large and quite obvious. (Consider, also, how eyewitness testimony persistently fails.)

A real-life demonstration of the “we see, but we don’t see” mistake occurred in 2004 near Washington, D.C. On November 14, a 44-year-old charter bus driver picked up a group of students at the Baltimore/Washington airport for a trip to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home. By all accounts, the driver was in a bad mood that day. He was upset about the way another driver in the entourage was treating him. So he got on the phone and vented about it.

The students’ route that morning took them along the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The parkway passes through rolling hills and beneath arched overpasses, including a stone bridge. About a quarter of a mile before it, a large yellow sign warns that the arched overpass ahead has a clearance of just over ten feet in the right-hand lane.

For cars, this is no problem. But the charter bus was 12 feet tall. The driver needed to move toward the center lane, under the peak of the arch, where the clearance is well over 13 feet. This is what the lead bus did.

Yet the second bus never changed lanes. The driver continued talking on the phone. The bus slammed into the bridge, and the collision sheared off the right side of the bus’s roof, exposing a gaping hole. One student was seriously injured.

After the accident, the driver was interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board. His statement shows the power of inattentional blindness. He told investigators that not only did he fail to see the yellow warning sign, he failed to see the bridge itself.

We notice on a need-to-know basis.
Often we fail to pick up major changes to scenes even while we’re actually viewing them.

The profound impact of this “change blindness” was demonstrated a decade ago in an experiment by Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin, then at Cornell University. The experiment was simple: The researchers had strangers on a college campus ask pedestrians for directions. But there was a twist. As the stranger and the pedestrian talk, they’re interrupted by two men who pass between them while carrying a door. The interruption is brief—it only lasts a second—but something important happens. One of the men carrying the door trades places with the stranger. When the door is gone, the pedestrian is confronted with a different person, who continues the conversation as if nothing had happened.

Would the pedestrians notice the change?

In more than half of the cases, the answer was no. Only seven of the 15 pedestrians reported noticing.

You may think, I would have noticed a change like that. And maybe you would have. But consider that you’ve probably seen countless similar changes and not noticed them—in the movies. Movie scenes, of course, are not filmed sequentially but shot in a different order than they appear in the film, usually months apart. This process often results in embarrassing mistakes known in the industry as continuity errors.

One of the most famous of these comes in the chariot scene in the 1959 Hollywood epic Ben-Hur, which lasts for 11 minutes but took three months to film. During the race, Messala damages Ben-Hur’s chariot with his saw-toothed wheel hubs. But at the end of the race, if you look closely, you will see that Ben-Hur’s chariot appears undamaged.

There’s also a mix-up in the number of chariots. The race begins with nine; during the race, six crash. That should leave three at the end, but there are four.

Even experts cannot catch every mistake. “It’s not humanly possible,” says Claire Hewitt, who has supervised scripts on a variety of movies over the years. The best you can do, she says, is to try to spot the most important things.

We skim when we shouldn’t.
Few industries make a habit of confessing their errors. But one does on a daily basis: newspapers. Their correction columns often make such delicious reading that in 2004 Craig Silverman, a freelance writer in Montreal, launched a website devoted to them, regrettheerror.com. Each year, he compiles the industry’s greatest hits, as it were, into a book of the same name. A favorite was published a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal: “Some jesters in a British competition described in a page-one article last Monday ride on unicycles. The article incorrectly said that they ride on unicorns.” How could the editors have missed that? While it’s tempting to attribute mistakes like this to simple carelessness, the explanation is more complicated.

When we read an article, odds are, we don’t read every single letter in every single word in every single sentence. We’ve read enough words and sentences that we can recognize patterns. If the sentence begins, “The thirsty man licked his …,” the final word is probably lips. Likewise, if our eyes pick up a short word that begins with th-, we will probably assume that the final letter is e.

Human perception is, above all, economical; we notice some things and not others. And the better we are at something, the more likely we are to skim. Good sight readers of music don’t read music note by note; they scan for familiar patterns and cues. This lets them play with the fluidity that other musicians must practice to achieve.

But with this ability comes a trade-off: Details are overlooked. Decades ago, a distinguished piano teacher, Boris Goldovsky, discovered a misprint in a much-used edition of a Brahms capriccio after a student played the note at a lesson. Goldovsky stopped the pupil and told her to fix her mistake. She looked confused; she had played what was written. To Goldovsky’s surprise, there was an apparent misprint in the music. Why, he wondered, had no one—the composer, the publisher, the proofreader, other pianists—noticed the error? They had all misread the music and misread it in the same way. They had inferred a sharp sign in front of the note because in the musical context, it had to be a G-sharp, not a G-natural.

Goldovsky conducted his own experiment. He told skilled pianists that there was a misprint in the piece and asked them to find it. He allowed them to play the piece as many times as they liked. Not one musician found the error. (For music fans, the piece is Brahms’s op. 76, no. 2. The mistake occurs in bar 78.)

We think we’re better than we are.
When a Princeton University research team asked people to estimate how susceptible they and the “average person” were to judgmental biases, most people claimed to be less biased than others. Which should come as no surprise. Most of us hate to think of ourselves as average or, heaven forbid, below average. So we walk around with this private conceit that we’re above average, and therein lies the seed of many of our mistakes. “Overconfidence is, we think, a very general feature of human psychology,” says Stefano DellaVigna, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

He’s studied the ways in which overconfidence induces us to commit everyday errors of judgment, from signing up for gym memberships we’ll never use to buying time-shares in a condo (which we also won’t use, at least not as much as we think we will). “Nearly everyone is overconfident,” he says, “except the people who are depressed. They tend to be realists.”

Oddly, as tasks get harder, overconfidence tends to go up, not down. Even when given a nearly impossible job—like telling the difference between drawings by Asian children and those by European children—people think they’ll perform better than they do.

So strong is our belief in our own abilities that we often believe we can control even chance events, such as flipping a coin or cutting a deck of cards. But it’s an illusion of control. And it’s not limited to those who make a living at the racetrack or in other high-stakes endeavors.

Corporate executives often display overconfidence in their judgments about the thing they think they know best: their businesses. In a well-known series of tests, managers were quizzed about their knowledge of their own industries; 99 percent proved overconfident.

Mistake-Proof Your Life
1. Think small. Each year in the United States, some 7,000 people die from medication errors—and many of them are made because of doctors’ sloppy handwriting. Little things do mean a lot.

2.Think negatively. When you have a major decision to make, ask, What could go wrong? While putting a positive spin on things can influence their outcome, positive thinking also blinds us to pitfalls. So look for and even expect failure. It’s “the power of negative thinking,” says Atul Gawande, MD, of Harvard Medical School.

3. Think differently. Habit is a great friend, saving us time and mental effort. But it can kill our ability to perceive novel situations. After a while, we see only what we expect to see.

4. Slow down. Multitasking can cause our error rate to go up, as our attention becomes divided. It makes sense to slow down and do things one at a time. The slower approach may actually be more efficient in the long run.

5. Get more sleep. Sleepy people make mistakes, and there are staggering numbers of sleep-deprived people out there.

6. Beware anecdotes. When making decisions, we often give vivid bits of information-like diet testimonials—more credence than they deserve. The power of anecdotes to lead us astray is so strong that an influential CIA study advises intelligence analysts not to rely on them. Ask for averages, not testimonials.

7. Put off decisions until you’re in a better mood. Good feelings increase the tendency to combine material in new ways and see relatedness between things. Happy people tend to be more creative and less prone to errors.

8. Use constraints. Simple mental aids keep us on the right track. The color red works well because this extreme and powerful color signifies “stop.” A song’s melody can be a constraint against forgetting; it’s why jingles stay with us long after commercials do.

Credits: Reader’s Digest

About Nerdwerx

As a Quad City Website Design company, we develop awesome websites, design compelling graphics for the web, exceed at performing search engine optimization, and are social media marketing gurus. Whether you need to utilize our SEO services for your current website, develop a brand identity for your custom social networking site, or something in-between, we offer superior one-stop services as a web design company and SEO company for the Quad Cities. Tired of reading? Talk to us now: Call us at 877-505-NERD.

A good website is just not about the design and layout, rather it is also about the content that is updated there. Likewise, plain content doesn’t make a website and it has to have an attractive, visually appealing design and layout. So, which one is more important for the success of the website? Content or Design?

Website design comprises of the final visual interface design and the layout of the web pages. It should be noted that it is different from interactive design or information architecture. Website content requires a sound understanding of types of content and thorough information about what needs to be delivered to the website audiences. It is also important to know what the website visitors are looking for on the website and satisfying their requirements.

Website Design

The designing of a website generally starts by establishing a business objective to the website, deciding on the functionality requirements, determining the target audience and strategizing accordingly. All the design elements, be it the logo, the navigation bar or the structure of web pages revolve around these determined objectives. The starting of the website designing process doesn’t involve too much of content. In fact, the site map includes the list of generic pages like Homepage, About Us, Products & Services, Contact Us etc. This generally follows a standard structure and poses no problem or issue regarding addition of new pages. You can just add new pages and update whatever you need to be placed on the website. Content comes in very late in the process. After website has been designed and the structure of the web pages have been finalized, the addition of content is considered. However, often it happens that many issues creep up during this stage. This is because if you are loaded with too much content and your web pages fail to accommodate all of it, you have to cut short it. For example, you might have a bunch of short testimonials that need to be placed on the website but the Testimonials page doesn’t have space enough for the same. However, if there is enough space on the web pages, you can seek to include them all. Thus, in case of smaller websites, design probably has more importance than content. This is because content inclusion becomes dependent on the website design and layout.

Website Content

Content takes a precedence over the design where there is an overhaul of information like in case of larger websites. In case of large websites, there is too much information that needs to be handled. There can be online information and offline information waiting to go online. In such cases, the sheer volume of content outweighs the design and becomes the driving force of the design and development process. When a website is designed around its content, it guarantees a better and enriched user-experience. This is where it gets important for a website designer to efficiently understand the contents of a website in addition of its goals and objective before starting the design and development process. Only then can one seek to design robust website the design and layout of which completely complements the content of the same. The idea is to create a seamless balance between the two elements.

About Nerdwerx

As a Quad City Website Design company, we develop awesome websites, design compelling graphics for the web, exceed at performing search engine optimization, and are social media marketing gurus. Whether you need to utilize our SEO services for your current website, develop a brand identity for your custom social networking site, or something in-between, we offer superior one-stop services as a web design company and SEO company for the Quad Cities. Tired of reading? Talk to us now: Call us at 877-505-NERD.