Customer service and help desk for web designers

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SmarterTrack 4.x is a powerful help desk application built for tracking, managing, and reporting on customer service and communications, including sales and support issues. Businesses can manage employees and company communications at distributed locations around the world from a Web browser—increasing the efficiency of virtual offices, mobile agents, and companies with multiple locations. Features include:

* A world-class Ticket solution that transforms service, sales, and support emails into a powerful information distribution system
* Live Chat, which gives businesses the ability to reduce phone calls, capture information on website visitors, and assist more customers
* WhosOn, which gives businesses real-time tracking of customers as they navigate websites, providing the opportunity to increase sales, expedite customer service, and gather information on site visitors
* A portal interface that is optimized for search engines and functions as the central hub for all communication channels
* Self-service resources, such as a Knowledge Base and news items, that allow customers to research and resolve questions and issues
* A Web-based interface that provides accessibility wherever an Internet connection is available
* An integrated survey system that can be triggered upon events
* More than 70 summary and trend reports with many levels of customization and filtering
* Support for multiple brands within a company

And, there is a free version (without as many features, obviously)

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Blogs or web sites

You know when I started designing web sites, blogs didn’t exist. My first web site was made with Microsoft Publisher and a little bit of HTML knowledge. Pretty well every webmy dog site then took an age to download, even if I had had cable then, and had heaps of large graphics and lots of animated graphics. Text was big and the design was usually pretty poor.

By the time I bought dreamweaver, in preference to Front Page, thank God, I was ready to get my own domain name and host. Dreamweaver was pretty easy to learn and I thought, great, this is the best thing since sliced bread.

Then there were all those books in computer book stores about Java and PHP and I didn’t have a clue. But I did learn how to use javascripts not as a developer of them, but as a web designer.

Now we were suddenly going up to XHTML and CSS had arrived. It was all going too fast for me. I’ve managed both of those now, sort of, but we are almost back to a full circle with build a page, wikis, blogs, swickis all of which means that no-one has to know any code.

There’s debate all the time about which way the internet is going to go next. Was it going to be a content management system or was it going to be a blog?

I’ve used both and even had a forum at one time too. But it is only now that I have added WordPress to my site. And I like it.

With my web site, I tried DHTML menus so that every time I added a page I could update the menu in a flash. I’ve learnt Paint Shop pro, but not everything about Photoshop. I’ve made video tutorials that go to YouTube and I’ve made some podcasts. I love technology.

I could never afford much, so any spare cash went on the computer and we now have 2 networked. I’ve never done any IT study.

I find it almost impossible to keep up with all the changes, so the blog makes it easier to write a page and have it indexed almost immediately. Word Press has so many plugins to make it like a web site. There are not just posts here.

Should I change my whole site over to this blog or have it as a quick update of news to do with web design? Maybe not. I’d lose whatever ranking I have.

But which will do better? I have added google analytics to this blog so I can see my visitors. This blog is still only a month old so I don’t expect too many click throughs yet. I have a number of subscribers to my feed already though.

That’s another thing about blogs. A person can see all your posts in one click in their reader of RSS feeds. Subscriptions to web sites like I have seem to be slowing down. RSS is so much easier, although I may add an email subscription to my feed also.

I think too that most of the interesting stuff is appearing more on blogs than web sites. Of course the corporations and small businesses need their web sites. They don’t need to be changed that much, but whenever you go to google adsense or google analytics for example, do they care much about design? I don’t think so. They don’t need to.

Some blogs and web sites are really beautiful and I still like a good looking site.

Anyway, what do you think? What will be the future of the internet and please don’t say mobile phones.

Oh? About the eyes on the dog. I’ll get rid of the blue pupils for the next post and tell you how I did that as if you didn’t know!

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More web design tips

Mario Sanchez Author Site design tips

I have edited her site design tips to include only the more sophisticated of them. They are her views.

  • Write in layman’s terms so that everybody can understand your content, unless you’re running a technical site for technical people.
  • Reading from a screen is painful: use 50% less words than you would use on print.
  • If a page is too long, break it into several pages and link to them.
  • Don’t use font sizes smaller than 10pt. for the body of your page. Specify your fonts in percentage terms instead of pixels to let users set their own size preferences using their browser’s text view options.
  • Use a spell checker. Spelling mistakes are embarrassing and hurt credibility.
  • Tips to Know Your Customers Ask for feedback: include a feedback form in your Contact Us page.
  • Publish an ezine and include a subscription form in your homepage. Give your customers valuable information and encourage them to contact you.
  • Include polls and other tools to gather market intelligence.

Tips on Linking

  • Make your links descriptive. They should indicate what the user will be linking to, as opposed to just saying “click here”.
  • Don’t underline anything that is not a link.
  • Underline your links and use a consistent color for them across your site (preferably blue).
  • Use a different color for visited links, so that your visitors know where they’ve been (preferably purple or a more subdued tone of the unvisited links color).
  • When linking to a non-HTML file, such as Excel, Word or Acrobat, make it evident, by including a small icon next to the link.
  • Don’t link to “under construction” pages.
  • Make sure that your links work and that you don’t have broken links.
  • If you use graphic links, don’t forget to use the ALT attribute.
    The ALT attribute should describe what you are linking to.

Tips On How To Use Graphics

  • Optimize your graphics. Use only .gif and .jpg formats.
    Make your image files as small as possible while maintaining acceptable quality. Use a free online graphics optimization tool.
  • Use thumbnails (miniature versions of a picture) and make them clickable to the actual size picture.
  • Avoid graphics that look like ads. People ignore them.
  • Use the ALT attribute on pictures, even if the image is not a link. It helps users with disabilities and people who have turned off graphics.

Tips To Optimize Your Site For The Search Engines:

  • Create short, descriptive page titles, to entice search engine users to click on your links.
  • Create a site map containing all your pages, and link to it directly from your homepage. Search engine robots will follow the link to your site map and will most likely add all your pages to their index.
  • Decide what the two or three main keywords are for each page (the words you believe search engine users will type to find your pages and repeat them often in your page title, description meta tag and page body.
  • Create a Links page and call it Resources. In it, place links to those sites that have agreed to place a reciprocal link to your page. The more inbound links you have from quality sites with a topic related to your site, the better your site will rank with the search engines.
  • Use more text than graphics, and minimize the use of Flash and JavaScript. Search engines heavily favor text and will crawl and index your site faster. For more details on these tips, or for more tips, visit TheInternetDigest.net

Web design expert and author Shelley Lowery’s ebook, Web Design Mastery, is taking the Internet by storm…Customers are raving…”Finally, a web design course that makes total and complete sense! Shelley, your new eBook will quickly become the “bible” for anyone who wants to build a website. Totally top shelf!” — Rick Beneteau For the first time, Shelley reveals all of her professional Web design secrets in her latest book, Web Design Mastery. Finally! A COMPLETE Web design system that makes professional Web design easy…with 100s of copy and paste codes. Web Design Mastery is a MUST read for anyone serious about designing a great website! I HIGHLY recommend it.

A terrific forum for webmasters. Forums are where you can help others and get answers to your questions. This one has many members and many categories.
http://www.webdesignforums.net/

Web design and resources for beginners and before CSS and web 2.0

You don’t have a web site yet

It’s very difficult to keep up with the changes to web design these days. Some of the flash sites we’ve seen are particularly brilliant, some are not. Making a web site without buying Photo shop, paint shop pro and dreamweaver will leave your site fairly plain. That may be all you want, but if you want a more professional design try this. Try these templates

Web design tips

There are things you can do to your web site to confuse the spammers. There’s a way of using another symbol apart from @ for your emailon your site. It is @
Spider robots looking for the @ then can’t find your email.
You can use a ‘no right click script’ . But I believe that even going to all those lengths you will still get spam mail.

Appelet menus..very attractive
The web developers virtual library

One of the reasons we could never quite get the colours right on the site is that without seeing them together it is difficult to judge how they will look. As with painting a room, we found the following site invaluable. We had the web site there to pick the colour and the dreamweaver open to see how it looked next to other colours. From our experience a two colour site is probably best, but that doesn’t count the text link colours.

Check out this colour picker

Here’s a great link to HTML tags and which browsers the tags work in.
HTML tags

Create DHTML/Javascript menus for your web pages visually, without any programming experience required! A Javascript menu will work alike in browsers supporting DHTML, such as the I.E., Netscape Navigator, Firefox and Opera browsers, without you having to deal with DHTML incompatibilities across them. A DHTML menu can be vertical or horizontal, it can be movable, stay visible while scrolling, contain static or animated images, borders, colors and much more. There is also a collection of predefined styles in the Style Gallery that can help you build a dynamic menu very fast; just add the text for each menu item and let the Style Gallery take care of its appearance. Finally, a simple step-by-step process makes it easy to compile and link a menu to your web page in just seconds! Since menus have always been familiar and straightforward to users, you can really boost your sites’ functionality with comprehensive, well-designed menus; AllWebMenus is definitely a great tool to achieve this!
I have used the All web menu and can recommend it provided it is not too graphic intensive. They are attractive and popular. All Web Menus

This site was advertised as Site Pro News of the week. I has simply everything you’d need. Everything the web designer needs

Creating site maps with different software – all free

I have a page of resources on my web site.

Flash

Well here is a great link to flash tutorials. Good luck. I can’t make head nor tale of flash. I guess I’m not
that keen on learning it either. But for the occasional banner or button flash is pretty useful. I use on-line flash generators if I need it

Articles about web design

Do you have some affiliate programs from which you’d like to receive some commission for advertising them on your site? Have you clicked on one of these from another site and thought you’d like to buy
something but decide to get rid of the referrers ID? You can encrypt your link by using my Protect your link service to be found at the bottom of the About affiliate programs page

HTML Code Tutorial’s goal is to provide the most helpful and complete guide to creating web pages anywhere. They have good tutorials on frames and on forms at
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/

Free on-line web tools

Flash Generators, Graphic Generators, Dhtml/Css Tools, JS Generators, JS/Css Generators, Html Generators, MetaTag Creators, Calculation Tools, Colour Charts, Site Popularity, Dates & Times, Text & Numbers, Domain Related, Fun Tools, System Information, Ping, whois, etc. Code Validators, Miscellaneous http://www.freetoolkit.net/

Make your long URL shorter http://www.snipurl.com/

Creating vertical lines on your web page

We do this by building a .gif image we’ll call “vertbar.gif” and then placing that next to some text. You can build the image to width, say 2 pixels, and form the height as desired using the img height attribute, like this: <IMG src=”vertbar.gif” width=2 height=n align=”left”>
You obviously have to create your vertical graphic in your favourite graphic program.
If you are short on one of these check out my free graphic editors

ALT TAGS

This tag is the one that is most often misused: The alt tag.
Alt tags are comments that should be used whenever you add a graphic, or image to a web page. Pictures are worth a thousand words to you and me, but zero to a search engine. An alt tag should be a little bit of short, descriptive text which helps any user (and search engine) understand what the reference is pointing to. If you are not aware of what an alt tag looks like, here’s an example: <imgsrc=”chinavase.jpg” width=”159″ height=”196″ border=”0″ alt=”china vase”>

DHTML menu

Another DHTML menu builder : this one is also cross browser which is invaluable as many only work on some browsers. There are free DHTML menu codes out there but often, not very exciting, or limited to few browsers and you have to know how to code them yourself. Mine was free at the time, but that no longer applies. Mine also does not work on the Opera browser. Why do I like DHTML menus? Because you add a page and you just add the page to your menu. You don’t have to use SSI or change every page on your site.

Interactivity

If you have a web site with content that you want to share, FreeSticky is the place to list it. Freesticky also locates and reviews high quality website tools and website improvements that you can easily add
to increase the professional look of your site. You will find a variety of content including headline news feeds, financial content, jokes, lottery results royalty free photos, images, stock tickers, sports tickers and much, much more. Web site tools include remotely hosted applications such as free chat rooms, free hit counters, free message boards, free guestbooks, free web forums and more! Make your site sticky

Jumping links Internal links, or whatever you want to call them, are pretty easy. Let’s set up the basics right now and then I’ll totally explain it. The word anchor in this lesson will apply to the target of the internal link.
The anchor is the spot you go to. If I was linking to ozwebhub.com, the anchor would be “http://www.ozwebhub.com”.

With internal links, the link and anchor are both on the same page usually, but they can be on another page too. So, the link has to point to something other than a conventional anchor.
Now I will show you the HTML since you should have a solid understanding:
<a href=”#soft”>Free software</a> would take you to this anchor: <a name=”soft”>Free software</a>

You can jump to specific areas on another page, too. Simply address the page area you want to go to like so: <a href=”http://www.ozwebhub.com/dreamweaver.html#dwvideo“>How to use dreamweaver</a>

That HTML would lead you to the page known as dreamweaver.html at the section (anchor) called “dwvideo”.

TARGETS are great for a site map. Break up your pages and point to more information by using targets.

Xara web service applications have just added a menu maker to their products. But there are heaps of other quite cheap things to choose from as well as free tools

How to protect your web site from thieves.
Is it possible? Is it advisable?

Yes it is advisable for security reasons, but then there is the philosophy that the internet should be open source and free. Right click codes don’t really do the job as people can just look at your source and write it down. I’ll leave it up to you. Here is what HTML-Protector says about their product, and it is pretty cheap, besides. You don’t need to use it on every web page where you want people to download something, but it will help stop that most annoying spam.
HTML-Protector.com is incredibly simple to use. Within seconds, you can:
Completely hide all your HTML!
Encrypt every single e-mail link, ensuring spam “spiders” can’t snatch your address!
Securely encrypt every single PayPal “return” link!
Lock your pages, so they only display on your site!
Disable right-clicking, offline browsing, text highlighting and printing!
Stop URLs being shown in the status bar!
Cancel any clipboard copying or screenshots from being taken!
Prevent dragging-and-dropping and Adobe Acrobat Web capture!
Automatically break out of frames!… and more!

Favicons

I have made a favicon.
The tiny icon next to your bookmarked page really makes it stand out. One note about it. It can disappear because it relies on cookies. If you delete your history and cache you will need to upload it again. You can download a free program called FavOrg to bring them back again. See my tute on making one

Web design tips

Even though this site looks a lot like one of my own pages, I recommend it. It has HTML tutorials. It talks about communications and it has a crossword on it, which really tests your knowledge of computers. The crossword is made in a very interesting way. It is really designed for year 12 IT students. Web design

Tips on web design http://www.tlc- systems.com/webtips.shtml

How to write HTML
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/index.html

Accessibility

See how your site is viewed by all browsers, link checker and more http://www.anybrowser.com/

Web tips

1. For Dreamweaver users (and possibly Front page users)

I was sent an email by Roy Bryant of http://www.seventwentyfour.com which alerted me to broken links outside my page. As I went into the code to see what was causing this I discovered that if you don’t put http:// in front of your link, it will not work. At the same time I discovered that I had plenty of 20% all over the place. I had to delete these from my code. Also those sites where you see www.geocities/~sam for example, the squiggle translates to something else in the code, but doesn’t seem to effect the viability of the link. You can make these mistakes so easily. Only yesterday as I was rejigging my site, I discovered that I had a ‘h’ missing for a URL link. Result? Yet another broken
link.

File structures

I am changing the file structure by separating out the images and HTML files.

So on my computer I have a folder called ‘ozwebhub’ containing all the HTML files which belong to that and under that file I have one called images. On the remote site (my server) I created a new folder called images too, so all the images go there.
But in my HTML code I have to change it to <img src=”images/banner.gif” width=”286″ height=”138″ alt=”how to make a banner”> for example.

Now you can use this same process to separate up more parts of your site, like your blog.

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