Pendragon Design Journal

Website templates are very affordable and they save you a lot of effort and time when you want to create a new layout for your website. However, a lot of people make mistakes in the process of choosing and using a web template and end up with something that was unlike the image they had in mind. Here are some guidelines to help you avoid those mistakes.

The first obvious mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is very popular. If many people use the same template, your website will not appear unique at all and your credibility as a solid, different website will be tarnished. In other words, you will appear generic just like your next-door neighbours.

To whole point of using a web template is to save time and effort. You just change the title and appropriate details and you’re done. The biggest mistake one makes is to customize the template beyond recognisation. While that may be good in the sense that you’re creating a unique graphic, you’re defying the very purpose of using a web template — saving time and effort.

However, on the opposite side, if a template you purchase is suitable but some changes must be made to suit your site’s theme, then you will have to take some time to make the changes. For example, you can find a very nice template that suits your hobby site except the original designer has put an image of stamps in the header. You can find images of garden plants and spades to replace the stamps for your gardening hobby site. However, do only make the necessary changes and don’t redesign the whole template.

In some circumstances, some people simply make the wrong choice of templates. This is a very subjective issue but you have to be careful in selecting templates to suit your audience. Do not choose templates just because they are pretty, choose them because they serve your purpose.

No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, many websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.
The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accomodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.
When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.
As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage “the money is in the list” cannot be true enough — if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects.
You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let’s take a look at a very good example — apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via — guess where — iTunes!
In reality, you do not need to offer such a “heavyweight” download such as a full-feature software like iTunes.  You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it.
However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website won’t be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.
First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you’ll get some of them converted into your prospects!
Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the harddisk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie.

5 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:
1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox
When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.
2) Start a web log (blog)
Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.
3) Carry out polls or surveys
Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.
4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games
Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.
5) Update frequently with fresh content
Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

As I’ve written before, the company I worked for previously was a bizarre outfit run by people who thought that software development was a dirty thing, and they really weren’t keen on upgrading past MS Access 97. In fact, the code base for their core application still uses DAO almost exclusively, rather than ADO (which make it impossible to upgrade to Access 2007 without a major re-write), and most of the business logic is based in the forms, as class modules are too hard to understand, according to the head developer. As an example I thought I would show you a snippet of code written by the head developer (AL), which is in my opinion one of the most absurd and ignorant pieces of coding I have ever seen. Here it is :

Public Function isnumber(a As String) As Boolean
Dim isn As Boolean
isn = False
If a = “0″ Or a = “1″ Or a = “2″ Or a = “3″ Or a = “4″ Or a = “5″ Or a = “6″ Or a = “7″ Or a = “8″ Or a = “9″ Then
isn = True
End If
isnumber = isn
End Function

Now, let me explain. This function was created to test that the first character of an address was numeric. So, why test for ’0′ ?!?! And why not use the VBA isnumeric() function ?

Perhaps now, you can see why I left. OMFG.

So, as a company, we haven’t been in existence for long, but I think we have made great strides in the right direction. The last company I worked for, QA Plus, taught me everything I know about how Not to run a company. Ironically, I thank them for that, as I feel that I have a much clearer vision of how things should be done now, than I ever would if I have never worked for such a shoddy outfit.
Our website – www.pendragoninteractive.com is looking better all the time. I have spend the last few days trying to get the tags and text correct for search engines to index the site properly. Its a painstaking job, but it will be worth it in the end.

As a team, Jon and Myself seem to work together very well. We have a a kind of symbiotic relationship, where I need him for his graphical skills, and he needs me for my technical skills, and business acumen. The Web design service is fairly well saturated in Britain, but then again so is the hairdressing and car repair markets. Companies will survive, as long as there is a need for their services. With the maturation of the internet as a promotional tool, and purchasing portal, I believe that the services of businesses like ours will only become more important in the future. This will become apparent with the advent of HTML5, increases in broadband speed and developments in web 2.0 that will make the internet experience richer, faster and a whole lot more interactive. Flash and Java have made attempts at creating a richer environment on the net in the past, but I think the healthy competition that Microsoft have brought to the market with Silverlight and the constant improvements in the ASP.NET controls will push the envelope further.

I really think that the best days in web design are yet to come. We are hoping to push the boundaries ourselves, and I’m sure that there are other companies out there hoping to do the same. Hold on to your hats !

I have been fascinated by technology for as long as I can remember. When I was a young boy, I used to spend many happy hours dismantling old clocks and radios and try to understand how they worked. I used to fantasise about building robots out of old tin cans and motors out of cars that I would find in the mechanics workshop on my grand parents farm. I developed a fascination with science fiction, and would build motorised contraptions and cars out of mechano, lego and pretty much any useful parts I could get my hands on. Later, when I moved to a new school, I made friends with a rather nerdy pale boy called Oliver who introduced me to the concept of computers, and showed me his electronic experimentation kit. He taught me how to count in binary, which seemed pretty pointless to a boy of 12, but the idea of programming machines really caught my imagination.

We set about borrowing books on computing from the library, which were out of date even then. We learnt as much theoretical stuff about computers, and how they worked as we could, and then one day I came home to find that my step father had bought me a ZX81 from some guy he met in the pub. I was dumbstruck. It was beautiful – so black and elegant, and kinda mysterious. I phoned Oliver to tell him the news, and he wasn’t jealous as I expected. He came over and started to explain to me what he had learnt about the BASIC programming language, and we tried out some of the sample programmes from the instruction manual. God was it painful! Nothing seemed to work as I expected, and I was struggling with the bleak abstractness of the language concepts. For those that don’t know, the ZX81 had a really nifty innovation called UOTKES – Unique one touch keyword entry system, which meant that you never had to type any programming keywords in full. For instance, if you pressed the letter ‘P’ then the word ‘Print’ appeared, and using a combination of function keys, all of the the Sinclair BASIC keywords were accessible through UOTKES.


The ZX81 was an amazing machine for its day. It was so simple, that the way it worked could easily be understood by a teenager. I learnt a lot of basic programming concepts on that machine, including assembler, and sold my own version of scramble to a computer magazine for £10.

A year later, and I managed to scrape enough cash together, along with the sale of my beloved ZX81 for £45, to buy a Sinclair Spectrum. Now, at the time, and considering the price, this machine was the mutts nuts. It had sound, colour, more memory than the ZX81 (48K instead of 16K with a Ram Pack), and had a much better keyboard. It had an extended version of BASIC, and my friends and I just loved playing the games you could get on it. Manic Miner was a particular favourite of ours, along with jet pack, hungry horace, and all sorts of other games that seemed to exude character. I know those games look horribly dated now, but I dont think I’ve ever enjoyed playing games as much as I did on the Spectrum. Just like the ZX81, it was a fantastic learning tool for kids of all ages, and I really believe that a whole generation of kids were inspired to become software developers by the quirks of the spectrum and other machines like it.

Sadly, those days are gone. PCs rule the roost now, and the kids that play games on them really never gain any insight into the inner working of the machines, as they are just so damned complicated. You really need to have studied electronics and computers at college before you can hope to understand the architecture of a modern home PC. I find it sad that today’s teenagers may not really do any programming until they get to further education, as PC programming is far less accessible and more abstract than the early machines. Yes, its easy to pick up some understanding of HTML, and JavaScript, but they are completely detached from the workings of the PC, and its getting harder and harder to have the simple joy of having total control over a machine, as my generation did as teenagers.