Our website is where our business resides – we view it as our the headquarter of an offline company. That's why we believe it's important to practice good web design principles to reach the maximum number of visitors.

QuikZilla.com Designers and Developers practice the following principles:

• We reduce the number of images
  
  Web design is about finding the balance: It's a fact that graphics make a website look more attractive. But there are still many internet users on dial-up or slow internet connection, so we reduce the size of our graphics if possible. Large images make our web sites load slowly and more often than not they are just a waste of bandwidth.

We have found that graphics are essential on our websites, and we therefore must find this delicate balance between esthetics and speed. Slow speed would affect Search Engine ranking negatively, and “ugly” websites won’t attract internet users. We optimize our websites by using an image editing program so that they meet a minimum file size.

• Our websites are cross-browser compatible
  
  The most popular browser is still Internet Explorer (“IE”) and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future; however, other browsers are becoming increasingly popular, particularly FireFox, which in recent years has become a serious threat to IE. If our websites look great in IE but break terribly in Firefox and Opera, we will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors. We always check how our websites looks in different browsers.
  
  We also use the W3C Validator at http://validator.w3.org/ - it definitely helps with our websites compatibility.
  
  
  • For our customers, here are two free online browser check services:
  • http://www.browsercam.com
  • http://www.anybrowser.com/siteviewer.html

• We implement clear navigation directions
  
  Our websites navigation menus are uncluttered and concise, so that our visitors and customers know how to navigate around our websites without any confusion.

• We use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as much as possible

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a popular technology web designers and developers who care about web standards and accessibility. But it should also be a technology embraced by anyone who cares about SEO. QuikZilla.com developers do some amazing things with CSS. For example, we minimize the use of HTML tables and transparent 1-pixel spacer GIFs for layout, replacing all that “code bloat” with succinct, streamlined HTML and style-sheet code. Using tables-based layout not only subjects our customer to longer page download times, it also lowers the keyword prominence of the body copy.

In fact, we strive to completely separate the presentation layer from the content layer (as much as practical) and move all the presentation “stuff” into an external style sheet – in other words, into a separate CSS file. An additional benefit of this approach is that the CSS file gets cached by the user’s web browser and doesn’t have to reload with each new page, further improving the customer’s experience.

We further boost our keyword prominence with a more advanced CSS technique – our programmers reorder page elements in the HTML without affecting what the page looks like. We place our content above our navigation in the HTML and still display that navigation exactly where we want it on the rendered page. Have you ever seen a left navigation bar coded at the end of the HTML? It’s a thing of beauty (at least to us SEO geeks).

CSS also provides an alternative method for creating mouse-over navigation that is still search-engine friendly. With JavaScript-based mouse-over navigation, spiders can’t access the links underneath the mouse-over because they don’t normally execute JavaScript. We accomplish the same mouse-over effect with CSS and links accessible to spiders. We attempt to make all these links in a text form rather than a graphical form so the search engines will associate the text with the pages to which we are linking.

• We implement smart image replacement
  
  Search engines have discounted Alt tags (the text that is displayed when you hover your cursor over an image) to the point that they do little, if anything, to improve rankings. Thanks to CSS though, we have an alternative method for associating text with graphics – one that is more effective in SEO than Alt tags. This CSS technique is dubbed “image replacement” and allows us to incorporate not only text, but also HTML tags including heading tags (H1, etc.) and links. This alternate HTML code will appear to the spiders but not to humans unless they deliberately turn off CSS in their browser. In effect, the CSS code pushes this alternate text and HTML aside (e.g., outside of the margins of the web page) and inserts a graphic in its place.

In general, we strive to use of text-based navigation rather than graphical navigation, which would make “image replacement” unnecessary; however, we are also concerned about our image and esthetic design, so image replacement is a viable workaround for us. We would like to note that image replacement is not a green light to start keyword stuffing. We don’t believe in search-engine spamming and we believe it isn’t a sustainable SEO strategy.

• We limit the use scripting languages on our site
  
  We use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data on our websites, but not to create visual effects. Scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some of our visitors might miss important information because their web browser crashes.

• We keep text paragraphs at reasonable length
  
  Reading online is a different experience then reading off line print media. If a paragraph is too long, we split it into separate parts so that the text blocks will be much easier to read. We use a lot of white space between our text blocks. This gives the eyes some rest, and keeps our readers alert. Our font, as you can see, is large enough so people have no problem reading our text and our message.

• Understanding the business issues behind design
  
  A web site is meant to be a platform for our business plan to showcase and communicate important information to people online. Hence it is extremely essential for our designers to create websites in such a way that they attract the right target audience. The correct development and design of websites can literally make or break the very purpose of our existence. Here comes the role of our web designers.

We may have wonderful offers for those who visit our websites, but if they are presented in an unprofessional way we may not be able to impress upon the online visitors. In fact people might not visit our websites just because our websites have not been done up efficiently. So in order to maximize the number of visits to our websites as well as to yield an encouraging response to our offerings, we have educated our designers to become business savvy.