It has long been said that it takes two to tango. Web development is exactly like that. Web design cannot do it alone without backend support. But to a majority of users, website design has a big space in their consciousness; for them it is dependent on whether a certain site will be a success or a failure.

There is a sudden surge in demand for a beautifully made websites. Users don't want poor presentations anymore; they all like something else, something new to their eyes because they have become web-sophisticated. With the advent of css 3, almost any kind of design is now possible in web. It's like photoshopping your way to the world wide web.

True Beauty Comes From The Inside

Informed web designers and business owners alike know that design is vital to a successful website, and its beauty must go far beyond looks. While design needs to support a company's brand positioning, it must also effectively inform, communicate and provide positive experiences.

A winning website is one that delivers useful, relevant content that allows people to accomplish their goals quickly and easily. In today's hectic society, that's what makes a great and lasting impression on the Web.

Good design achieves simplicity through a range of elements - from a single point of focus to intuitive information flow to plain, familiar menu names. And as more people flock to the Web for everything from casual encounters to green homes, more businesses will likely lean on web specialists who can contribute to effective design.

Web professionals who specialise in select services, technologies and industries will increasingly thrive with higher client list and get paid accordingly. In contrast, jack-of-all-trade web types can't keep up with every emerging tactic and tool, and they'll eventually only appeal to and serve clients who are purely price-driven. These clients generally don't value expertise, nor are they willing to pay for it.

Additionally, web professionals will benefit from the fact that businesses are pushing more of their marketing dollars online - even those businesses that have been hesitant to shift from traditional media such as TV, radio and newsprint.

Moving marketing online makes more sense than ever. Something's off when typical consumers might spend 25% of their media time on the Web and a company is investing only 5% or so of its marketing budgets on websites and other online promotions.

An investment in a website will get almost any business a better return on investment than an ad in a newspaper, magazine or print telephone directory. A website can provide greater reach and superior exposure, and it works for a business 24/7 for multiple years.

Great Web Copy

Other people indicate a weak web copy would most likely prompt them to abandon a website, businesses should continue to take their web writing seriously.

While there appears to be increasing awareness surrounding web writing in general, many businesses continue to fail to recognise what a professional web writer can bring to a website and a business's bottom line.

Web writers, website content writers, SEO copywriters - call them what you will - these web copy specialists are often not even being considered a part of the equation when it comes to building or overhauling a website.

A well-versed web writer can help a business with everything from attaining traffic via search engines, to differentiating a business from competitors and conveying key benefits effectively, to achieving higher conversion rates.

Fortunately, as of late, there are more web-related organisations and schools introducing copywriting courses specifically for the Web, which promises to increase the supply and qualifications of web writers.

An increase in writers who specialise in the Web will help decrease the ineffective, error-laden, self-centered copy that is so common on the Web.

Faster Is Better

Making people wait is a BIG mistake and it will make them hit a competitor's site. The main objective is not to make them leave and explore a site at longer rates.

Good web designers and developers respond by optimizing images, streamlining HTML and avoiding dated gimmicks like Flash intros. But some designers and business owners alike continue to fall into such traps.

Unfortunately, web designers and business owners sometimes let their egos get in the way. They fail to acknowledge that when a prospect visits a website looking for information or to complete a task, that Flash intro will only get in the way, and potentially frustrate visitors.

Flash intros were tolerated in the '90s when the Web was a novelty. People were excited about this new thing called the World Wide Web, and spent countless hours surfing it. Today, however, most people want to get information and complete tasks in as little time and with as few clicks as possible, so they can get on with their busy lives.

Give Users What They Want

Internet professionals would better serve Internet users by collaborating and delivering simple, fast, useful and convenient websites.

Give Internet users what they want and everyone wins: web users benefit from ease of use and efficiency; businesses enjoy increased leads and sales; and the web professionals maximise income and fill their portfolios with winning websites.

Developer tools are now rising allowing programmers to now choose software they are comfortable with to assist them during the development and testing process. I highlight some for you below.

Recently, I used a tool called PhoneGap, which combines a focus on pure JavaScript and HTML for phones.

If your business is building large-scale applications in which plenty of data will be processed, the Hadoop framework is equipped to process this together with Hive, which is file system that executes the SQL-like queries.

Eclipse is a fine IDE for building and debugging java applications, and can be used while building a website.

The NetBeans IDE, which works fast and well with multiple languages, expands its C/C++ capabilities with some new features and enables unit testing in PHP.

OpenStreetMap is open source version of popular mapping services.

With these developer tools, programmers can do more to achieve top software or websites with minimal effort.

We have recently witnessed strong advancement in the field of website layout and design. Everything evolves. Flash movies, gigantic animations and other graphic media have become increasingly widespread over the years.

However, in the effort to have the ‘coolest' website layout design, website owners tend to forget to whom they are creating their website for: their target audience.

The target audience consists of the people you want to visit your website. And this is one of the crucial areas to consider. Moreover, the goal is to increase visitors, make them stay for an extended period of time, purchase items or select your business' service, return to your website in the future, become a regular visitor or customer, and even recommend you to others.

The success or failure of your website is significantly determined by your audience. Hence, when designing for your target audience, consider the demographics of the people who you want to visit your site. These demographics include gender, ethnicity, race, age, education level, and even fiscal siatuation.

This is where market research is of help, to identify your audience.

Then, there are tools to determine the exact numbers and statistics once the website is launched, allowing you to see if you are attracting your audience as expected. These are tools like Google Analytics, Alexa, Quantcast, Goingup and others that provide detailed reports of the types of people that cover your REAL audience.

This is a great way to make sure your target audience is actually the audience that is viewing your website. You cannot always make everyone who visits your website stay or return, but when your website is concentrated on the correct target audience, then you increase repeat visitor chances greatly.

Every self-respecting geek would tell you that what he would like in a friend are one, that he's very rich, two, he's able to keep up with the intellectual barter that happens whenever technology or any intelligent conversations would come up. Lastly, he should really be good with the ladies, considering that majority of us geeks are female free (since birth).

If you feel the same way as millions of other geeks in the world, there's only one person in the entire universe that has to be your friend; Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man.

As the head of Stark Industries, he commands a fleet of engineers and scientists to develop the ultra-cool defence and ammunition systems that can literally "blow" enemies away. As a side project, he developed this ultra cool "hot rod red and yellow" inspired armour that wreaks havoc anywhere and to anyone he wishes. In short, the perfect war armour.

As the literature says (meaning comic books), Iron Man is nothing more than a pigment of one artist's imagination, or is he?

Somewhere across Utah, Steve Jacobsen is already building the first (and hopefully not the last because I really want a cool armor) of many armour that's going to be used by the U.S. Military in the coming future.

Enter the XOS Skeleton.

The XOS Skeleton, like it's counterpart in the comic books, gives the wearer that oh so good light feeling and "enhanced" human strength. As Rex Jameson, pilot of the first ever "wearable" enhancement is demonstrating on the XOS Skeleton, he can lift quite heavy objects seamlessly as the armour gives its wearers the extra boost of strength that you need.

The original creator of the XOS Skeleton is Sacros, which has been purchased by a bigger defence company Raytheon. Being funded by the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects (DARPA), they're turning the military's 40-year old fantasy of "mechanically enhanced" humans for war into reality.

Personally, I think that the way it works is that there are pneumatic actuators or pistons built into the armour that's helping with the load of doing heavy stuff (imagine a car jack that can be commanded and can react fast to commands to go up and down), not to mention if you got hit by a punch coming from a guy wearing the armour, you'd likely be missing a couple of ribs if ever you'll be alive to even be interviewed. As far as tests go, the pilot can throw jabs seamlessly wearing the 150 pound skeleton, lift 200 pounds (not sure, maybe a rumour).

The exoskeleton definitely needs a good battery pack though, as you can see on the picture, the pilot is still wired (since it's just the initial stages), and I think the battery pack wouldn't last long for the missions intended to those who will use it.

Adi Granov, one of the illustrators of Iron Man and a consultant on the Iron Man films, saw the XOS at work and he can't believe that Sacros is almost close to the comic book counter part. "I knew that's where we were heading, but I didn't realise we were this close," Granov told Popular Science. Aside from the lack of flight and weapons, he adds, "that's Iron Man".

I can't wait till I see the first of those armours go into battle. It would really be moment to remember seeing a fleet of "Iron Men" rolling out and doing skirmishes on a desert somewhere. Just give it a good battery pack, and a tricked out shell, it could possibly pass for Iron Man armour.

If you have read any of my blogs, you will know that when forming a strategy for your website, you must have 'traffic' in mind - specifically, how you plan to attract traffic to your website. Google, Bing and other search engines remain the single most potent source of traffic delivery to all websites.

For this reason, it is important that when you are typing content for your website, you consider Google and other search engines as much as your customer, who will eventually read it.

Here are my top 3 tips to consider when typing copy for your website:

1. A page for each keyword

   It may seem an attractive proposition to litter your Homepage, or Services page, with all your important keywords.
   
   This will only confuse search engine spiders. It is important to give each of your keywords their own page, and by showing these keywords such respect, you will encourage search engines like Google to do likewise.
   
   
   

2. Repetition of keywords

   It is a fact that the more times you mention a keyword on a particular page, the more likely it is that page will be indexed by Google.
   
   But this is one people tend to get a bit silly with. You don't want to do so much repeating that when a human reader lands on your website, they think the copywriter has some sort of weird condition that makes them repeat stuff nonsensically.
   
   
   

3. Inter-linking OR Contextual Linking

   Within your content, if you refer to a keyword that has its own page, link that keyword to that page. For example: I am mentioning search engine optimisation but am actually writing about something else, so I have linked search engine optimisation, which is a keyword, to KayWeb's search engine optimisation page. Please click the keyword to see for yourself.
   
   The reason this is good is because search engine spiders will click those links to navigate through your pages. You end up mapping a route for these spiders.

The web has evolved a lot since its boom in the late 90s. Especially web typography. Web typography deals with the font usage among websites. The clearer the font, the better.

Web typography deals with the line-height, text-spacing and colour, which are all text properties. Font styles and usage will greatly affect the design of a website as a whole. It can be boring or exciting.

There are still advancements in web typography, including using the image replacement technique. Using css, some use images rather than web type fonts. It enhances someone's site significantly. Of course the negative of this option is that text within images are not readable by search engines.

Regardless, good old web type fonts are best for corporate websites after a clean look.

With fonts like Arial and Times New Roman considered "default" fonts for some, there are other alternative fonts that web designers should consider. Here are my Top 4 (in no particular order):

• Verdana - A good sans-serif font with good width and readability. It's pretty versatile, looking nice at small and big font sizes. It may have become too common though.
  
  
• Georgia - The 'New Age Times New Roman'. I think the mistake most web designers tend to make is they use this as their base content font. Georgia works well as headings, but it's too stylized in my opinion. Here's a tip: Use this font with high line-height properties in your CSS if you plan to make this your base font.
  
  
• Tahoma - Very similar to Verdana, but I think this is more effective in small sizes. The Windows feel to this font makes it good for footer text and comments.
  
  
• Lucida Sans Unicode - A relatively narrower sans serif font compared to Verdana and Tahoma. It relies too much on the smoothing of the system. This works well for modern-looking templates.

At KayWeb, we are all about guiding clients to embrace what is good on the web to advance their business.

Recently I blogged about Twitter. That despite Facebook being the best social networking ticket for individuals, the benefits of Twitter far outweigh those of Facebook when it comes to business.

The chief reason is that while Facebook pages are private to non-members, Twitter pages are public. Both are very popular websites, but by being public, there is greater chance your business will be exposed by Twitter to a wide audience.

Further, a link to your business website, blog, etc posted on Twitter, and clicked through from Twitter, will win you kudos with search engines like Google and Bing.

Here are my top 5 tips to get you and your business tweeting effectively:

1. Create account

   You have to be in it to benefit. Go to www.twitter.com and take the 5-10 minutes to register, add a picture and dress up your background.
   
   
   

2. Follow people

   Use Twitter's search feature to follow businesses and individuals that may be interested in your business' services or products, with the hope that you following them will entice them to follow you back.
   
   Also follow friends, as they will more certainly follow you back. Then their friends will see that you are being followed by someone they like, and thus, your network of followers begins to grow.
   
   
   

3. Be interesting

   The point of someone following you is because they want to read your status updates. Each status update is a micro blog post by you. This means you only have 140 characters to relay your thoughts, pitch, etc.
   
   Make those 140 characters as interesting as possible, or you will notice your legion of followers will end up dwindling.
   
   Smart ways of being interesting is by being short, including interesting links in tweets, including Twitpics in tweets, etc.
   
   
   

4. Link, link, link

   Include links to your business blog, website, etc as often as possible. People clicking through may end up clients/customers to you and search engines like Google will notice that a popular website like Twitter is linking people to your website! Kudos to you...
   
   
   

5. Take part in Trending Topics

   Trending Topics appear on the right side of your Twitter page, and they include topics that people are tweeting about most on Twitter at that particular moment. EG: Iran Elections and Michael Jackson most recently.
   
   You can identify trending topics and attract people to your post by including the relevant hashtag. Click here for more information on Twitter Hashtags.

Now, I hope you enjoy your Twitter experience. The above is enough to get you started.

Don't forget to follow me - Haig Kayserian - by clicking here.

And please follow KayWeb by clicking here.

Did Microsoft abuse its position of power so badly many people are still motivated by the experience? The way in which Google is releasing Wave almost makes me think so.

Unlike Microsoft, they've made it open-source and made it clear that anyone will be welcome to run it, even on their own servers and change it however they like.

Perhaps making money for Google is no longer their top priority, but here's guessing that there's a revenue stream in there somewhere.

What are Waves? While there's no simple answer, it's a combination of instant messaging and email with differences. The following are some I noted from the conference demo.

The idea is that they can be scattered around web pages around the web waiting for people to join in and make comments.

The messaging defaults to showing every character typed in real time, which is new, but will also place heavier loads on servers, perhaps a factor for self hosting.

The email will do a much better job of allowing reorganisations of threads or conversations as they are known in Gmail. While Outlook lists messages in the order they arrive, Gmail groups them by the subject line but doesn't allow re-grouping. Google Wave will remove these restrictions as well as allowing people to be added or dropped even from sub-threads within the conversation.

There will also be abbreviated interfaces that allow it to work on iPhone and Android.

Years ago, when Google only had its search engine, I read an article somewhere saying that Google is preparing for World Domination. Probably the basis of the following website: GoogleWorldDomination.com. I asked my colleagues  then how in the world would a search engine company dominate the world?

With Google's latest and probably greatest product - Google Wave - I think I've got my answer.

Google Wave consolidates the most important internet communication technologies into one simple interface. You can do everything from simple messaging to complex simultaneous wiki-type editing.

But what amazed me was the playback feature where you can playback how a “wave” transpired. It’s like having a remote control on your threaded email conversation.

Another feature that I liked is that when you make a change or reply to a wave, the changes are sent real-time character by character to the server, then to other wave clients.

With a complex protocol to enable a lot of features, I wonder how “real time” it will be in real life setup - server on a datacenter and clients on a regular DSL internet connection?

One true step for Google in World (maybe Web would be a better word) Domination is making Google Wave open source. That means anyone can download the software and upload it to their server.

If Google Wave becomes successful, then Google will be living inside the majority of the world’s servers.

Another exciting feature of Google Wave is the ability to create extensions on both client and server side. This allows web development companies (like KayWeb) to create customised versions of Google Wave and onsell it to clients.

In future, we at KayWeb will most likely be doing this sort of Google Wave customisations!

What kind of customisation? We cannot reveal. We can confirm that a trademark is already pending for our desired products.

Unrelated to what we will do, we would like someone to create a Skype extension for Google Wave to allow for Voice and/or Video calls.

My fearless forecast is that one day, email will be a thing of the past and wave dominate us all.

I can see my Managing Director Haig Kayserian asking me to 'wave him an update' or 'start a wave to discuss KayWeb's next brilliant business idea!

Last week, Google surprised the I/O conference crowd with their announcement of its very own communication and collaboration tool with an almost-perfect application that achieved the company's goal to 'wow' everyone.

And wow it did as the impressive engineers employed by Google presented the beauty of the newly-developed Google Wave; the technology that is best described as e-mail for the 21st Century. How?

Google Wave is a collaboration of all available internet communication.

Communication including email, instant messaging, blogging, sharing of files, tasks, etc. The Google Wave is where people can work on shared files, enabling a participant to reply anywhere within the message, edit the content and add further participants at any point during the process. Then with 'playback', an absent participant is able to rewind the wave to see who said what and when. And this is all in real time!

Best of all, Google Wave is 'open source'. Every enthusiastic developer can contribute to develop extensions which will continue to improve the tool.