Web Design, the Malaysia Way

WordPress is a free publishing platform. It will turn 5 years soon and you will be amazing of how many people are using it now, especially as Blog. Blog works so well for everyone to share personal journal on the web. You can sign up one for free and start blogging almost instantly!

Yes, Blog is free! Free is not good - at least for businesses. That is why, blogging spread like fire among individual users than businesses. It has becoming a New Marketing way for most businesses. Old corporate managers do not want to miss this new marketing opportunity, ended up setting one official corporate website together with an official Blog.

It was never easy to tell my customers that Blog and corporate website are the same. Fancy design still remains as the top-most-wanted feature for most of my customer. It was designed as like to please just the corporate website owner than people visiting it. Or, it may be the idea of web developer to push for beautiful layout, which in most case, the same result can be delivered by a page simple as Google main page.

WordPress has done so well in keeping the design separated from the content. It works like the theme in you Nokia Phone. You can choose to change the look and feel of your screen without entering all your contact in your address book again. This sounds simple but challenge is everyone has to adapt to a single format (post title, post slug, categories) of content, yet work in any page!

We have changed the look and feel of our corporate website several times, without worrying about rebuilding the content. But, you will be surprised with number of corporate websites still built with both content and design combined and ready to have them built from scratch again in their next revamp.

Bloggers are paving the way for the change of corporate website. They take the risk of change, trying up how the new format of content definition should work. Bloggers do not have website in the past. Creating a Blog is not a revamp to them, but something new.

But, for a company with already spending so much in the past in their website, it is hard for them to make the change. They choose not to make immediate decision. They are still on the look-and-see state, but will eventually follow!

There are three things happening now,

1. Businesses are starting to understand the importance of the goal of creating a website. A goal must be measurable, it can be number of order, number of people downloading your location map, number of support email received, except branding :)

2. The platform of Blog, such as WordPress, after a long 5 years of development are now ready to prove that the technology is mature yet simple to user now.

3. All of us are no longer limiting to our own job of scope. My partner just login to our corporate website, edited one of a page posted months ago and approved some comments. In that 5 minutes works, he turned himself into editor, proof reader, comment moderator, etc. The rules changed. You are taking over works of airline booking agent because you know it can be done online, faster and cheaper.

Business will soon no longer need a web developer!

Are you a web developer?
Free WordPress theme for your business

Ammap is an interactive flash map creation software which works with Flash player 8 and other later versions. With the use of it, you could search the population of different countries, the location of your home, routes to your office or journey, and create your own distributor map.

It could help you to customize every detail of the map from sizes to disable features that you don’t need, like create multi-level structures, load icons or other custom movies or photos on top of your map, set start-up zoom level and position, export map as an image, and so much more. Its weigh only 35 kb so it would not occupied much of your pc’s space. What’s more, we could download and use it for free. It is really handy to use.

The look and feel of a site should be separated from its content. Imagine if you have to revamp your website, and everything you have done earlier will have to redo again. You lost your competitive high search ranking built over the years because of the filename change, and you are prepared to lose it again in your next revamp which will be taking place in future.

The introduction of WordPress Blog, not being just a world-best Blogging platform, but also smartly define how a website components should work with each other. A theme was used to defined the layout of the website, without any content but only placeholder.

Placeholders are then replaced with content pulling out from a database. This is not something new to Blog, but corporate website will soon be tapping on this.

Family photos, vacation snapshots or creative artistic works: whatever images you have to present, you can present them in a variety of ways. On a big screen, in slide shows or in a thumbnails gallery. However, to convey the message of presented data effectively, it’s important to offer it in an attractive and intuitive way. Furthermore, the presentation itself can make images more valuable and simplify the browsing through hundreds of slides.

Trip Tracker Slideshow is one of the good-looking, lightweight JavaScript image viewer with an animated slideshow feature. The viewer is free to use in personal or commercial web pages, provided that the script is not sold or exchanged for profit.

See their script in action!

Most of the website owners are able to tell us what they want when come to the design of their websites. Their preferences run wild from font-size to the colors used in the web layout!

We started by asking them who and what is the reason for someone to visit their website. Not everyone, please. Until now, they seem to understand pretty well about their visitors.

They continue to propose features which they want. This is where they stray away from their objective. Sadly to say, it sounds that those features are of what the site owners want, than their visitors.

It comes into a long list, from content management system to online payment. If your customers are businesses who prefer dealing with you by check, or group of people who never buy online - how much would this online payment help!?

The simple rule is, starting from something simplier. Do not worry about what features your customers might want to have, because they are the one who will let you know. The site owner, only represents one of the visitor, not everyone!

If there is only one feature you will need to include in your website, it would be how to make the life of customers easier!