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IFX Group

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING.

Web Designer Tips For Our Competition

If you are a web designer or pay someone to design web content for you, make sure you use every one of the following tips.

  • Always use a welcome page with heavy animation, lots of loud music and no content.
  • Never allow a user to jump directly to your web site content bypassing the top page.
  • Require all users to have a proprietary multimedia browser add-on (e.g. Flash, Silverlight, etc.) to see any content on your web site. This is also a very effective way to hide your content from web search engines.
  • Avoid using cascading style sheets (CSS). Include all formatting, font, size and color style information in every page.
  • Always use scripting (e.g. Javascript, Flash) for all menu navigation.
  • Require scripting (e.g. Active-X, VBscript, Javascript) to be supported/enabled in the user's web browser to see any of your content.
  • Design all web content to only work with one web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer 6) and refuse to accommodate any others.
  • Use frames and iframes to separate navigation from content and to prevent users from bookmarking the true URL of each page.
  • Change the page names often even if the content has not changed.
  • Use a backend engine (e.g. ColdFusion, PHP, ASP) with a database to generate all page content for every user request.
  • Test all web development exclusively on very high speed (e.g. Gigabit Ethernet) connections to a private web server that only serves the web developer.

The more of these tips you use on your web site, the less you will be in direct competition with our web customers. Please do your part and make it more difficult for web search engines to find and spider your content because it ensures search engines won't be able to direct new customers to your web site. If some customers happen to find your web site by chance but have a slower Internet connection than the web developer's gigabit Ethernet, ensure those customers have a very long download before they can see your product.

IFX Group Web Designer Tips

All IFX Group web sites are designed for maximum compatibility not only between different web browsers on different operating systems but with virtually all web search engines. We absolutely do not require any scripting or browser add-on support in the user's web browser for navigation.

All multimedia content always includes text descriptions so web search engines can correctly identify the media and correctly direct customers to products and services with minimum effort.

All of our web design staff are well trained to design very efficient HTML with minimum size overhead. This makes our web content naturally faster and more compatible with a wider range of web browsers. All of our web designers are required to test web content on live web servers running on the public Internet with real work loads from real users before any new content is delivered to the customer. This ensures everyone with a low speed home Internet connection can access the content quickly with minimum waiting.

All static web content is compiled into standard HTML pages only once each time that content changes so page service is always incredibly fast and efficient even under extreme server loads. Database work is only used for web content that is unique to each customer (e.g. shopping cart). This naturally allows our web sites to gracefully scale to very high volumes with minimum hosting costs because the web server work is always focused on serving content rather than creating it.

Historical file names are retained whenever possible. When a page name needs to change, the original page name is also retained with a continually updated duplicate of the new page content so users with bookmarks or users following links from a search engine with old information can still find current content. These pages also tell search engines about the name change in a way they can directly use. Of course it is best to design effective page names first and avoid the need to rename.

Unfortunately some web designs require the use of things like client-side scripting and frames. In these cases, the IFX Group always designs multiple ways to equally support those users with support for these technologies and those without because web search engine spiders do not see pages like human users do. In some cases it is arguably more important for the spiders to find the content on your public web site than users.

The best example of a well structured multimedia web site is youtube.com where scripting is used, but not required to navigate. The flash content is limited to only the video and is never used instead of HTML or text content. All video content is isolated on individual pages dedicated to just one video with a text title, text description and user comments all closely associated to that video. This makes it very easy for even a simple web spider to connect that video (which it can't see) to searchable text describing or associated with that video. Frames are used, but they never separate the main navigation from the main content on each page.

Past mistakes are too easily forgotten which dooms us to repeat them endlessly. This is the price of ignoring history.
First published 2007-06-10. The last major review or update of this information was on 2010-05-20. Your feedback using the form below helps us correct errors and omissions on this page.