[Re]Encoded.com

When In Doubt, Go Simple: 5 Reasons Simple Design Works

There’s been a recent revolution in online design – a move towards simplicity and minimalism. While minimalist design has been around for decades – from inspiring product design to ultra-simple building architecture – the most recent wave of simple blog designs and action-driven website styles has cemented minimalist design as one of the most important and valuable design styles out there.

Why? Because it works. Thousands of top bloggers have taken up ultra-simple blog designs for that very reason. Rather than distracting their readers and inflating their business requirements with a complex page design, more and more companies, bloggers, and web presences are opting for the simple option.

More »

Billing 101: Should You Work for Free When You’re Starting Out?

The hardest part of starting any service business, particularly an online service business, is the first few months. They’re the months when the most adjustment takes place, the most active marketing occurs, and the most important decisions get made.

One of those important decisions is how you’re going to market yourself. As a designer, or any type of service-based freelancer, it’s very difficult to effectively market your business without a portfolio, testimonials, or some sort of track record. Internet entrepreneurs are understandably hesitant to go with a provider that’s not well established, making it difficult for new service providers to find an audience early on.

More »

10 Ways to Minimize Site Loading Time

All of us has occasionally ran into a web site that was slow to load or worse yet, refused to load at all. As you are well aware, this can be a rather frustrating experience. You are probably among the majority of Internet surfers who would just as soon hit the back button of their browser rather than sitting there waiting for the painfully slow progress of the status bar.

Obviously, frequent instances of slow loading times and downtime do not bode very well for any web site, especially your web site. If this type of thing happens often enough, you may well end up losing a lot of visitors. The question then becomes what then can you do in order to minimize these occurrences? The answer is to find ways to minimize your web sites loading time. The following is a list of ten ways to do just that.

Find your performance issues using Web Tools

One of the easiest ways to do this is with the use of a program called YSlow. This is a tool for front end designers and tells you why they are slow after analyzing the web page. This analysis is primarily based on the rules of high performance websites which is located on Yahoo!’s developer network. Although many of these high performance rules are common sense, some rules apply only to those websites that get millions of unique hits each day. While this tool is not the absolute last word on performance problems, it is a good starting point. And will give you an idea where the problem areas are.
More »