Everyone has a website these days, but not every website is equal. As the online environment becomes ever more crowded, you don’t just need to have a website, you need to have an outstanding website that implements advancements in web development to introduce features and applications that enhance functionality and customer satisfaction.

To aid you in your pursuit of the perfect page, here are some top web development mistakes to avoid:

1. Forgetting to take care of the basics: As your company develops and your products and services gain more widespread popularity you may find that the amount of visitors to your website increases dramatically. Before you begin any web development ventures, it is therefore important to make sure that all elements of your website can be adjusted (graphic files that allow for compression in size and dynamic elements that can be replaced for example) to prevent your website crashing with increased traffic or producing slower load times with the addition of new content and applications.

2. Impenetrable information: As your site grows in the course of web development and begins to cover an increasing amount of topics and contain greater quantities of applications, it may become extremely difficult for visitors to find exactly what they are looking for. Including clear navigation and indexing systems as well as a search tool on your website will allow for easier navigation of pages in the first instance and help to filter information to customers in a way that is relevant and under their control.

3. Lapses in security: When your website begins to contain an increased amount of information and boasts a greater amount of daily traffic, security risks can also increase. To prevent hacking and unauthorised access to your customer databases and confidential company information, any web development plan must include the establishment and maintenance of secure operating systems and coding.

4. Immobility: As we progressively use our mobile phones and other portable wireless devices to access websites, it is absolutely imperative that any web developments you implement are compatible with all manner of mobile platforms. Nothing will frustrate your site visitors more than when they try to access information on the go and are constantly stalled by unsuitable display options.

5. Incompatibility: Another possible problem that must be taken into account with any new web development is a resulting incompatibility with some of the most popular web browsers. New web browsers are constantly introduced and the applications on your website must stay accordingly up-to-date. To make sure that your clients don’t become discouraged, make sure you rigorously test the functionality of your website for cross browser compatibility.

About the Author

John has been working as a freelance writer for Infinite IT Solutions, a Melbourne-based premium web development and online marketing company dedicated to providing personalised web services to ensure that your business stands out from the rest.

Popularity: 3%

On Youtube over 35 hours of videos are being uploaded every minute! Thats a massive amount of content for anyone to watch and quite frankly out of that 35 hours of video 49% are probably crap and 50% are probably cat videos! So the gem actually lies within that 1% that goes viral and becomes really popular. But keeping track of these youtube memes and trends are often a big problem as there is no central place where you can go to just consume all the “great” stuff.

Well youtube seem to have just solved that problem with their new initiative named :Youtube Trends. The site is basically an analytics hub for the giant video sharing site, featuring a lot of feeds showing all the trending videos and trending topics (which are generated via metadata). In their official blog post they also mentioned a feature called “4 at 4? that will present four buzzed-about videos twice a day. Other features include: a Know Your Meme-esque blog to analyze said videos and a dashboard that breaks down popular videos by demographics (location, age, gender, etc). Youtube Trends also presents videos in billboard-style charts, some cool data visualizations and more.

Read the Youtube Trends FAQ section to learn more about the service and also take this chance to watch a nice YouTube compilation of the most watched videos of 2010.

Kevin Allocca, YouTube Trends Manager writes:

“We see YouTube as a way to not just be entertained and informed, but also as place that can help us understand more about the world we live in and the people we live in it with. And that’s what YouTube Trends is all about.”

Introduction to YouTube Trends

(video link – for RSS Users)

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Good news for those who spend a lot of time teaching or helping their parents with their computer or internet issues on a day to day basis. Yes, I mean You! If you are a bit tech savvy, I’m sure you are often the Go-to-guy [ or go-to-gal ] to fix all computer/ IT issues of your parents, grandparents, neighbors, extend family, friends, friend of a friend and the list goes on…

Even though personally I don’t really mind helping out when such occasion arises, sometimes it just becomes overwhelming if you happen to be the tech guy for a lot of people. Dealing with someone’s tech issue is never easy as most of the time you are not in the same location as the person who needs your help. Thus you try to provide help over Telephone or IM and often it does more harm than good. Lately as technology has advanced, I often just use softwares like – Teamviewer, GoToAssist or any other remote desktop clients to get control over their computer remotely so that I can do the necessary fix from my end and they can just sit back and watch.

But what can beat some good quality, short, easy to understand how-to videos produced by Google that covers a lot of those simple (sometimes annoying) problems/questions that often gets thrown at you. Google’s this new initiative can be accessed at: http://www.teachparentstech.org/ which is a really cool way for you to send a “how-to” video on a topic of your choice directly from the site. Currently they have videos on a wide range of topics like: Computer basics, World Wide Web, Communication, Multimedia & Search. Check out some of their sample videos below:

- How to Make a blog

- How to Share Photos Online

- Take a Screenshot

- How to change Desktop Wallpaper

For the rest just go to: http://www.teachparentstech.org/

Also check out Google’s video introduction of this initiative:

My Two Cents:

I think its a great move by Google, but not sure why its called – Teach Parents Tech? I mean parents are not the only people who needs help with tech. But anyway since Google now is into a much wider “consumer market” with their Android, Chrome Browser, Chrome Netbooks etc. overall its a very good initiative from the company to show everyone that they truly cares and in the process they may eventually push more people to their “cloud” of products.

(Via Google Blog)

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Google has recently introduced something called “social sitelinks” in the search results. Social sitelinks basically looks like normal sitelinks but includes your friend’s profile pictures/avatar, their name and the link to their profile. Currently its working for sites like: Twitter, Youtube & Myspace.

Mike Cassidy, Director of Product Management at Google wrote that Google Sitelinks are based on the same technology as Google Social Search – they are using the social circle of a user to identify relevant websites and user pages.

Example of how Social Sitelinks may appear in your search results:

If you want to see the social sitelinks in action, try doing a search for the term “twitter” in google. Note: This may not work if you are not logged into your Google account and you don’t have Google profiles enabled.

Even though I have both enabled, I couldn’t really replicate the screenshot as posted in the official Google blog. Thus I believe this may not have been rolled out to all users yet. However I just don’t see the point of Social sitelinks. I follow over 2000+ people on twitter, I wonder which 5-6 people are they going to shown as sitelinks and how are they going to pick the most important ones? And why would someone do a search for the phrase ‘twitter’ in the first place?

What Google Social Sitelinks Could Have Been?

Even though I don’t quite understand the current application of Google Social Sitelinks, I don’t totally discredit the idea. If social sitelinks works for other major sites that I read everyday e.g. Techcrunch, Mashable, Search Engine Land, Techmeme, NYTimes etc. then there could be rather an interesting implementation.

For instance, If I could just do a search on google for the term “Techcrunch” and underneath the organic Techcrunch listing get an additional 5-10 social sitelinks, which can basically be the most recent techcrunch links shared by my friends then I think that additional information will be pretty useful to me.

Just a thought…

So what do you think of this new Social sitelinks?4

Popularity: 3%

If you have lots of friends in your Facebook then going through all the news articles/videos/pictures from the facebook newsfeed can be overwhelming.

But a new web service from Tigerlogic called PostPost plans to change that.

PostPost – Your own Social Newspaper

Postpost may seem like any ordinary news aggregator that you may have seen or used before. But the big difference here is, instead of gathering links from all over the web, PostPost only looks at stuff that your friends have shared.

So PostPost is essentially a newspaper made from all the links, videos, photos your friends have shared. The reason I keep calling it a ‘newspaper’ is because it does look like one. The formatting & layout looks very much like a magazine, and the recent/important stuff tends to appears on top of the page.

What I have found most useful about this service is it’s search feature. Not only you get a really nice magazine like feel, you can also perform search on all the items your friends have shared. PostPost is integrated with TigerLogic’s yolink search-enhancing technology thus the results it returns is really powerful and accurate.

Use of PostPost is absolutely free and as the service grows I think they will add new features. There are a number of things that I personally want in the service:

- Ability to reorganize the layout (drag-n-drop).

-Marking certain source “Important” so that they get higher priority.

Check out the video to get a better idea of PostPost:

Try out PostPost and let me know what you think about the service!

Popularity: 4%