“Web



Web Development

Domain registration, website hosting, responsive web design, content management, application programming interface and integration, professional search engine optimization and more!

About Walt Kennedy Design

Walt Kennedy Design is a small, personal service systems and design firm, established in 1997 to succeed the full service advertising firm Kennedy Advertising Associates, Inc. Desiring to scale down business without full retirement, Walt Kennedy continues to serve several small clients with whom he has a personal relationship.

Kennedy's broad breadth of experience in systems design, graphic design, and the emerging world wide web has positioned WKD to concentrate on digital publishing and building websites, in additional to conventional publishing, prepress and identity design. Early clients included newspapers serving the Irish and Polish diaspora in the Midwest and community and fellowship organizations.

Current and former clients include musicians, festivals, artists, authors, publishers, designers, manufacturers and online retailers.

Master Jeweler Video

Watch master goldsmith John Condron of Fado Irish Jewelry demonstrate his art at his workbench. In this video, he creates a stunning Celtic wedding band in 14k yellow and white gold. You can see/purchase any of his beautiful jewelry at BlarneyHome.com.

E-Commerce

Build your online store or monitize your existing website.

How to Choose a CMS

When it comes to selecting a Web CMS. (Web Content Management System) for your organization, there is no one right choice – but there is a lot that you need to consider. You should first focus on defining and clarifying your business objectives, requirements, processes, and activities; then you can start thinking about your CMS.

A Web CMS should make it easy for non-technical staffers to manage content on their own, without requiring technical support for day-to-day activities, but the underlying business problems and the nature of day-to-day activities are steadily changing. There are several matters you should consider in the selection of the right Web CMS solution that will suit to your needs.

A Good CMS is Good For Business

A Web CMS makes it easier for you to create, manage and maintain your website content. Let’s consider important reasons to manage your website using a Web CMS:

  • Enable business users to manage and update site content.: A Web CMS helps you build and manage your website efficiently. With a user interface that’s simple for non-technical users, website updates are a cinch.
  • Protect your site against unauthorized or unintentional changes: A Web CMS includes security features that make your website less vulnerable to password compromises and security attacks. In addition, you can assign roles across the organization to segment who can update particular sections of your site. This prevents unauthorized or unintentional content updates.
  • Make your site run faster: A Web CMS can improve the performance of your website by optimizing the way pages load and by using web farms to distribute requests to a pool of web servers.
  • Drive more organic traffic to your site: By providing tools for automated re-directs and advanced URL management, a Web CMS can drive more traffic to your website from search engines. Now that we’ve covered some of the benefits of a CMS, let’s consider how you can choose one that’s best suited to your organization’s needs. How to Choose a CMS Choosing a Web CMS is a big decision. It’s critical to look for and understand the essential features that will address your business needs now and in the future.
  • These essential features just below provide you with details of what to expect from a (good) content management system, beginning with baseline features and progressing to advanced features. But, if you need a closer look at each feature, download this guide.

The Essential Features of a CMS (From Basic to Advanced)

  • Whether you need a brand new content management system, a more scalable system for your growing business, or are replacing a solution that no longer meets your needs, be on the lookout for these essential features:
  • Ease of use: A Web CMS should offer design flexibility and allow content contributors to manage and customize the look and feel of pages, without specialized programming or design expertise.
  • Mobile readiness: It’s a fact of life, visitors are viewing your website from a mobile device. Select a Web CMS that provides tools and capabilities to create valuable experiences for mobile users.
  • Granular permissions and workflow: Creating, managing, editing, and auditing content is a continual process, so any Web CMS should provide several, easy-to-use content management capabilities, such as creating work ows for content staging and approvals.
  • Easy-to-use templates: A CMS should offer “templating” capabilities so you can create and easily duplicate content, as well as structural details such as page layouts.
  • Scalability and performance: Your Web CMS needs to load pages quickly and maintain high performance as the site grows.
  • Strong SEO and on-site search: Look for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools, so that your pages rank well in search engines, and a good site search feature to help visitors nd what they’re looking for.
  • Flexible delivery options: Select a Web CMS that can be deployed on on-premises or in the cloud.
  • Extensive service and support: Carefully evaluate the vendor’s service and support options to ensure that they meet your needs.

Make An Informed Choice

When selecting the right Web CMS for your organization, there is no getting away from your history. Rarely are you going to be starting with a blank slate. You need to determine what’s working, what’s not working, and what needs to be fixed.

Take stock of your existing IT investments and leverage what you already have in place. Remember you are on a journey. As a leader, be strategic in your recommendations and decision-making by optimizing for the best long-term fit.

How To Choose A CMS Website

CMS sites are dynamic websites which could include tens of thousands of web pages. All pages have same design components like header, site navigation, text styles etc. Just main body content varies between website pages. Let's over look which factors need to be consider before choosing web content management system and why those are important.

how to choose cms website 1

Versatility

CMS websites use a simple method that allows you to upload, edit and delete data according to your needs, even if you have not any technical skills. If you can type a letter in wordprocessor like MS Word you can use a CMS.

Using CMS software you are able to edit the content, add photos and videos. The page design is separate from the content and can be controlled by editing single file or module which usually knows as templates. Templates control the layout of CMS website.

CMS Websites offers a simple and easy interface to publish, modify website content. These types of CMS software also allow site maintenance using a simple interface.

Furthermore A good CMS Website put great power in the hands of the web designers with limited skills set and enable them to create good looking websites effortlessly.

Expansion

No need for multiple installations to get sub-domain or micro-sites. You may use a single installation for multiple websites without compromising the content or structure of the main site.

CMS Software Cost

Today you can find a variety of CMS software. In which some are free and others have a monthly fee as well as you can also find good open source CMS software that can be tailored to your needs. Read more informative and interesting article related to free CMS websites.

How to select CMS website software

Before choosing CMS software make sure it meets certain requirements The most important thing is the offer versatility. You can add edit pages and update without interfering with codes and complicated scripts

The second thing is the accurate representation of the requested data, the data should be displayed accurately correctly and completely on request.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines have two major functions: Crawling and indexing the billions of documents, pages, files, news, videos, and media on the World Wide Web, and providing answers to their queries, most frequently through lists of relevant pages that they've retrieved and ranked for relevancy.

Crawling and Indexing
A website contains many elements, each one of which is a unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG, or other file). The search engines need a way to “crawl” the website and find all the elements, so they use the best path available—links. The link structure of the web serves to bind all of the pages together.

Links allow the search engines' automated robots, called "crawlers" or "spiders," to reach the many billions of interconnected documents on the web.

Once the engines find these pages, they decipher the code from them and store selected pieces in massive databases, to be recalled later when needed for a search query. To accomplish the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the search engine companies have constructed datacenters all over the world.

These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing large quantities of information very quickly. When a person performs a search at any of the major engines, they demand results instantaneously; even a one- or two-second delay can cause dissatisfaction, so the engines work hard to provide answers as fast as possible.

Large Hard Drive Providing Answers
Search engines are answer machines. When a person performs an online search, the search engine scours its corpus of billions of documents and does two things: first, it returns only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher's query; second, it ranks those results according to the popularity of the websites serving the information. It is both relevance and popularity that the process of SEO is meant to influence.

How do search engines determine relevance and popularity?

To a search engine, relevance means more than finding a page with the right words. In the early days of the web, search engines didn’t go much further than this simplistic step, and search results were of limited value. Over the years, smart engineers have devised better ways to match results to searchers’ queries. Today, hundreds of factors influence relevance, and we’ll discuss the most important of these in this guide.

Search engines typically assume that the more popular a site, page, or document, the more valuable the information it contains must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in terms of user satisfaction with search results.

Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually. Instead, the engines employ mathematical equations (algorithms) to sort the wheat from the chaff (relevance), and then to rank the wheat in order of quality (popularity).

These algorithms often comprise hundreds of variables. In the search marketing field, we refer to them as “ranking factors.” Moz crafted a resource specifically on this subject: Search Engine Ranking Factors.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at allowing desktop webpages to be viewed in response to the size of the screen or web browser one is viewing with. In addition it's important to understand that Responsive Web Design tasks include offering the same support to a variety of devices for a single website. As mentioned by the Nielsen Norman Group: content, design and performance are necessary across all devices to ensure usability and satisfaction.

A site designed with RWD adapts the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images, ƒand CSS3 media queries, an extension of the @media rule, in the following ways:

The fluid grid concept calls for page element sizing to be in relative units like percentages, rather than absolute units like pixels or points.
Flexible images are also sized in relative units, so as to prevent them from displaying outside their containing element.
Media queries allow the page to use different CSS style rules based on characteristics of the device the site is being displayed on, most commonly the width of the browser.
Responsive web design has become more important as the amount of mobile traffic now accounts for more than half of total internet traffic. Therefore, Google announced Mobilegeddon in 2015, and started to boost the ratings of sites that are mobile friendly if the search was made from a mobile device. Responsive web design is an example of user interface plasticity.

Contents
1 Related concepts
2 Challenges, and other approaches
3 History
4 See also
5 References
Related concepts
Mobile first, unobtrusive JavaScript, and progressive enhancement
"Mobile first", unobtrusive JavaScript, and progressive enhancement are related concepts that predate RWD. Browsers of basic mobile phones do not understand JavaScript or media queries, so a recommended practice is to create a basic web site and enhance it for smart phones and PCs, rather than rely on graceful degradation to make a complex, image-heavy site work on mobile phones.

Progressive enhancement based on browser, device, or feature detection
Where a web site must support basic mobile devices that lack JavaScript, browser ("user agent") detection (also called "browser sniffing") and mobile device detection are two ways of deducing if certain HTML and CSS features are supported (as a basis for progressive enhancement)—however, these methods are not completely reliable unless used in conjunction with a device capabilities database.

For more capable mobile phones and PCs, JavaScript frameworks like Modernizr, jQuery, and jQuery Mobile that can directly test browser support for HTML/CSS features (or identify the device or user agent) are popular. Polyfills can be used to add support for features—e.g. to support media queries (required for RWD), and enhance HTML5 support, on Internet Explorer. Feature detection also might not be completely reliable; some may report that a feature is available, when it is either missing or so poorly implemented that it is effectively nonfunctional.

Challenges, and other approaches
Luke Wroblewski has summarized some of the RWD and mobile design challenges, and created a catalog of multi-device layout patterns. He suggests that, compared with a simple RWD approach, device experience or RESS (responsive web design with server-side components) approaches can provide a user experience that is better optimized for mobile devices. Server-side "dynamic CSS" implementation of stylesheet languages like Sass or Incentivated's MML can be part of such an approach by accessing a server based API which handles the device (typically mobile handset) differences in conjunction with a device capabilities database in order to improve usability. RESS is more expensive to develop, requiring more than just client-side logic, and so tends to be reserved for organizations with larger budgets. Google recommends responsive design for smartphone websites over other approaches.

Although many publishers are starting to implement responsive designs, one ongoing challenge for RWD is that some banner advertisements and videos are not fluid. However, search advertising and (banner) display advertising support specific device platform targeting and different advertisement size formats for desktop, smartphone, and basic mobile devices. Different landing page URLs can be used for different platforms, or Ajax can be used to display different advertisement variants on a page. CSS tables permit hybrid fixed+fluid layouts.

There are now many ways of validating and testing RWD designs, ranging from mobile site validators and mobile emulators to simultaneous testing tools like Adobe Edge Inspect. The Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers and the Chrome console offer responsive design viewport resizing tools, as do third parties.

Use cases of RWD will now expand further with increased mobile usage; according to Statista, organic search engine visits in the US coming from mobile devices has hit 51% and are increasing.

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