Here are some of the most popular project management methodologies:

• Waterfall: This methodology follows a linear and sequential approach, where the project progresses through distinct phases of planning, design, development, testing, and deployment, with each phase dependent on the completion of the previous one.

• Agile: Agile is an iterative and incremental approach that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and customer feedback. Agile methodologies include Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming (XP).
• Lean: Lean methodology emphasizes the elimination of waste and the optimization of the value stream. It focuses on delivering value to the customer with fewer resources, using a continuous improvement approach.
• Six Sigma: Six Sigma is a data-driven methodology that focuses on reducing defects and errors in processes. It uses statistical analysis and quality control methods to improve the quality of deliverables.
• PRINCE2: PRINCE2 is a project management methodology developed by the UK government. It provides a structured approach to managing projects, with defined roles, processes, and templates.
• PMI/PMBOK: The Project Management Institute (PMI) developed the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) methodology, which provides a framework of project management processes and knowledge areas.
• Critical Path Method (CPM): CPM is a technique used to schedule, analyze, and optimize the tasks in a project. It identifies the critical path, which is the sequence of tasks that must be completed on time to ensure the project’s success.

There are many other project management methodologies, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The choice of methodology depends on the project’s specific requirements, the organization’s culture and preferences, and the project manager’s experience and expertise.

In print copy we use pt for font sizes because usually we want a “fixed” size because it is going to be printed out on a piece of paper that we have specified the size of. And in a similar fashion px, are fixed not relative sizes and it means that we have hardcoded the font-size to all of the users of the text on our webpage. This means that no matter whether our users are on a phone, desktop computer or tablet the font size will be exactly the same. Which will more than likely mean the font size will be tiny on a phone device. The end device can’t change the value so if they have set their device to show text at a large size you have said no way I know better and I’m not letting you.

So what is the CSS font best practice or solution?
REM and EM

Rem and Em is a relative unit that many developers use to preserve accessibility.

Rem (root em) stands for “root element’s font-size”

If the default root font-size is 12px. So, if we see a font-size that is 1rem, we are looking at 12px but if a user has set their default root size to be 18px then our 1rem will be 18px not 12px.

Because Rem means root element’s font-size, we can also override the default value by using CSS like this:

:root {
  font-size: 20px;
}

So now you have changed the root font-size, now 1rem = 20px

What if we want to use values on our pages other that other than 18px?

We can get the rem value of a pixels by using decimal options to go up or down sizes. For example, if we want to use a larger font-size we will write font-size: 1.25rem. And if we want a smaller font size we use 0.8rem

But it’s so annoying ?!

Yep, using rem will make the development process longer because we need to calculate the rem value. But this gives some freedom to the user, and we are not messing with the accessibility.

So how do em works?

Em stands for “parent element’s font-size”

Because css is cascading and support inheritance then em will inherit font-size value from the parent element. For example, we have a parent div, and p tag inside:

<div>
  <p>hello work </p>
</div>

<style>
  div {
    font-size: 0.5rem; // 8px
  }

  p {
    font-size: 1em; // ??px
  }
</style>

Because p inherit the parent element’s font-size, so 1em = 8px. This means, that the p will have font-size: 8px.

You can read more on W3Cschools site

Why Do You Need a Web Design Client Questionnaire?

So you understand your client’s motivation, strengths, pain points, objectives, and budget. You also need to consider the target audience, promotion tactics, and lead generation strategies right from the beginning. Designing a information website is different from a service website or ecommerce website.  from  It is important to keep in mind what the core purpose of the website is going to be.

11 Questions to Ask When Building  a brand new website

These are just meant to be a starting point to get you going and some of your clients answers will illicit further questions

1. What is your business about?

What they do;

• How long they have been in the market;
• Their company’s fundamental values;
• Products;
• Target audiences;
• Marketing strategies;
• A unique value proposition that differentiates them from the competition;
• Their short and long-term business plans.

Knowing the answers to these type of questions should assist you when making decisions throughout the project.

2. Why do you need a website?

Many clients don’t have the answer to this simple question – “what do you need a website for?” Increase brand awareness?, Sell my product or service?, create a community?

Asking a few more “why” and “what” questions will help you better understand your client’s real motivations and suggest solutions that will work best for them.

3. Who is your target audience?

• Demographics: customers’ location, age, gender, preferred device for online searching/browsing, etc.
• Psychographics: customers’ values, buyer personas, hobbies and interests, lifestyle, and online behavior.

4. What do you want your visitors to do on the website?

Such as:

• Purchase a product or a service
• Click links/buttons to get information or learn something;
• Download an app or another digital product;
• Receive online support for their questions/pain points;
• Read/engage with your content;
• Register for an event;
• Fill out a form/make contact/ lead generation, etc.

Likewise, you need to discuss the overall goals of the website with your client. Talk about each page’s individual goals, too (as each page usually leads to action).

5. What are the top features that will contribute to the website’s success?

• Call to Action (CTA) buttons;
• Live chat and other customer support software;
• Social media buttons and sharing options across all your client’s platforms;
• banners for highlighting promotions or discounts;
• contact forms
• blog section
• example work/past projects

Put them in priority order

6. What will makes this website stand out from the competition? 

•  Why are you and your business special?
• An exceptional service?
• Free shipping?
• Unique products people cannot find elsewhere?
• A robust product guarantee?
• Discounts and promotions?

7. Who are your top competitors?
8. What would you like to have on your website regarding branding and style?

• Do they have a style guide?
• Do they have a logo and colour scheme ?
• Have they got the content for the websites pages/products?
• Do they have any promotional material already that the website needs to be consistent with?

9. What pages besides the ones listed below do feel you require?

Clients may not realise but you must include certain pages on a websites for transparency, user experience, legal reasons, and better Google rankings. At a minimum, your client’s website should have:

• A homepage;
• An “About Us” page with information matching Whois data;
• Privacy policy page to let website visitors know exactly what happens to their info;
• Terms and conditions – a must-have page for all websites;
• A “Contacts” page;
• The 404 error page (website under construction);
• FAQ page to answer customers’ questions.

10. Do you have a domain name and host?

This seems obvious and some time straight forward and some times not so straight forward but here are some tips for choosing a good domain name https://tipsforyourwebsite.com/what-is-a-domain-name/

Domain names and webhosting within a website development project are also relatively cheap parts of a project so don’t get to caught up in going for the cheapest because you could end up paying a lot in time and energy managing them

11. Date to go live with new website?

Make sure it is a realistic time frame. Remember the business saying- under promise and over deliver. Things can go wrong- unexpected events can pop up so make sure that there is some breathing space in the development time frame and plan it out. (That is another post right there- actually breakdown planning of a project)

While Google  already blocks some types of “mixed content” on the web and makes it difficult to view non SSL websites it has now announced that from early 2020, Chrome (and other browsers will follow that example so they don’t appear “insecure” ) will block all mixed content by default, breaking some existing web pages. Which makes the information below on why all websites need to have a valid SSL certficate below even more pertinent.

What is mixed content

Mixed content is confusing. If you are viewing a web page that’s both secure and not secure. For example, a usually safe and secure web page via https but the web page is getting a JavaScript file via HTTP then it is possible that the script could be modified—for instance, if you’re on a public Wi-Fi network that isn’t secured—to insert malicious code into the  web page that could monitoring your keystrokes etc.

Google announced in September on it security blog that if your website is not using HTTPS/SSL when they implement their latest changes  in 2017, your website credibility and search engine rankings may be affected. Chrome- Googles web browser  has already begun to mark non-secure pages containing certain input fields as Not Secure in the URL bar as you can see below. 

At the moment this only appears on non-SSL pages that ask for a password or credit card information and  it’s not too noticeable. But Google  has confirmed that in the near future, this warning will appear on ALL pages served over HTTP vs. HTTPS and it will be in RED and look like this NOT SECURE- not exactly the sort of thing that will instill confidence in your website!!

There is already a lot of research which shows that Google is already using  HTTPS as a ranking factor…SSL DOES Correlate with Higher Rankings!!

Websites need to convert from HTTP to HTTPS to Avoid the ‘Not Secure’ Warning and feel confident with a Secure green padlock

Another reason why you should convert your website to HTTPS/SSL is that its safer for your visitors

HTTPS and SSL prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.

When an SSL certificate is installed on a web server, it operates as a padlock and acts as a secure connection between the web server and browser. An SSL certificate binds together your domain name (or server or hostname), company name and location. While how an SSL certificate works goes into more details–involving a public key and a private key–what you need to know here is this: Even if a hacker manages to intercept your data, he won’t have the private key to decrypt it. Basically HTTPS and SLL adds extra layers of protection.

So what do website owners need to do

The first step would be to contact their webhost and purchase and  install a Secure Socket Layer certificate (SSL)  to ensure that data between your web server and browser remains private and secure and they are not penalise by Google’s SSL update.

If you want the rest of the world to see your website you need someone else to ‘host’ your website so it is accessible to the public via the internet. In very simple terms this is what a web server is, a computer that is always on and connected to the internet. Hosting is just companies that rent out servers.

When someone puts in the web address for your website it points towards that server and hey presto, your website is served. (DNS is also involved here and your domain name registrar but that is another post) But not all hosting services are equal and certainly not all servers are. A server can range from, at the lower end of the spectrum, a repurposed desktop machine which is converted to a server (this is more common than you might think and is a viable solution for less critical infrastructure) to dedicated high-end servers and cloud services. To give you a idea with one provider you can rent some basic hosting for under a dollar a month and with another host you can rent a dedicated high-end box for over $300. So how exactly do you pick what you need?

I must declare a very big warning here- as the saying goes “pay peanuts and you get monkeys” and this is so true in the web hosting environment. If you choose your web host purely because they are the cheapest then you run the very real risk of ending up in a “bad neighbourhood” This is a server which spammers have also dumped their sites on for short term goals. Once they have trashed the “neighbourhood/server” they then move onto other cheap servers and give them a bad name- which reflects on every other website on the same server- so don’t say I didn’t warn you. This is only me saying this Google does as well!!!

Shared VS Dedicated VS Cloud VS Specialist

These are the four main environments in which your website may be hosted and each has it’s own pros and cons. Let’s address these individually, as each is suited to different applications.

Shared hosting

Most sites don’t need a whole server to themselves, and because of economies of scale it’s a lot more cost effective for hosting companies to have fewer large servers than more smaller ones.
You rent a space on a physical server and a virtual server is created within that space. So you still have your own dedicated environment, but it exists alongside lots of others within a single physical server.
By creating a virtual environment it means that you get a set share of the resources on the server and someone else doing something stupid with theirs shouldn’t affect yours. It’s a good option for small business or where you don’t require tons of resources.
Your host will take care of server requirements, not your website security requirements (again another post) but the server security needs.

Dedicated hosting

This is where instead of your own space next to everyone else as in a shared hosting setup, you rent an entire server. If you’re dealing with critical infrastructure or high volumes of traffic, this may well be the best solution for you. You can either rent a whole server with an environment already set up for you or you can opt to rent just the box and deploy what you want on there.

In reality unless you’re a developer or sysadmin specialist, renting just the box is not going to be the right solution. Even having an entire physical server is overkill for most sites, unless you have very high bandwidth, security and infrastructure requirements. Cloud based solutions have increasingly becoming a better fit for these requirements as well.

If you’re going down the dedicated hosting route you should be aware of the maintenance responsibilities. Unlike shared hosting where it’s the responsibility of the hosting company to keep the physical machine up and running, on a dedicated box monitoring is often left to you.

Cloud services

Cloud hosting is closer to shared than dedicated hosting in that you’re renting a virtual environment. However instead of having a set share of resources you have a ‘pay as you go’ model. You pay for the resources you use, scaling instantly.
This is the best fit for those businesses with dynamic requirements that require very flexible solutions. You can use a small amount of resources and then scale up massively for peak periods.
Because of the sheer scale needed cloud services are generally only offered by larger or specialist hosting companies. Amazon Web Services is one of the most well known. As the cost of storage comes down more and more solutions are appearing, but this is still one of the most expensive forms of hosting as that kind of flexibility doesn’t come cheap.

Specialist hosting

There are also a few specialist solutions out there with hosting services tailored to more niche markets. A good example is WordPress hosting, where it’s a hosting company that just services WordPress sites.
Generally specialist hosting isn’t the cheapest in the market, however it is usually still very cost effective and you should find a good plan for ~$30 a month.

So how much bandwidth / storage and everything else do I need?

Good question 🙂 This can be a hard one to estimate. Bandwidth is a bit of a misused term within hosting as well. Instead of meaning the amount or volume of traffic that can be handled (as in how much traffic can it handle at once) hosting services tend to mean the amount of data transfer allowed. A bit like the download / upload limit on your internet connection that you need to consider when looking at plans.

The speed of your hosting is important as well, however this is a bit harder to work out in advance. Because so many different factors will affect the connection speed of both you and your audience to the website. This can be vary massively from person to person depending on everything from connection speed to time of day or how many people are trying to connect at once.

The storage is just that – how much hard drive space you’ll be allocated. If you have a giant database and tons of media files you’ll need more storage. You may well need to search around for something to fit if you’ve got high storage and low bandwidth requirements as the two usually scale directly together.
Also be aware if you are going to leave your email on the server such in the case of imap email accounts then this is going to add to your storage space requirements.

A note on unlimited hosting

You’ll find that lots of services offer ‘unlimited’ hosting, meaning it’s all you can eat storage and data. Of course it’s not really unlimited – otherwise Google would be hosting their data centres for a few dollars a month 😉 All of these unlimited solutions will have some actual limits and fair usage policies.
Most will start throttling your connection after you reach a certain point, you may have to do some digging with different providers to find out where that point is. Like any unlimited service they rely on the majority of people underusing the resource available and capping those who overuse. But something will definitely be limited and this will mean that you will be up sold to a more expensive plan. The limiting factor could be the number of files, bandwidth, storage etc- buyer beware!!

So what’s best for you?

Really this depends on what you’re looking to host. If you’re just starting out look for a provider who offers great support that you can actually talk to either via phone, email or live chat. Test out any potential new hosts by emailing them and seeing how long it takes for them to reply to you. If they take forever to reply to a presales question there is a good chance they will take even longer to reply to a support issue.
When you are starting out go for a small package – you shouldn’t be looking to pay more than $30 a month for whatever you choose. You’ll find you can always upgrade and generally providers on shared hosting are good at monitoring and letting you know if you’d be better off on a bigger plan (this is how they make their money after all, they won’t have any problem with upgrading you to something more expensive).
Remember, hosting services will always be happy to scale up your solutions, so start with what you think might be just enough and upgrade as you need.

You can talk to us at UAC Infotech if you want get a great hosting plan that can grow with you 🙂

Post src: https://www.wordtracker.com/academy/learn-seo/technical-guides/what-is-web-hosting

1. Keep text in your posts to a minimum of 2 lines.
2. Make the image the main thing, and keep the text on the image below the Facebook recommended text limitations  so that you can boost the post if it is doing well.
3. Only boost posts if they are already doing well, if it is not doing well why throw good money it !!
4. Don’t over-post. Statistics show that posting once every second day is ideal from statistics.
5. Not all of posts should be pushing your product/service or you. Some posts should be re-posts of a story that is industry related and relevant.
6. Keep your posts to one photo per post.

Thats it – The Quickest Facebook Marketing Tips You’ll Ever Get !!

Link Exchanges and Bad Neighborhoods

Create content automatically

Use keyword rich doorway pages and cloaking

Hide text on your web pages

Get links in bulk

Phishing or spoof emails attempt to trick you into clicking on links which will redirect you to a website and ask you to confirm or update personal information such as credit card details, account numbers, or other information the scam company may already have. They may have some of your personal details correct from a completely different source such as domain registration which may add to their credibility.

Phishing emails generally try to look like the legitimate provider’s email but when you look carefully the  From and reply to address is not the legitimate providers email address. Often the grammar and spelling is incorrect or very poor and the layout slightly or very inconsistent with the real emails.

Another extremely common scam email that many domain owners becomes target for is where scam emails and fake letter invoices are sent which look like domain registration renewals but are nothing but a scam!! They don’t come from your domain registrar and don’t even look like they do but they do look legitimate. These types of scam are one of the many reasons to have a good relationship with your registrar so that you can easily query invoices or emails. These scams emails and letter offer a genuine sounding but non-existent product or service such as “Traffic Generator” or “Google VIP Support”. An example is below.

HTML color codes

Colour codes are ways of representing the colours we see everyday in a format that a computer can interpret and display. There are a variety of formats, including Hex color codes, RGB and HSL values, and HTML color names, amongst others.

Red colors

Orange colors

Yellow colors

Green colors

Cyan colors

Blue colors

Purple colors

Pink colors

White colors

Gray colors

Brown colors

More colour resources

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colors.asp

http://htmlcolorcodes.com/color-picker/

https://www.sessions.edu/color-calculator/

https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

These days the majority of users access website via a smart phone or tablet and Google keeps separate search rankings depending on whether you’re searching with a smartphone or not?  The May  update to Google’s algorithm identified that mobile friendly pages would get higher rankings.

Google even has a free tool that can help you find out if your pages are mobile friendly which you can access here- “googles mobile friendly test tool” . If you’re site isn’t mobile friendly you really should make sure it is.

No 2: your website delivered via HTTPS/SSL

In September 2016 Google announced on it security blog that if your website is not using SSL which means https:// not http://. When they implement their latest changes  in 2017 (NOW), your website credibility and search engine rankings may be affected. Chrome- Googles web browser  has already begun to mark non-secure pages containing certain input fields as Not Secure in the URL bar as you can see below.
You can read more about it in this article on “why SSL is a must have for SEO/Google Results”

No 3: XML Sitemaps

Sitemaps are a way of letting Google know about all of your pages instead of just hoping that Google will find the link to them, follow it and index each of the pages. You can think of a sitemap as a book index or table of contents that tells you all the sections/pages of the book or website.

Most CMS systems can automatically create their own sitemaps, or you can use a plugin to generate one but you need to make sure that it is a valid xml sitemap by using a validator or by going to Google Webmaster Tools  and testing the sitemap.

If your sitemap validates and you want to signal to Google that you’re ready for indexing, you can submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. This is a great step to do if you’ve spent a lot of time revamping your site behind the scenes and are ready to go live and what your website re-indexed with all of your new content.

HTML sitemaps are also really good for sites that have a lot of dynamic content as they list of all the pages on the site by hierarchy, which can help human visitors- who should not be confused with robot visitors as detailed further down this list.

No 4: Site Speed

Thanks to the internet and humans expectation of instant gratification it is important that your webpages load fast and even more so on phones and devices that may be accessing your webpages via slow data connections. So for this reason  your site absolutely must load quickly.

Google has a tool to help you measure page speed for your site so you can tell if you’re too slow for their tastes. It will rank your site for both mobile and desktop and give you tips on how to improve the speed. If you want to go a little more advanced then consider going for Accelerated Mobile Pages.

No 5: Relevant and specific Titles and Meta Descriptions

Google says they don’t use titles and meta descriptions for ranking, but they’re quite important for readers that want to know what a page is about. So while it may not be something that google uses in its algorithm it is important for usability and getting user traffic from Search Engines. Titles are ideally under 60 characters to prevent Google from cutting them off. Meta descriptions should describe what the page is about and be between 150 and 160 characters.

If you don’t put in a meta description, Google will try to pull one from the text. Sometimes this is good enough for a page that’s trying to target a long-tail keyword, but it’s good practice to write your own titles and meta descriptions for all your pages in order to improve click-through rates in organic search results.

N0 6: Good Content Quality

When it comes to onpage SEO it is important to have good quality content.  Which in Googles eyes means:

• Original content
• How much content is “alot” or “enough” is relative but for this point I would say the amount of content needs to be “enough” to get the overall message across.
• Fresh content or regular content- the expression “Google loves fresh content” didn’t come from no where for no reason.
• Media rich enough for today’s content standards . So include pictures, video, etc that enhance the content.
• Clear navigation

No 7: Robots.txt

Robots.txt files inform search engine spiders how to what of your content you want to be indexed. The search engine spiders want to index as much content as possible but there maybe pages or content that you do want to appear in the search engines. For example for usibility reasons you may not want to your admin pages to appear in Googles index or you may not want content or webpages that are still in development to be indexed.

You do this by including commands for the search engines spiders on whether they are allowed or disallowed as examples to index files and folders this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol.

It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say https://tipsforyourwebsite.com/stuff/stuff.html. Before it does so, it firsts checks for https://tipsforyourwebsite.com/robots.txt, and finds in it:

The “User-agent: *” means this section applies to all robots. The “Disallow: /” tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site.

Or the robots.txt may contain:

where in this one the robots.txt is giving instructions for only googles spider and telling it not to index the admin, stuff and cgi-bin folders

There are two important considerations when using /robots.txt:

• robots can ignore your /robots.txt. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
• the /robots.txt file is a publicly available file. Anyone can see what sections of your server you don’t want robots to index.

So don’t try to use /robots.txt as a security feature.

N0 8: Good quality reference links and citations

These are also often referred to as citation links. And while you won’t be penalised by Google for not including them they do provide supporting information and validation of your content and can be useful for your users.

Anther helpful SEO article