New Circle Blog

How to Plan an Effective Website Re/design (Part I)

May 16th, 2010

Good planning is a halfway to success. This is especially true in website design and redesign. In this article we will discuss the typical process of website design projects. Review the important components involved in launching a website. Also we will discuss some common pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Typical Life Cycle of Website Design [...]

Add Slideshow to Your Website

April 16th, 2010

Slideshows are fun. You can use that to share event photos, or you can use that to rotate through a list of your portfolio items without people have to click around or scroll to read all.
There are many ways to get this done. We will look at two easy-to-use options in this article.
NextGen Gallery
If you [...]

Five Tips to “Socialize” Your Website

March 17th, 2010

“Social Media” has become a big buzz word. People are setting up accounts with Linked-in, Facebook, Twitter, etc. In this article I’d like to share a few tips that you can implement for your website to maximize the results from your “social media” efforts.

Add social share to your site
Link people to your social media accounts
Pull [...]

Measure Website Usage and Make Informative Decisions

February 17th, 2010

Learning how your visitors use your website can be helpful in shaping up your online strategy. What can you learn and how? We will look at a few tips and good practices in this article.
What You Can Learn
Overall Site Traffic
Typical metrics people measure include:

Unique visitors
Page views (total and average per visit)
Average time on site

You want [...]

Adding Video to Your Website

January 12th, 2010

A Better Way to Tell Your Story Online
According to comScore’s April 2009 report, an impressive 79% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video and the duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes.
Online video has moved into mainstream and is proven effective.

Video draws audiences
Video is engaging
With video, you can get your message [...]

Add Background Music to a Web Page

January 2nd, 2010

There are special occasions that people like to add some background music to web pages. Today, I had such an assignment. The requirements include:

Short music, ~15 seconds in length
Auto start
No player or button is to be displayed on the page

Client provided me with MP3 files to work with. After some search and I found a [...]