Mahen 3D: Past, Present and Future
Mahen 3D Ltd is a young,
dynamic and ambitious company based on a very simple idea. We offer project-managed open source web
solution and custom IT solutions with a professional and experienced web
production unit based in
Mahen 3D has developed a
very close working relationship with many reputed web design/development
companies in Sydney and London, who already have an established reputation for
delivering innovative and highly creative design work. This close working
partnership enables us to deliver world-class web design work that seamlessly
integrates with other branded design materials. We are specialised in
- Web Site Design Services
- Web Content Management Solutions
- E-commerce web site development
- Database development, design, and
Implementation
- Web Application Development
The development and creation
of the majority of the web production work on the will come from Mahen 3D’s
core team based in
Mahen 3D prides itself on
its commitment to providing career development opportunities and a good working
environment for its employees. In
We are a registered web design company in
Services
We are primarily a web design/development
company, which means we design, implement, deploy and support web
based applications, which are tailor-made to your individual
requirements. View our portfolio page to see some of our work.
We specialise in creating
professional websites that are both good-looking and functional. We know that
strong websites allow small businesses to tap into huge potential markets.
However, we don't believe that the process of creating such sites should empty
your business bank account.
That's why we believe our straightforward,
practical and highly effective approach will work to your best advantage
You can be sure that your site visitors will
easily find information about your products and services, while receiving a
good impression of your business.
We design sites that are:
-
Visually
attractive,
-
Easy
to navigate, and
-
Search
engine friendly.
If your idea heavily relies on IT, you’ll need a reliable
technology partner. Choosing us to handle your technology issues leaves you
free to focus on your product or service.
·
Web Site Design
(XHTML/CSS2/WAI)
·
PHP/My-SQL Based Applications
·
E-commerce Web development
·
Content Management Systems
·
Backend Administrative Panels
Directly employing our own multi-talented
web development team allows us to act as a web design company in our own right
- offering cost effective, third generation web solutions that emphasise
website accessibility and usability.
Development
Life Cycle
In order to maximize Client’s full potential the first step
would be to draft a range of initial concepts. The logo shown is an
illustration of this process, which would need to be developed along with other
logo prototypes. These can then be refined and a final logo produced, which can
then lead on to the design for the portal.
Project Specification
Website
specification
The best websites are
fast and easy to use, making sure that the user spends more time reading,
learning and contributing, and less time waiting for pages to load and become
available on the screen. These websites share the same key elements that make
them so good:
·
They are fast,
·
They are attractive
·
They have quality information.
Creative Website
The design of the
website is where it all begins, and so is the first thing to get right. A good
design is a fine balance between graphics, information, ease of use and file
size of the page (which will partly determine the download speed).
The process of
designing a website is a very interactive process where input flows constantly
between designers, web developers, usability specialists and the client. At
each stage of the process we analyze the design on feasibility and ease of use.
We write a formal usability report and feed it back in to the design, thus
ensuring that a good balance is struck.
Fast website
An optimal design is
not the only element that determines a speedy download. There are elements that
are out of our control, such as the user’s computer power and internet
connection. However there are other elements that are in our control that can
make a huge difference, such as the hosting and the way the website is put
together.
Our hosting solutions
·
make sure that the website is
always up
·
have the website on a
powerful server
·
optimize the server’s
performance by fine-tuning the server software
The way we construct website ensures best performance by
·
leveraging on existing
software that has proven it’s competency
·
testing and bug fixing custom
software and customization of existing software
·
optimizing the amount of code
the browser has to download and process
Search Engine Optimisation
The quality of the
information on the portal is also very important. Good quality content doesn’t
only depend on the quality of the author. A user has to be able to trust the
content to be both accurate and up to date. That’s why an easy to use remote
author tool is so important. The easier updating is, the more likely the community
is going to utilize the portal to its full potential.
The information on a
website is not just the content. It is also about users finding the content
they are looking for, it is about providing the user with useful features to
help them accomplish what they came to the site for in the first place.
A prerequisite of
finding information on the website is that web users can find the site in the
first place. Although we believe the portal will do well in the search engines
through our normal search engine optimization program, we believe a Google ad
words campaign and Overture keyword bidding will significantly increase
awareness of the site. We suggest using up the rest of the budget for this
portal for optimal results.
Design
around your content.
Clients often provide
a long list of what they want on the main page, or what they have in mind. If
high search engine rankings are on that list, as they usually are, you'll need
to create your design around key-phrase rich content (about 250 words1),
especially for your main page.
Alternative
Text/Graphics and Navigation Links
Search engines will read text. Here are some
recommendations:
·
Provide text-only alternatives for your content that
can't be read by search engines (such as JavaScript, image maps, Flash and
other multimedia)
·
Include text for your image ALT tags
·
Consider how you use HTML tags, such as header tags and
their order and use
·
Include at least 250 words of rich search engine friendly
content on your main page (search engines generally give more weight to content
higher up on the page, too)
·
Site navigation and architecture should be easy to follow
·
Effective TITLE tags and
JavaScript
If you're using
JavaScript within your page between the HEAD tags, for example, consider moving
your JavaScript code to an external .js file. Otherwise some spiders will read
your JavaScript code first, giving this greater importance than your content
Frames:
Strictly No use of Frames
Reason: Framed
websites are often fraught with problems, with one of the negative aspects
being complications with search engines. Either the search engine indexes an
orphan window outside of the frameset, leaving the visitor stranded and unable
to link into your site, or the search engines won't even enter a site with
frames at all.
Also following instructions need to be take
into consideration in the Development.
1) Domain
name registration & hosting.
Make sure that when you register your website's address that you
register it for at least 5 years. Sites that register their site for a short
amount of time send up a red flag at Google, who end up thinking that site has
been registered short-term in the hopes of helping another website that is
owned by the same person/company, to rank well by linking to it. When choosing
your domain name, do not choose a URL that is riddled with hyphens between all
your keywords. It is more important that you target this to your visitors than
to the search engines.
2) Creating static URL's. This is one of the most overlooked yet
important things that you can do to ensure that your SEO campaign is a success.
By eliminating dynamic parameters within your website's URLs, you are ensuring
that search engine bots will have no problems indexing all of your pages.
Creating static URL's can be accomplished by using the mod rewrite command in
the .htaccess file in the root folder of your server. Here is
an example of a dynamic URL (which you want to avoid), and a static URL (which
you want):
Dynamic: http://www.yoursite.com/listings.php?ref=22
Static: http://www.yoursite.com/listings/22.html
Make sure that any potential programmer or designer that you hire understands
that this will be a full requirement of the job. Another important issue is
that all pages throughout the site have URL’s that reflect the pages content.
i.e. Premium pages should use the affiliate Client, profiles should use the
woman being profiled name. etc. The head
tag should also reflect this.
3) Editing the head tag. There are three areas
in the head tag that you will want to be able to either edit yourself or have
your SEO edit. They are the page title, the description meta tag and the
keywords meta tag. Having control over these for each of your top level pages
(all the pages linked to from your home page), will be critical to your
websites success in the search engines. You definitely do not want these to be
the same on every page (they must be unique and reflect the nature of the
content on the given page). For other pages that will be created in high
volumes, you will want to make sure that there is a variable string (your web
designer/programmer will understand what this is) in place for each of the
three areas in question, so that they will automatically be filled with content
that is the right length and reflects the content on the given page.
4) Clean, simple code. Ideally you want to define all aesthetic
properties that different types of text on your site are going to have in a
separate CSS file. This means that you want to avoid using as many tags as
possible, especially font, size and color tags. You also want to avoid creating
PHP scripts that are either two long, and contain a lot of unnecessary steps,
or ones that rely heavily on javascript. It is best to avoid using javascript
as much as possible.
Remember, the most important thing your site can be doing is making it easy for
search engine bots to easy scroll through the code of your website and follow
all the links that it finds. When there is unnecessary code and script on your
site, it makes it a lot harder for them, thus hurting your SEO campaign.
5) Ensuring that visible written content is editable. The writing within
the body of your site is one of the most important areas for you or your
Optimizer to help your site increase it's rankings. Ensuring that either of you
can edit it at your own convenience is extremely critical to the entire SEO
campaign. This because from time to time search engine algorithms will change,
and that might mean that a strategy that was implemented in the past might not
suffice, so you must be able to change it to keep up with the most up to date
SEO techniques.
6) Site structure. Considering the nature
of PHP, your site will most likely (and should) be created by a series of
includes that puts all of the pieces of a given page together. You want to
ensure that the layout and placement of graphics and navigational links within
these includes is strategically correct. Remember, you don't want to have to
pay someone to go back and redo this, so it is critical to
get it right the first time