Measure How Readable Your Text Is!

Usability is everything (almost) when it comes to web design. You have a good layout and good navigation, but what if your content is crap? Now you can actually measure that crap!

Go to textalyser.net and type in the url of your crap, er, the url of the content for which you want to check readability.

Out comes a table listing average syllables per word, sentence count, average sentence length, maximum sentence length, complexity factor (Lexical Density) and Readability (Gunning-Fog Index).

Now all you have to do is tweak the content until the Readability figure gets within limits (the limits are listed on the textalyser home page) and voila!, it’s easy to read!

By the way, this article got a 9.8 for Gunning-Fox Readability, where 6 is easy and 20 is hard, so if you don’t understand this article, there’s something wrong with YOU

Technorati Tags: seo, readability, textalyser, lucky balaraman, the magnum group, web design

Open Your robots.txt File, QUICK!!!

This hot off the press: Google, Yahoo and MSN, who agreed on a common site map format on November 16, 2006, now say you must tell them where you’ve put it…

The sitemap format was Google’s. For once the big guys put their egos aside and prostrated to the user in unison! Hail user!

They have announced that you have to put a pointer to your sitemap in your robots.txt file. This pointer is just a simple line that looks like this:

Sitemap: http://yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

Simple as that. What isn’t simple is remembering to do it. May I suggest that you write a few words on your washbasin mirror using soap… and don’t worry about this method: it’s clean!

As the wolf would say to Red Riding Hood in an email, “All the better to spider you with, my dear!”

Technorati Tags: sitemaps, robots.txt, lucky balaraman, the magnum group, web design

A Fab, Easy, Free Slide Show Service

Whoa! Did you know you can easily embed a slide show similar to the one at left on your web page with hardly any effort and just two pins of programming knowledge?

All you have to do is upload your images, click twice and paste some HTML code. Slide is the web service that that makes this miracle happen.

The above celestial carousel displays inside pictures of our office, sample web sites we have designed and portraits of senior functionaries of The Magnum Group.

Terrific configuration is possible: you can choose from several image transitions, fixed foreground images, border skins and speeds.

You can also automatically upload to Bebo, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Xanga, Piczo, Yahoo 360 and Live Spaces. If that doesn’t generate a lot of interest in you, dog, nothing on earth will!

This amazing service is a valuable tool every web designer and webmaster should have in her bag of tricks… try it for yourself and see it’s eye-popping effect on your visitors!

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: slide show, embedded flash, the magnum group, lucky balaraman, web design, slide