The DWG Blog

WebP and the Impact on Site Speed

With the permanent introduction of the latest site speed parameters into google’s Search Algorithm (Nov 2021), it is more important than ever to speed up your website.

If you want high quality images while speeding up your website, then you should then care about WebP image format. WebP is a hybrid of the PNG and JPEG features and makes websites lighter and faster.

The advantages of WebP over JPEG and PNG are many. For example, WebP includes a more aggressive and better optimized compression algorithm than JPG and PNG with the goal of minimizing file sizes while still providing acceptable quality. As a result, websites that use WebP will load faster and require less bandwidth. In terms of size, WebP lossless photos are 26% smaller than comparable PNGs.

Lossless WebP supports transparency. Transparency is supported by lossy RGB compression, which often results in 3x smaller file sizes than PNG. Lossless WebP compression utilizes visible image augments in order to exactly reconstruct new pixels. It can also use a local palette, if no interesting match is found.

Lossy (2) WebP compression, like the VP8 video codec’s keyframe compression, encodes an image using predictive coding. The values in adjacent blocks of pixels are used to predict the values in a block, and only the difference is encoded.

The WebP image format is supported by Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and many other tools and software libraries. You may modify WebP files using graphics applications like GIMP, ImageMagick, or Microsoft Paint that natively support the WebP format. There are several online tools we can use to convert our JPGs, PNGs, and other file formats to WebP. There are undoubtedly more to come.

Squoosh – Online image compression and conversion
Online-Convert.com – Online image conversion

WebP offers improved lossless and reduced-quality compression for online images. Web developers and webmasters may use WebP to create smaller, richer pictures that improve the performance of their websites. WebP is good for your site load time and thus good for SEO. You can use WebP to make images that are identical in quality to their JPEG and PNG counterparts, but without the size limitations – resulting in faster loading times for your visitors while maintaining comparable visual quality.

1) Please read our article from January 6th, 2021 regarding Semantic Web (https://thedwgblog.com/what-is-semantic-search-and-what-is-the-context-in-todays-seo/)

2) Lossy vs lossless image compression: Lossy compression permanently removes some of the image data due to compression while lossless doesn’t distort image quality by compressing it, instead it removes non-essential information.

Pacific Symphony Launches with Tessitura Ticketing Integration

Congratulations to the team at Pacific Symphony on your beautiful new website! You can see it here – Pacific Symphony Website

Pacific Symphony sought an entire web presence that could represent their nationwide brand with passion and excitement (in addition to California style). Pacific Symphony wanted to maximize the user experience by fully integrating custom functions including Tessitura ticketing system.

ARTdynamix™ Enterprise fit that request perfectly. Thus, DWG collaborated with Pacific Symphony through the entire process and the new web presence launched in December of 2021. Yay!

As we began developing the Pacific Symphony’s Website, the need for a shopping environment for REST handshake with their Tessitura software in order to replace their existing SOAP based environment. Having converted other Tessitura clients from SOAP to Rest, we began the task by understanding the way that Tessitura is customized for Pacific Symphony. Tessitura refers to itself as “arts enterprise software”.

It is an enterprise application used by performing arts and cultural organizations to manage their activities in ticketing, fundraising, customer relationship management, and marketing.

As many of you know, Tessitura happens to be amazingly flexible and allows the end user to create their ticketing environment pretty much any which way they care to. As such, understanding the client ticketing paradigm is essential to creating a great Shopping platform.

We were able to cover the gamut ranging from short flex series with special pricing, to long term category based fixed packages, to group sales, individual tickets, and donations.

What Is Semantic Search and What is the Context in Today’s SEO?

Search engine technology has progressed substantially and will continue to do so. Semantic (context-based) search has become increasingly important for SEO. It is important and can work for you.

SEO is transitioning from multitudes of backlinks and keywords to high quality backlinks and from long tail keyword and search queries to fast websites with semantic search.

The Search Algorithms have added, replaced or modified many of the variables that are used for placement/ranking. Previously, the focus has been on speed, cohesive content and congruity, The focus since early summer 2021 has been on understanding intent and action, as well as the context (semantics) that surrounds them.

Optimization has changed. The days of reverse-engineering content to improve rankings are gone and just discovering keywords is no longer sufficient.

You must provide rich information that provides context surrounding the long-tail keywords and have a strong grasp on the user’s purpose. This combination is essential for SEO, since AI and NLP (natural language processing) are being embedded in to search engines in order to better understand the context and users of search. So, in short, semantic search is a search engine’s attempt to produce the most accurate results possible based on the end users’ intent, query context, and word relationships. In another word, semantic search, tries to process and understand natural language in the same manner as a human would.

Semantic search on the web extends nearly two decades. Whether it was Powerset or SHOE in the 2000’s or the google knowledge graph in 2010 which eventually led to Hummingbird, RankBrain and BERT. All these engines are attempting to create the Semantic Web where intent and query is matched as closely as possible with the provided content.

How do you succeed with semantic search?

Most of you who know me (Nami), know that I have been a strong advocate of structured data. Going back to 2013, DWG first advised our clients that they need to create structured data to inform search engines of their shows, events, products, content, and location.

Well, don’t be surprised then if I tell you the structured data is more important than ever. But structured data by itself, especially if not used properly can prove to be detrimental.

First as always, is your content. The age of keywords alone has long passed, so look through your pages and give your audience, a comprehensive answer and include long-tail (4 – 5 words). Before digging into more technical information, provide content that answers a typical inquiry simply and concisely at the top of the page.

Consider providing “comprehensive guidance” and more complete resources that your readers will find useful instead of dozens of small, disjointed pages, each with its own topic. Think of big themes in your field that you can go into detail about. By focusing on people’s intentions, you can build a comprehensive, creative, and high-quality content strategy.

This strategy will focus on a list of subjects for content generation that focuses on the searches that bring users to your or your competitor’s website. Focus on the real question that is being answered and not the individual keywords.

Now that you have these pages, circle back and recheck the basics:

Long Tail keywords, Nice URLs, Meta tags, H1, and H2 Tags
Authoritative Backlinks
Use Schema.org (structured data) to help the search engines present your information in more ways
Accessibility and WCAG audit – Even though it is intended for accessibility testing, this will help you find many of possible short falls of your SEO and even help your SEO in places.
Site Speed – getting your site speed up is essential – Minify resources, compress images, use caching, and if possible, use a CDN.
Information Design – Create a logical Information structure for your site and make sure there is a logical relationship between your content for a better user experience.

–Nami

The Vital User Experience

When I (LaMae) do presentations about web design and navigation, the User Interface / User Experience, the discussion is always lively because inherently everyone understands that UI/UX is vital. I often tell the story of a mirror I installed in our home hallway and how I was so pleased with myself for the handiwork. Then, I showed my husband who happens to be taller than me, his head was chopped off and I realized the great job I had done would only work for me … or those very close to being the same height as me. Missed the mark on that one.

A simple UI problem

This picture is a more analog example of the user experience. Imagine how many folks had difficulty using this paper towel dispenser for someone to have taken time to make and tape up an additional explanation? My experience was just as confusing. I read the sign, “PLACE HAND RIGHT BELOW THE GREEN LIGHT …” but the green button was nowhere to be found unless you moved your hand under the dispenser, and then it was intermittent. Most of us would eventually figure this out and frankly, it is only an annoyance, but how many people are choosing someone else because of an annoyance?

UI/UX on your site

The user interface (page design including the look and its ease of use), as well as the user experience (how do the site pages flow work together to get things done), should be the primary, or at least one of the primary planning considerations. Can the visitor find what they want, is it aesthetically pleasing, can they/will they buy? These questions are your goals (or should be). There are probably others, too.

If someone wants to buy – let them. Heck – make it easy for them.

Finally, this brings me to Quality Assurance. Check your site (or paper towel holder) based on real users and not your own expectations and assumptions and minimize annoyances.

TB We haven’t changed and that is OK

During my annual computer ‘refresh’, I ran across some old content. I smiled when I saw the below – happy to still put customers first. — LaMae
(ok – so our writing style has changed a bit – that’s ok too)

As a leading Los Angeles based web design company with global web development offices, we are committed to maintaining a one on one relationship with you and providing a team you can count on right here at home. We are dedicated to creating an environment of trust that will keep your project moving, on time and on budget.

We understand that along with being one of LA’s top web design companies, comes our responsibility to assure that our design is inextricably balanced with functionality. Whether we are designing an eCommerce site or the latest app, we will make sure our creative team delivers your message with style and ease of use.

Whether we are designing and launching a new website or app, our Los Angeles team of web developers, marketing hot shots, and analytic gurus will arm you with an integrated marketing strategy that will achieve your goals.

Whether we are designing an app to interpret whole-genome sequence data and identify disease-related mutations, programming an image recognition platform, or connect a plethora of social media platforms in a single application, our team of technology mavericks is working 24-7 to bring innovation and functionality to everything we do.

While the “rules” keep on changing, you don’t need to worry about that, we will stay on top of them for you, making sure your website is found by people who are relevant to your business and likely to use your services.

If there is not a software out there that can meet the needs of our client, we create it. We have programmed and customized software specifically for the unique requirements of many of our customers.

Long before World Wide Web, software development has been an integral part of our business. We created software for devices ranging from etching equipment, to movie data management. Please take a look at one our best wares – ARTdynamix for a glimpse of what is possible.