Optimum Number of Images for a Webpage

Text has been the pioneer in information dissemination. But the ball has now left the court. In the digital age of high speed broadband internet, Text based websites are soooo 1980s.

A post from yola.com depicted clearly, the need to strike a balance between visual and text content on a website.

It is said that your readers often create impressions about your website in just 50 milliseconds, so do you think huge chunk of text is going to help the reader to form a really nice opinion about your website, instead a nice image would attract attention and if the reader likes it, he/she would move further. 

This technique is risky, because if the reader does not like the image, you'll receive a "hmmf" and the reader will move along.  As is evident, until now, the article is actually in confirmation to a few concepts of Website/ SEO Psychology.

However, It has a much higher probability of luring the readers into reading/ using your website than a chunk of smart looking text.

But you know, anything in excess is never good. So how do you know, if you've over-rainbowed your website. How do you know when your website stops being an informative/productive/inspiring website and starts becoming an abomination made by an overweight pixie puking colorful paste?

Too many Images? BLUNDER!

In simple words, Adding too many images for a webpage (not a website) can cause some serious repercussions,

1. Image will load glacially slow (That means so slow, that you’ll grow a beard). Your page speed will suffer and so will you.
2. If you do not use a free resource like blogger, you’ll need to host the images somewhere, hosting needs space for storage and that would require money which will be taken from your pocket.
3. Also too many images sometime puts off the readers. They get the impression that you did not have enough content and so you’re compensating by adding lots and lots of images.

Too less Images? BLOOPER!

But if you have too less images, it can cause some serious damage too.

1. Less images would bore your visitors, If numerous images would have you growing flowing beard then after 5 minutes of lengthy article without images, you will have a bored skeleton sitting in front of a computer.
2. Lesser images without significant breaks lead to people skipping some juicy parts of your article.

Images on Website Type?

Just like your Bounce rate depends of the type of website you have, similarly in the case of images, it all depends on the type of work you do. If you're a photographer or a design enthusiast, your website will have to show in the same manner. If you're a brooding extra mindful persona, you'll automatically use”no nonsense full of text” methodology. The eye tracking study of web readers by nngroup claim that users will read more text on newspaper websites than they do at any websites.

Psychologically, this is because they actually visit the newspaper websites to gain information, to know about things and also because many people sitting at offices are not able to visit many websites and hence resort to the ones that are not blocked by their IT dept./Government (Digress..) The same analogy can be seen in links too. People often say, the higher the number of links you have better is your page, but it’s not true every time.

The Results

My philosophy is to micromanage and document. At codemakit I tend to delve deep and after research I put forward values and processed data. For Example, The Ideal blog posting schedule for a week  or The one about what page rank should you have to reach top 500 of all websites, So here I have attempted to micromanage and tell how many images are optimum for a webpage (for different types of webpages).

Mind you, the table is created after hours of grueling research, using two different methods for the analysis and comparing. The study revolved around the top 500 websites of the world by Alexa as per 11th June 2014. Several websites were selected. Ones in language other than English were rooted out. Ones that need authentication (like Facebook, Reddit etc.) before letting the visitors enter were removed. Ones with objectionable content were not considered.

Finally the values are arrived by using weighted average method. The complete Study on "The Optimum Number of Images for a Website Type" is available now in pdf.

Type	Images
Forum Type Websites	7
Photosharing Websites	10
Brand Specific Websites	10
Banking Websites	12
Shopping Websites	35
Product review Websites	56
Group Blogs	83
Newspaper Group Websites	130
Entertainment Websites	145

So what is bad? Bad is when you mix things up. When a simple blogger uses so many images that the page uses an hour to load on the reader's computer. When loaded the page greets the user now sitting with a face full of white beard. If you’re so hell bent on using images for every little piece of text you have, use it in awesome ebook covers and magazines. But remember “The moment you overdo anything, you're in trouble.”

Note,

Google webmaster guidelines clearly state, you should not embed important text in images, use alt text for images, also the image must be conducive to the text you've published (You do not see an image of a puppy in this webpage, because it is out of context)

But nowhere has anything been mentioned about the optimum number of images a webpage might have (Not even the hyped “How search Works” by Google. So, I posted a question at Google’s Webmaster Forum in search of professional opinion. You can see the topic here, But There was no response from that side. Maybe my question was convoluted. :-(

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Why do you need a multilingual website

Learn how you lose about 95% of your visitors and how to get them back. Demographics play an exceedingly pivotal role in determining the fate of your website. Language does pose a barrier if you want your blog to go truly global. 

Codemakit ran an article on “Why do some countries hate your website?” answering the question how a simple change in spelling can cause your blog to stop receives visitors/readers from certain countries. On similar lines, the language in which your blog was written in bounds the overall reach of your blog.

Languages Based on Mother Tongue

According to Wikipedia, the percentage of world population speaking English is about 5.43%. Considering many WebPages and websites are now made in English, you would wonder, that you're losing about 94.57 % of your potential readers just by writing in English!

Table 1 : Languages (Mother Tongue) spoken by people around the world

Rank	Language	Native speakers (millions)	% of world population
1,	Mandarin	955*	14.40%
2,	Spanish	405*	6.15%
3,	English	360*	5.43%
4,	Hindi	310*	4.70%
5,	Arabic	,295*	4.43%

Source : Wikipedia Retrieved on 10th June 2014

Here comes the need for a language specific approach towards webpage creation. But there is a catch; the above data is basically for mother tongues. So 5.43% of the world's population has their mother tongue as English. (Now the figures do not disappoint).

Languages Acquired By Readers

But what if your mother tongue is not English and for answers you have to look towards English content on the web. So you use the language skills hammered in by your teachers at school and look for content published in English. Using this scenario in mind, you get almost 27% of the world as your potential readers. (Now that is pretty and believable)

Table 2 : Languages (Acquired) spoken by people around the world

Rank	Language	Internet users	Percentage
1	English	565004000	27.00%
2	Chinese	509965000	25.00%
3	Spanish	164969000	8.00%
4	Japanese	99182000	5.00%
5	Portuguese	82587000	4.00%

Source : Wikipedia Retrieved on 10th June 2014

Languages of Existing Webpages

In the previous Para we discussed a problem. A Problem often faced by readers all over the world. You do not find WebPages with content in your language. Would you like to hear what the language most websites are made of is? The answer not surprising is English or Anglais (I'm learning French). But what alarms is not the language, but the sheer number of WebPages using the language. What would be your estimate? Huh? 20% or 25% or 35%? Prepare to be floored; it is a whopping 56%, followed by 6% of Russian and 6% of German.

Table 3 : Webpages Existing on the web (Based on Languages)

Rank	Language	Percentage
1	English	55.70%
2	Russian	6.00%
3	German	6.00%
4	Japanese	5.00%
5	Spanish	4.60%

Source : Wikipedia Retrieved on 10th June 2014

This was the problem I was talking about. You need answers; you have a presentation/ test/ viva tomorrow and all you find are WebPages in English. Hence you force yourself to plough deep into the webpage and try to understand the obscure language (The sentence might be futile for codemakit readers reading the blog in English). This might lead to visitors leaving webpage in search of a non Shakespearean website where the language is much simpler. This would increase your bounce rate, maybe this is the reason why your blog is not growing.

A Comparison

Here's a comparison of the languages discussed above.

Table 4 : Comparison of Languages, Based on demographics, Analytics and Website Content.

Rank	Language (Mother tongue)	Language (Internet Users)	Language (Website Content)
1	Mandrin	English	English
2	Spanish	Chinese	Russian
3	English	Spanish	German
4	Hindi	Japanese	Japanese
5	Arabic	Portuguese	Spanish

Source : Wikipedia Retrieved on 10th June 2014

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is evident from the fact that we would always like to be presented with content in our language, and the apparent lack of content on the web based on reader demographics, we should strive towards WebPages/ Websites with localized content presented in local languages. Even General Elections of countries were affected because of such tactics. Online Giants are doing it (Example : the Case of Wikipedia) and so should you (Unless you’re a potato blogger)

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Do Pages with questions as title receive more clicks (Part 2)

This article is the complete study conducted by codemakit Website Research. If you feel that the contents are too technical for you, you may want to read the simplified summary presented at part I of the article first. Based on the data obtained from 190 Web Pages and their page views, the following observations were found.

The data available were the number of views, and the date of publication of page. Since the pages were linearly published (i.e. one page after another), the difference of the number of days were found and Cumulative number of days were found. Cumulative number of days helped in determining the number of days a webpage was present on the website as published. As a page's page views and the number of published days are directly proportional. 

The Data Set

The complete Data Set containing information in pdf for all the blog posts is available for perusal here. To probe this even further, Consider Page A has 200 page views and Page B has 20. This cannot be called as the complete indicator of the actual worth of the page, As Page A might have been published a year ago and Page B just a week ago. Hence a balanced base is needed to determine whether a webpage is performing well or not.

V/D ratio was found out. The V/D ratio is the ratio of the number of page views per unit cumulative day. The ratio is a perfect indicator of the number of how well did the page do in terms of garnering visitors. Using V/D ratio the index for page A would be (200 page views/365 days) and for page B as (20 page views /7 days). The ratio for Page A comes to be 0.548 and for Page B comes to be 2.85. The page A which at first looked better in comparison to Page B, now doesn't look worthy at all. Hence a normalized base would help in determining the true worth of a page.

Types of Webpages

The complete analysis was done using V/D ratio. Graphically, V/D = 0.2 was obtained as the value to be used for determining if a webpage performed well or not. Complete Data was divided into three parts 

1. The lesser ones,

Now all Web Pages which had a V/D ratio less than 0.2 can be safely said to perform worse than its counterparts. Hence all Web Pages with a V/D ratio less than 0.2 come under its purview. There were 53 lesser ones.

2. The Greater Ones

Just like the name suggests, all the Web Pages with a V/D ratio more than 0.2 were called as the greater ones or the ones that performed better. There were 123 Greater ones.

3. The questions

Each webpage which contains a question in its title text is a question type webpage. There existed 63 question type Web Pages on the said website.

How did we arrive at V/D=0.2 ?

Note. It must first be understood how the value of 0.2 was obtained. The complete analysis being a really simple one, It was thought that the sample could be plotted on the graph based on its frequency. The graph was then created taking V/D ratio on the abscissa and the frequency at ordinate. 

The resultant graph was a sharp bell shaped curve. The sharpness was due to excessive variations among the sample group with different number of Web Pages having inordinate differences in their V/D ratios. Hence, The Graph was then magnified at its peak in the hopes of arriving at the dividing value. This graphically came near 0.2.

The Observations

Summarily, It was found that, The Webpages with questions as their title text that performed poorly was 21.21%. However, The Webpages/Articles/Blog Post with questions as their title text which performed poorly was just 21.21%. In Short, if you put your title text as a question for any webpage, you have 50% more chances of making it more famous. 

			Greater Ones	Lesser Ones
		Total Number of WebPages	123	66
		Number of Webpages with Questions	39	14
		Percentage of Webpages with questions	31.71	21.21

Disclaimer for the study, 

It is however pertinent to note that, the study took 197 webpages and had to exclude some to maintain the sample's integrity. The study was conducted on a single type of website with a single Page Rank and hence same results cannot be expected for any other.

The study could be extended to cover other types of websites too. These could be analysed and results displayed. Also, one must understand that the criterion for determining if a webpage performed good or poor, was created based on the overall performance of the website itself. Hence, there exists a need for determining independent criteria for websites of different types, page ranks and visitor interaction.

Also, you can bring people to your webpage, but making them stay there is wholly dependent on how you present the content. Bounce rate isn't too irrelevant you know.

Is the Study too technical for you?

For a much simpler version of this study you can visit the part I of the series. 

If you still have doubts or would like to share your own story, comment below, we'll be happy to answer.

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Do Pages with questions as title receive more clicks (Part 1)

There exists a very contended view that, If you write an article with a question as its headline or title, it will receive more clicks and the webpage as a whole would be more successful. 

codemakit in the past has published material on improving the readership of any blog like, using specific publishing schedule, controlling Spam, creating apps, organising your blog content etc.

Though some are of the opinion that it plays no part in determining the popularity of an article. However, Online marketing experts disagree, Several studies claim an increase of 100% (Though there are several more probable methods of doubling your website traffic) traffic to the website, i.e. "Double Your Traffic!", some claim a modest 10% increase.

The truth isn't inaccessible, its just hidden. Gregory Ciotti, who oversees marketing at Help Scout and is the founder at Sparring Mind, believes, there exists an information Gap Theory based on a paper by George Loewenstein, on "The psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation" 

The Online marketing geniuses often claim that once a person glances on the headline, She/he frames their question as per the one displayed. For example, You need to know how to plant a eucalyptus tree in your backyard. You put the search term as "Plant a big eucalyptus tree". Suppose you stumble upon the headline, "How do you plant a large tree", though the queries are different enough, you must understand that the person finds it irresistible not to merge the two and experience that Aha! moment where you feel "That is just the damn thing I was searching for! How cool is that, I must check this out!"

Codemakit Website Research performed a study and analyzed Web Pages to answer this question. Since the study can prove to be too technical for some, It has been included in the second part of the article.

In the study, We took 197 Web Pages and collected just two information from them, Their number of Page views and the number of days they had been public on the web. We divided the complete set into three parts. 

1. One was the Greater ones or the ones that performed really great. 
2. Second was the lesser ones, i.e. those that did not perform up to the mark. 
3. Third set consisted of those which contained questions as their headlines. 

You can take a look at part II of the article if you want to know how did we divide the articles/blog posts into good and bad (complete Data Set containing information in pdf format for is available for perusal here). Once that was achieved, We analyzed and are now presenting our findings. 

Read carefully, The Web Pages which performed really good had 31% of them as questions. However, The ones that performed really bad had 21% as questions. In short your webpage has 50% more chances of performing good if it has a question as its title/ headline. 

For more information on the study you can visit the part II of the series. If you still have doubts or would like to share your own story, comment below, we'll be happy to answer.

But, Don't you wanna know how did we arrive at this conclusion?

Check out the second part of the series. 

Also, tell us how much better did your website perform?

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How did a sentence reduce Spam comments by half

Comments are by far the most important and the most useful social media engagement technique used in blogs. A comment has the ability to spark a discussion and give a new meaning altogether to the article. 

A comment can motivate the author and can also act as a critic thereby controlling the quality of the articles proceeding. But there is a downside to commenting scenario. Most blogs do not allow anonymous commenting; this is because of the extra time and energy they will have to spend in moderating the comments if they allow. So they ask the reader to login or register with the website to post a comment. Or they would ask the visitor to leave their email id, which is again no cool for the reader. A casual reader who wants to show his appreciation for the exemplary work done by the author, cannot do so if he/she is pestered by the site before leaving a comment. True comment is always extempore. 

An ideal situation is that the reader goes through the complete article and reaches the end. After reading the article he is tempted to post a comment. He just writes it and posts it. The comment is published and the user is happy. Such is the case with anonymous posting.

The Case Study,

The following is a case study on how a simple method was enough to stop spammers and give more readers to the blog as a side effect.

Codemakit had some problems in the past regarding lower comments. As is evident, low or no comments give ‘low quality’ jibes to the readers. So to increase the comments and increase the social interaction at the website, codemakit started anonymous comment. In short anyone who knew how to read and write could write just about anything in the comment box.

The First Day
The first day, codemakit received 24 comments all of which were basically spam. The number reached 57 on the third day and was not stopping. The only thing standing between a spam comment and unsuspecting readers was the blogger’s comment filter which did its best in keeping spammers at bay.

It was sufficiently clear, why websites do not keep anonymous comments. It was becoming simply impossible to keep up with such large numbers. The process of comment moderation took more than an hour daily, which ate up the time required in the maintenance of the website. Each and every comment had to be read properly before coming to any conclusion.

Some were straightaway spam which could not be filtered by blogger’s systems whereas some were cloaked up pretty good and some were even funny. But there was a plus side, the true or legitimate comments increased to five on the third day.

The Solution

As the days crept on, it was becoming increasingly difficult to moderate comments in such huge numbers. From SEO’s perspective, if a particular article has a PageRank of suppose 3, then this will be distributed to each and every link hosted on the page. So in short codemakit was leaking PageRank to the hyperlinks in the comments. 

One solution to the SEO problem was to hire personnel for filtering spam, which was expensive. Also you cannot post an ad on a newspaper or a website saying, "Wanted, an enthusiastic and intelligent individual for sorting spam at my petty little blog! I'll pay you in installments :-)"

Solution Two, Another solution was to hire a freelancer, which was too convoluted solution for such a simple problem. The blog at that time was a one person project which obviously didn't need another person just to sort spams.

Solution Three, Last solution was attaching a nofollow attribute to the complete comments section, thereby taking off the load of moderating by the author

The third solution was finally implemented. So the SEO problem was resolved (i.e. the rankings of the website will not be affected due to the low quality links in the comments section. But another problem on the softer side was too large to be overlooked. What will happen to the image of the blog when readers see fifteen to twenty comments, most of which are spam? This will affect the image of webmaster and the blog. 

The Process

So the second problem which floated was that comment moderation was still needed. One unique solution was to display a custom message instead of the default ‘Thanks for your comments’, another message was planned thinking if spammers are warned that their tactics will not work here, may be they'll stop.

‘Spammers Kindly remember, any hyperlink in the comments will not be indexed by search Engines because of NoFollow attribute. http://www.codemakit.com/2013/01/add-nofollow-to-your-blog-comments.html’

The message was specially crafted keeping in mind the mentality of spammers. Since blogger does not allow any hyperlink in the message section.

The URL of the methodology of adding NoFollow attribute was also added. Another important thing included in the particular webpage was a proof that Nofollow was added to the comments section with the help of a Firefox add-on.

The Results

It was thought that spammers who once add a spam comment would be greeted with the particular message and this would deter them from adding any more comments. But, the particular solution did more than what was expected.

The comments reduced to just the legitimate ones and since the message was displayed, there was not a single spam comment on the webpage. The Number of true or legitimate comments actually increased and so did the total number of comments.

Another side effect of the message being displayed was an unusual increase in the visitors of the website. It is not wrong to say that nearly each and every visitor of the NoFollow Webpage within 3 to 4 days were all spammers. The webpage which received 200 visitors in 15 days received 2300 visitors in just 2 days.

The following are the screenshots of the anomalies observed on the site.

The particular article on adding a NoFollow attribute became famous overnight, garnering 3075 followers in just 3 days.

It even surpassed the previous most read articles like remove youtube logo from embedded videos and Animated Flash Tag Cloud or even the article on Faults in your SEO and how to rectify it.

The peak observed was pretty amazing as the site had never encountered such amount of traffic before. The following is a screenshot from blogger dashboard.

So in a nutshell the complete procedure did more good than expected and can be used by webmasters for their respective websites.

 Try this and post your anonymous comments. I'm sure we'll be thrilled to receive your results.

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8 Best Online Form Creation Websites (Study Part 2)

Consider a case when you really need to create a form for your website, and so you need to decide which online service would suit you best. Though the reasons for creating an online form were discussed in an article before. Different websites have different USPs, some are suited for the general non programming public. Some are for more advanced users who actually know about the nitty gritty of coding and are willing to go the extra mile for providing awesome service to their customers or visitors. Some Form creation websites are meant for people who don't have the time and can do without the petty details which most people fret about.

So here is a list of all websites that can perform the task of creating an online form. Codemakit Website Research analysed them perfectly for your perusal so that your time is saved

Jotform

If you think of form creation with the speed of light, You would probably consider jot-form as the best. One visit to jotform would change you perception of form building forever. This is the first time I personally considered buying one of the premium packages that the website offered. The simple drag and drop functions bundled with easy edit and move options, jotform can be the site to look for.

Cons- The free subscription offers just 100 submissions in a month. No option of dedicated hosting of form. you must embed the form on your website for it to be functional. The responses are mailed separately but not as a spreadsheet which has found to be useful for most web masters and statisticians. There were speculations however that jotform domain was temporarily shut down once by the US Government.

FormSite

As is evident from businesses around the world, one man's thrash is another man's treasure, The disadvantages in jotforms were completely removed when the developers were creating formsite. Formsite understands that people actually need to use the information that they gained from the forms filled by the visitors. Formsite offers you services that helps you convert the responses into pdf /xls or similar spreadsheets so that you are spared from manual entry into spreadsheets for further processing or record keeping. Wiki entries boast about formsite into the top 5000 websites in terms of daily unique visitors. With more than 500 million form submissions, formsite is one of the most popular form creating destination for developers worldwide.

FormStack

Formstack can be called as just another form creating/maintaining website. Some of its USPs are better control  for the information flow by the form creator. The only major con for formstack is its 14 day trial. The website seems hell bent on converting nearly ever visitor into a customer. It is because of such low return on investment (ofcourse the functions wouldn't work afer the trial period.), codemakit decided to give it a rating of B3. Final verdict, If you are a freebie and want little fucntionalities for your blog/website, you woulnd'nt want formstack. It is for corporates and big players in the internet sphere.

Wufoo

Though Wufoo brags about cloud storage as its USP, It is interesting to note that Google drive is the only sensible enough competition for the same. Thus If you want your form data to be automatically stored at cloud storage. You can either use the ever free Google Drive forms or Wufoo. Since both are in the same battle field now, Let us compare them further. The one thing that Wufoo offers apart from the others is that you can personalize the pages to an extent that the form would look like an inhouse creation. With really high PageRank, SERP and an acceptable CWR (see Codemakit Website Research Ratings document) rank, WuFoo has been crowned the best in its class.

The Analysis

The following is an analysis for the eight Form Creation Websites from codemakit Website Research. Four different Rating Systems were employed for determining the overall worth of each Website; Webutation, known for providing users with the actual reputation of a website analysed by it. Page Rank, as you might know is one of Google's most overused methods of determining which page should be ranked first. The Third CWR rating is Codemakit's way of analyzing websites based on several patterns (You should first read the CWR Document about how codemakit analyses websites), Website Planet also works towards finding the importance of a website. Wind Rose diagram for Form Creation Websites is shown below.

Rockforms however was given a 40% rating by Webutation and so it comes at the end of our list. 

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Rank	Website Name	Webutation	Page Rank	Website planet	CWR Rating
1	Wufoo	100	8	8.5	A3
2	Coffeecup	100	6	8.5	A3
3	Formsite	100	7	7.5	B1
4	Jotforms	100	5	7.5	A2
5	Formstack	100	6	7.6	B3
6	Email-me-form	100	7	5	C1
7	Form-to-go	40	5	8.8	B3
8	Rackforms	100	3	8.6	B2

To find the actual stabilized table (Which was actually used for analysis) you might want to take a look at the following PDF document containing tables and the charts in the occasion when I might have left anything.

If CWR has left a form creation website that you think should be studied and analysed here, post it in the comments.

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