WordPress is one of the most notable platforms for creating your business or personal website.
Commanding 39%+ internet with its absolute CMS platform, WordPress continuously grows its share on the World Wide Web.
WordPress website designs or themes by default are always stunning, but you can extend your website’s functionality to enhance user engagement as a website owner.
Before we move ahead with the tips for enhancing the user engagement of your website, it is essential to have a clear understanding of your primary business or industry while designing a website.
What’s Your Website Niche?
Whether eCommerce, professional service, or personal niche, developing a beautiful website is achieved through WordPress. So, before applying the tips and tricks for designing a stunning website, always keep in mind your website niche.
For example, if your purpose of designing a website is to run an eCommerce store, your website design, theme, plugins, and space should be accordingly. At the same time, a personal website will require less storage and plugin extensions.
Hence, your custom WordPress website design should be according to the niche or type of your website. If you have clarity on this point, you can do wonders with your website further.
How Would You Enhance Your Website Engagement?
For enhancing website engagement, it is a must to have an eye-catching website. And for designing eye-catching websites, you require an excellent WordPress Development Team. The team with the best designers, developers, content marketers, and QA will help you build a perfect WordPress website for your eCommerce or professional niche.
WordPress Tips to Create Eye-Catching Websites
As we know that WordPress has some fantastic ways to extend the functionality of your website, so here we discuss the WordPress website development tips for creating eye-catching websites.
1. Make It Appealing, Don’t Stuff It
WordPress websites can be more appealing or attractive if you follow the below-mentioned tips while designing the UI.
Firstly, your WordPress website must be designed keeping in mind the customer’s convenience. It should have all the essential elements, including the design, content, images, videos, CTA, customer support, service or product details, etc.
The website must not be stuffed with more content or images. It distracts or confuses the visitor in the first place. Nevertheless, it should have an elegant theme that has legible fonts for helping the customer read important details or notes.
For example, revolving sliders or carousel sliders with essential information on the business products or services can help engage customers 3X times than a website without a slider.
2. Use Plugins for Extendibility
WordPress plugins are famous for increasing the versatility of WordPress websites. If you follow our WordPress tips for having eye-catching websites, you must scroll through WordPress plugins available onboard.
WordPress Plugins help you enhance your website’s appearance through 3D sliders, carousel sliders, footer sliders, blog sliders, inbound tools, image and video galleries, and much more. Plugins are meant to increase user engagement on your website by adding more meaning to your website’s features.
3. Focus on Content
Content is the main pillar of your website. Imagine having a stunning website with dull or meaningless content!
It is the content that adds value to your existing website. Nevertheless, WordPress is the platform that helps you display content in the most versatile form. Be it image sliders, videos, or text sliders; content can be expressed beautifully using WordPress websites.
Hence, when you consult the WordPress website design company to enhance your website’s overall appearance, you must not overlook the content. Hire the best content writer to increase your website’s search engine visibility. Also, you can have SEO-optimized content to keep your visitors engaged.
4. Keep High Definition Images
Another essential factor for creating eye-catching websites is trusting only high-definition images. Images speak more than words. Imagine visiting a website with blurry or dull images to showcase on its homepage or service pages. You will definitely lose interest and prefer to check other websites to better present products or services.
Especially when you are running an eCommerce website, the product images play a vital role in the success of your online store. Hence, for designing a perfect eCommerce website, you have to upload and showcase better-quality product images and videos.
5. Don’t Compromise With Website Speed & Security
Website speed and security are two different elements. First, let me talk about the WordPress website speed. WordPress is considered the best platform for developing your upcoming website because it offers impressive loading speed. And if you doubt your website’s speed, then you must consult the WordPress Development Services at WP OnlineSupport.
WordPress websites are considered more secure for businesses. It has incredible inbuilt security to offer companies looking forward to designing their website using WordPress. Many times due to plugins and themes, the website speed and security become a big question. For the same, you need to consult a custom WordPress website development company that can help you manage speed and security without uninstalling the useful plugins.
WordPress is one of the most notable platforms for creating your business or personal website.
Commanding 39%+ internet with its absolute CMS platform, WordPress continuously grows its share on the World Wide Web.
WordPress website designs or themes by default are always stunning, but you can extend your website’s functionality to enhance user engagement as a website owner.
Before we move ahead with the tips for enhancing the user engagement of your website, it is essential to have a clear understanding of your primary business or industry while designing a website.
What’s Your Website Niche?
Whether eCommerce, professional service, or personal niche, developing a beautiful website is achieved through WordPress. So, before applying the tips and tricks for designing a stunning website, always keep in mind your website niche.
For example, if your purpose of designing a website is to run an eCommerce store, your website design, theme, plugins, and space should be accordingly. At the same time, a personal website will require less storage and plugin extensions.
Hence, your custom WordPress website design should be according to the niche or type of your website. If you have clarity on this point, you can do wonders with your website further.
How Would You Enhance Your Website Engagement?
For enhancing website engagement, it is a must to have an eye-catching website. And for designing eye-catching websites, you require an excellent WordPress Development Team. The team with the best designers, developers, content marketers, and QA will help you build a perfect WordPress website for your eCommerce or professional niche.
WordPress Tips to Create Eye-Catching Websites
As we know that WordPress has some fantastic ways to extend the functionality of your website, so here we discuss the WordPress website development tips for creating eye-catching websites.
1. Make It Appealing, Don’t Stuff It
WordPress websites can be more appealing or attractive if you follow the below-mentioned tips while designing the UI.
Firstly, your WordPress website must be designed keeping in mind the customer’s convenience. It should have all the essential elements, including the design, content, images, videos, CTA, customer support, service or product details, etc.
The website must not be stuffed with more content or images. It distracts or confuses the visitor in the first place. Nevertheless, it should have an elegant theme that has legible fonts for helping the customer read important details or notes.
For example, revolving sliders or carousel sliders with essential information on the business products or services can help engage customers 3X times than a website without a slider.
2. Use Plugins for Extendibility
WordPress plugins are famous for increasing the versatility of WordPress websites. If you follow our WordPress tips for having eye-catching websites, you must scroll through WordPress plugins available onboard.
WordPress Plugins help you enhance your website’s appearance through 3D sliders, carousel sliders, footer sliders, blog sliders, inbound tools, image and video galleries, and much more. Plugins are meant to increase user engagement on your website by adding more meaning to your website’s features.
3. Focus on Content
Content is the main pillar of your website. Imagine having a stunning website with dull or meaningless content!
It is the content that adds value to your existing website. Nevertheless, WordPress is the platform that helps you display content in the most versatile form. Be it image sliders, videos, or text sliders; content can be expressed beautifully using WordPress websites.
Hence, when you consult the WordPress website design company to enhance your website’s overall appearance, you must not overlook the content. Hire the best content writer to increase your website’s search engine visibility. Also, you can have SEO-optimized content to keep your visitors engaged.
4. Keep High Definition Images
Another essential factor for creating eye-catching websites is trusting only high-definition images. Images speak more than words. Imagine visiting a website with blurry or dull images to showcase on its homepage or service pages. You will definitely lose interest and prefer to check other websites to better present products or services.
Especially when you are running an eCommerce website, the product images play a vital role in the success of your online store. Hence, for designing a perfect eCommerce website, you have to upload and showcase better-quality product images and videos.
5. Don’t Compromise With Website Speed & Security
Website speed and security are two different elements. First, let me talk about the WordPress website speed. WordPress is considered the best platform for developing your upcoming website because it offers impressive loading speed. And if you doubt your website’s speed, then you must consult the WordPress Development Services at WP OnlineSupport.
WordPress websites are considered more secure for businesses. It has incredible inbuilt security to offer companies looking forward to designing their website using WordPress. Many times due to plugins and themes, the website speed and security become a big question. For the same, you need to consult a custom WordPress website development company that can help you manage speed and security without uninstalling the useful plugins.
WordPress is one of the most notable platforms for creating your business or personal website.
Commanding 39%+ internet with its absolute CMS platform, WordPress continuously grows its share on the World Wide Web.
WordPress website designs or themes by default are always stunning, but you can extend your website’s functionality to enhance user engagement as a website owner.
Before we move ahead with the tips for enhancing the user engagement of your website, it is essential to have a clear understanding of your primary business or industry while designing a website.
What’s Your Website Niche?
Whether eCommerce, professional service, or personal niche, developing a beautiful website is achieved through WordPress. So, before applying the tips and tricks for designing a stunning website, always keep in mind your website niche.
For example, if your purpose of designing a website is to run an eCommerce store, your website design, theme, plugins, and space should be accordingly. At the same time, a personal website will require less storage and plugin extensions.
Hence, your custom WordPress website design should be according to the niche or type of your website. If you have clarity on this point, you can do wonders with your website further.
How Would You Enhance Your Website Engagement?
For enhancing website engagement, it is a must to have an eye-catching website. And for designing eye-catching websites, you require an excellent WordPress Development Team. The team with the best designers, developers, content marketers, and QA will help you build a perfect WordPress website for your eCommerce or professional niche.
WordPress Tips to Create Eye-Catching Websites
As we know that WordPress has some fantastic ways to extend the functionality of your website, so here we discuss the WordPress website development tips for creating eye-catching websites.
1. Make It Appealing, Don’t Stuff It
WordPress websites can be more appealing or attractive if you follow the below-mentioned tips while designing the UI.
Firstly, your WordPress website must be designed keeping in mind the customer’s convenience. It should have all the essential elements, including the design, content, images, videos, CTA, customer support, service or product details, etc.
The website must not be stuffed with more content or images. It distracts or confuses the visitor in the first place. Nevertheless, it should have an elegant theme that has legible fonts for helping the customer read important details or notes.
For example, revolving sliders or carousel sliders with essential information on the business products or services can help engage customers 3X times than a website without a slider.
2. Use Plugins for Extendibility
WordPress plugins are famous for increasing the versatility of WordPress websites. If you follow our WordPress tips for having eye-catching websites, you must scroll through WordPress plugins available onboard.
WordPress Plugins help you enhance your website’s appearance through 3D sliders, carousel sliders, footer sliders, blog sliders, inbound tools, image and video galleries, and much more. Plugins are meant to increase user engagement on your website by adding more meaning to your website’s features.
3. Focus on Content
Content is the main pillar of your website. Imagine having a stunning website with dull or meaningless content!
It is the content that adds value to your existing website. Nevertheless, WordPress is the platform that helps you display content in the most versatile form. Be it image sliders, videos, or text sliders; content can be expressed beautifully using WordPress websites.
Hence, when you consult the WordPress website design company to enhance your website’s overall appearance, you must not overlook the content. Hire the best content writer to increase your website’s search engine visibility. Also, you can have SEO-optimized content to keep your visitors engaged.
4. Keep High Definition Images
Another essential factor for creating eye-catching websites is trusting only high-definition images. Images speak more than words. Imagine visiting a website with blurry or dull images to showcase on its homepage or service pages. You will definitely lose interest and prefer to check other websites to better present products or services.
Especially when you are running an eCommerce website, the product images play a vital role in the success of your online store. Hence, for designing a perfect eCommerce website, you have to upload and showcase better-quality product images and videos.
5. Don’t Compromise With Website Speed & Security
Website speed and security are two different elements. First, let me talk about the WordPress website speed. WordPress is considered the best platform for developing your upcoming website because it offers impressive loading speed. And if you doubt your website’s speed, then you must consult the WordPress Development Services at WP OnlineSupport.
WordPress websites are considered more secure for businesses. It has incredible inbuilt security to offer companies looking forward to designing their website using WordPress. Many times due to plugins and themes, the website speed and security become a big question. For the same, you need to consult a custom WordPress website development company that can help you manage speed and security without uninstalling the useful plugins.
Is sketching essential to UX and UI designers? Well, if you think of sketching as a way to explore problems and record potential solutions, then yes, it absolutely is.
One of the most challenging tasks of any design process is capturing the initial idea. We’ve all spent countless hours thinking through an innovative solution to a project, only to lose the idea again. It turns out that sketching is a brilliant solution to this problem.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to improve your UX designs using sketching as a tool. First, we’ll answer the question of how sketching benefits design, then we’ll look at the tools you need, and finally what an efficient sketching process looks like. By the end of this 3-minute read, you’ll have valuable new knowledge that will help you as a designer.
Why Sketching Is Important For Designers
When you start working on a project, it’s tempting to jump straight into high-resolution wireframes. But in doing so, you run the risk of spending hours on each little detail, only to discover that the overall concept doesn’t work.
Sketching — unlike drawing, which is about communicating an idea — is a free-flowing, process that allows you to get your ideas down on paper (yes, paper!) fast.
If there’s one thing you take away from this guide, let it be this: sketches aren’t for clients, or colleagues, or Dribbble, sketches are just for you. They’re a non-written way of rapidly making notes. Sketches will help you recall all the possible routes to consider.
Sketching is all about visualizing your ideas quickly and efficiently. When you’re sketching, you don’t have to worry about details, and you don’t have to worry about communicating with anyone else.
By sketching ideas without detail, you can quickly explore numerous solutions for a project. It’s fascinating how sketching can help you visualize an idea and revise it again and again along the way with minimal effort.
So, what revolutionary new tools do you need?
What Tools Do You Need For Sketching?
Designers love new tools, but when it comes to sketching there are relatively few, and you probably already have them to hand.
First, you’re going to need paper. A notebook is fine, it doesn’t have to be high-quality paper; in fact, you will probably feel freer and less restrained if you make sure that it is cheap.
You’ll need something to make a mark on the paper. A pencil is fine, as is a pen, a biro, and just about anything else. Don’t worry about an eraser, sketching isn’t about correcting mistakes, but you will need a sharpener if you’re using a pencil — never draw with a blunt pencil!
Whatever implement you choose, it’s a good idea to have a heavy marker, like a Sharpie, to pick out an important detail, and perhaps a fine pen to add small detail (if required).
Finally, make sure you have a timer to hand. A chess clock is perfect for an old-school aesthetic, but a timer on your phone is perfectly fine. The timer is to make sure you don’t spend too long on one sketch, so you don’t have time to get wrapped up in perfecting the details.
Sketching 101: A Step-by-Step Process
When you’ve been sketching for a while, you’ll discover your own process, and preferred methods. But for anyone new, here’s how to get started.
1. The Initial Idea
As with designing a wireframe, the most challenging step is getting started. Usually, at the beginning of a project, we are overwhelmed. This is because there are so many ideas, and we do not know where to start. For this reason, a detailed analysis of the project is essential.
You can start by thinking about the most important interactions you need to create. This way, you will find out the most important and exciting aspects of the project.
Since most of us get caught up in the fine details, it is beneficial to think of sketching as a brainstorming session. This session is simply about coming up with an innovative solution for a project and visualizing it.
It’s fine to have an idea that you’ll ultimately disregard. This is not the time to edit yourself.
2. Start Sketching
Take a piece of paper and use your sketching tool to divide it into six sections. Set your timer for 5 minutes and start drafting mockups for the first interaction.
Often, designers struggle with this step, and fall back on what they’re used to, i.e. wireframing and high-res mockups. If you find that you’re struggling to start sketching, start by making a mark on the paper; any mark at all. Then, make a second mark. With the third mark, try to position it in a way that says something to you about the project, by its size, weight, position — anything at all. Keep going, and before you know it you’ll have a complete sketch.
It’s vital that you do not exceed the time you give to yourself because sketching is not about fine details. The time is better spent exploring multiple ideas, even if those ideas only serve to confirm that the first idea was the most promising.
Repeating this step can be very valuable. Once you are happy with the results, you can move on to the next and final step.
3. Self-Editing
Unfortunately, you can not take away every concept you have outlined. This step is about choosing your most effective ideas and expanding on them.
Most designers want to create top-notch, detailed designs, and that’s fine. However, sketches are only really helpful for the early stages of a project, and creating perfect sketches in the first stages of a project may not be productive — in fact, it can be restrictive.
It’s often a good idea to combine some of your designs. Redraw them together, and once you’ve done that expand and refine them.
Improve Your Design With Sketching
It doesn’t matter if you think you’re bad at sketching — no one is going to see your sketches except you. Many of us would struggle to sing in public, but are absolutely fine singing in the shower.
Remember that sketching is not about your artistic skills; it’s about capturing an idea and expanding on it. After all, once you have your final design, you will recreate it digitally.
You don’t have to be an artist to be a designer. And since sketching can improve your UX designs, there are many reasons you should give it a try.
Once you’re comfortable with sketching, you’ll find it an invaluable tool for identifying sticking points in a project, and solving them before you reach the wireframe stage.
In the age of the internet, building a beautiful online store is not enough to convince customers to make a purchase.
It is necessary to understand how search engines can find your store because this helps the customers reach your online store easily.
So, the higher you rank in the search engines, the more traffic your store will have which ultimately paves the way to increased sales.
If you have a Shopify store, it must already be packed with many SEO-friendly features that help you rank better. Still, there is a lot more you can do to improve your ranking.
Read more to find out how you can optimize your Shopify store:
What is Shopify?
Shopify is the leading e-commerce platform that allows businesses to set up their online stores and sell products online.
It supports businesses of all shapes and sizes. Whether you sell in-store, on social media, online, or just any other place, Shopify has got you covered. Store owners can also take advantage of, dynamics Shopify integration which helps with automation and data management in real-time.
Here are some of the products and services that you can sell on Shopify:
Digital Products
Physical Products
Memberships
Services and Consultations
Ticketed Experiences
Rentals
Classes and Lessons
What is Shopify SEO?
Shopify SEO refers to search engine optimization, which is unique to Shopify more than any other platform. Although Shopify comes with multiple features, which are useful for SEO, it has some limitations too.
Optimizing the content for search engines can help your store appear on top of search results increasing customer engagement and interest.
Read on further to learn more about Shopify optimization.
How can you Optimize Shopify?
Whether you are an emerging seller or have an established business, Shopify can help you grow.
Tooptimize your Shopify store in 2021, you need to go through these six steps:
1. Optimize Shopify Shop Structure
The organization of the content on your page is essential to SEO success.
If customers can easily navigate your site to find what they are looking for, they are more likely to spend time on your site and view more content, which is crucial for increasing and maintaining search engine rankings.
To make a site easy to navigate, you do not need to add a lot of categories and subcategories. A more straightforward site structure makes it easy for customers to navigate sites and for search engines to rank your site. Below are the popular structures you can follow:
In addition to these pages, the availability of an About page and a Contact page shows customers and search engines that you are a trustworthy and credible business.
2. Improve User Experience
For improving the user experience, a few things are essential to consider, such as the site speed and responsive design.
If your site speed is good, visitors can easily navigate it and access everything on it quickly. It causes no frustration to them, so they tend to spend more time on your site.
You can use a mobile-friendly theme and smaller images. Using sliders and not removing unused apps is not advisable.
Using a responsive design for Shopify stores means your store will customize its interface according to the device without losing its visual appeal.
It is a great way to improve the user experience and keep visitors on your pages longer.
3. Search for the Right Target Keywords
The foundation of SEO success is keyword research, so any Shopify SEO guide is incomplete without tips for better keyword research.
To start well with keyword research, you do not need to use fancy tools, all you need is to create a list of a few topics that are closely related to your products and customer preferences.
For this, you must put yourself in the customers’ shoes to understand the terms and interests they may search for to find out the products you are selling.
4. Optimize Shopify Products Pages
At this point, you must have a logical site structure and a list of keywords. Next, you can optimize your site’s pages using those keywords.
Youcan start with the top pages first- like the homepage, product catalog, and top-selling products pages.
Even if you are starting a brand new store, it is still essential to optimize your homepage. For this, you can use keywords consistently on different pages and create original content for meta titles and the product descriptions.
It is important to optimize keywords for SEO by connecting them to the images on the site and tags that may be searched for while ensuring the use of formal language for the keywords rather than slang.
5. Build Backlinks to Your Store
Backlinks are essential for SEO because search engines use them to determine how most of the audience within the general populace views your site.
It is a strategy for off-page optimization to assist your establishment of credibility and trustworthiness.
To get links back to your store, read a few tips listed below:
As an authorized retailer looking to sell products made and supplied by an established company, you can email them to ask if they can link to your store.
Youcan reach out to influencers and industry leaders for interviews to generate links as well as promotional content.
You can hunt out broken links for services and products similar to the ones you offer, and then connect to the site’s owner displaying the broken link to have them link back to your store instead. In this way, they will repair a broken link, and you will get a backlink.
6. Improve Ranking with Content Marketing
Content is what brings people to your site. As an eCommerce store owner, you may consider product descriptions as enough content for your site or skimp on it.
Taking time to develop original content adds a lot to your overall better user experience.
You can make a list of anything your customers ask you or may want answers to. Since only providing product information is not enough, you should provide them with accurate answers.
Through content marketing, you can let your customers know more about you than what you are selling. It is also beneficial for your site’s SEO.
Conclusion:
For many years, a growing number of users have been using Shopify as a platform for their business. For those users, it is essential to learn what common tweaks they can make to optimize their Shopify store.
An optimized Shopify store will undoubtedly have more traffic and more sales.
Hence, it is advisable to make your store rank higher in the search engines by implementing all SEO guidelines designed to increase and maintain higher ranks for your stores within search engines.
In the age of the internet, building a beautiful online store is not enough to convince customers to make a purchase.
It is necessary to understand how search engines can find your store because this helps the customers reach your online store easily.
So, the higher you rank in the search engines, the more traffic your store will have which ultimately paves the way to increased sales.
If you have a Shopify store, it must already be packed with many SEO-friendly features that help you rank better. Still, there is a lot more you can do to improve your ranking.
Read more to find out how you can optimize your Shopify store:
What is Shopify?
Shopify is the leading e-commerce platform that allows businesses to set up their online stores and sell products online.
It supports businesses of all shapes and sizes. Whether you sell in-store, on social media, online, or just any other place, Shopify has got you covered. Store owners can also take advantage of, dynamics Shopify integration which helps with automation and data management in real-time.
Here are some of the products and services that you can sell on Shopify:
Digital Products
Physical Products
Memberships
Services and Consultations
Ticketed Experiences
Rentals
Classes and Lessons
What is Shopify SEO?
Shopify SEO refers to search engine optimization, which is unique to Shopify more than any other platform. Although Shopify comes with multiple features, which are useful for SEO, it has some limitations too.
Optimizing the content for search engines can help your store appear on top of search results increasing customer engagement and interest.
Read on further to learn more about Shopify optimization.
How can you Optimize Shopify?
Whether you are an emerging seller or have an established business, Shopify can help you grow.
Tooptimize your Shopify store in 2021, you need to go through these six steps:
1. Optimize Shopify Shop Structure
The organization of the content on your page is essential to SEO success.
If customers can easily navigate your site to find what they are looking for, they are more likely to spend time on your site and view more content, which is crucial for increasing and maintaining search engine rankings.
To make a site easy to navigate, you do not need to add a lot of categories and subcategories. A more straightforward site structure makes it easy for customers to navigate sites and for search engines to rank your site. Below are the popular structures you can follow:
In addition to these pages, the availability of an About page and a Contact page shows customers and search engines that you are a trustworthy and credible business.
2. Improve User Experience
For improving the user experience, a few things are essential to consider, such as the site speed and responsive design.
If your site speed is good, visitors can easily navigate it and access everything on it quickly. It causes no frustration to them, so they tend to spend more time on your site.
You can use a mobile-friendly theme and smaller images. Using sliders and not removing unused apps is not advisable.
Using a responsive design for Shopify stores means your store will customize its interface according to the device without losing its visual appeal.
It is a great way to improve the user experience and keep visitors on your pages longer.
3. Search for the Right Target Keywords
The foundation of SEO success is keyword research, so any Shopify SEO guide is incomplete without tips for better keyword research.
To start well with keyword research, you do not need to use fancy tools, all you need is to create a list of a few topics that are closely related to your products and customer preferences.
For this, you must put yourself in the customers’ shoes to understand the terms and interests they may search for to find out the products you are selling.
4. Optimize Shopify Products Pages
At this point, you must have a logical site structure and a list of keywords. Next, you can optimize your site’s pages using those keywords.
Youcan start with the top pages first- like the homepage, product catalog, and top-selling products pages.
Even if you are starting a brand new store, it is still essential to optimize your homepage. For this, you can use keywords consistently on different pages and create original content for meta titles and the product descriptions.
It is important to optimize keywords for SEO by connecting them to the images on the site and tags that may be searched for while ensuring the use of formal language for the keywords rather than slang.
5. Build Backlinks to Your Store
Backlinks are essential for SEO because search engines use them to determine how most of the audience within the general populace views your site.
It is a strategy for off-page optimization to assist your establishment of credibility and trustworthiness.
To get links back to your store, read a few tips listed below:
As an authorized retailer looking to sell products made and supplied by an established company, you can email them to ask if they can link to your store.
Youcan reach out to influencers and industry leaders for interviews to generate links as well as promotional content.
You can hunt out broken links for services and products similar to the ones you offer, and then connect to the site’s owner displaying the broken link to have them link back to your store instead. In this way, they will repair a broken link, and you will get a backlink.
6. Improve Ranking with Content Marketing
Content is what brings people to your site. As an eCommerce store owner, you may consider product descriptions as enough content for your site or skimp on it.
Taking time to develop original content adds a lot to your overall better user experience.
You can make a list of anything your customers ask you or may want answers to. Since only providing product information is not enough, you should provide them with accurate answers.
Through content marketing, you can let your customers know more about you than what you are selling. It is also beneficial for your site’s SEO.
Conclusion:
For many years, a growing number of users have been using Shopify as a platform for their business. For those users, it is essential to learn what common tweaks they can make to optimize their Shopify store.
An optimized Shopify store will undoubtedly have more traffic and more sales.
Hence, it is advisable to make your store rank higher in the search engines by implementing all SEO guidelines designed to increase and maintain higher ranks for your stores within search engines.
Still, most Microsoft executives knew that competing on features would never be enough. In December of 1996, senior VP James Allchin emailed his boss, Paul Maritz. He laid out the current strategy, an endless chase after Netscape’s feature set. “I don’t understand how IE is going to win,”
In June of 1995, representatives from Microsoft arrived at the Netscape offices. The stated goal was to find ways to work together—Netscape as the single dominant force in the browser market and Microsoft as a tech giant just beginning to consider the implications of the Internet. Both groups, however, were suspicious of ulterior motives.
Marc Andreessen was there. He was already something of a web celebrity. Newly appointed Netscape CEO James Barksdale also came. On the Microsoft side was a contingent of product managers and engineers hoping to push Microsoft into the Internet market.
The meeting began friendly enough, as the delegation from Microsoft shared what they were working on in the latest version of their operating system, Windows 95. Then, things began to sour.
According to accounts from Netscape, “Microsoft offered to make an investment in Netscape and give Netscape’s software developers crucial technical information about the Windows operating system if Netscape would agree not to make a browser for [the] Windows 95 operating system.” If that was to be believed, Microsoft would have tiptoed over the line of what is legal. The company would be threatening to use its monopoly to squash competition.
Andreessen, no stranger to dramatic flair, would later dress the meeting up with a nod to The Godfatherin his deposition to the Department of Justice: “I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed the next day.”
Microsoft claimed the meeting was a “setup,” initiated by Netscape to bait them into a comprising situation they could turn to their advantage later.
There are a few different places to mark the beginning of the browser wars. The release of Internet Explorer 1, for instance (late summer, 1995). Or the day Andreessen called out Microsoft as nothing but a “poorly debugged set of device drivers” (early 1995). But June 21, 1995—when Microsoft and Netscape came to a meeting as conceivable friends and left as bitter foes—may be the most definitive.
Andreessen called it “free, but not free.”
Here’s how it worked. When the Netscape browser was released it came with fee of $39 per copy. That was officially speaking. But fully function Netscape beta versions were free to download for their website. And universities and non-profits could easily get zero-cost licenses.
For the upstarts of the web revolution and open source tradition, Netscape was free enough. For the buttoned-up corporations buying in bulk with specific contractual needs, they could license the software for a reasonable fee. Free, but not free. “It looks free optically, but it is not,” a Netscape employee would later describe it. “Corporations have to pay for it. Maintenance has to be paid.”
“It’s basically a Microsoft lesson, right?” was how Andreessen framed it. “If you get ubiquity, you have a lot of options, a lot of ways to benefit from that.” If people didn’t have a way to get quick and easy access to Netscape, it would never spread. It was a lesson Andreessen had learned behind his computer terminal at the NCSA research lab at the University of Illinois. Just a year prior, he and his friends built the wildly successful, cross-platform Mosaic browser.
Andreessen worked on Mosaic for several years in the early ’90’s. But he began to feel cramped by increasing demands from higher-ups at NCSA hoping to capitalize on the browser’s success. At the end of 1993, Andreessen headed west, to stake his claim in Silicon Valley. That’s where he met James Clark.
Clark had just cut ties with Silicon Graphics, the company he created. A legend in the Bay Area, Clark was well known in the valley. When he saw the web for the first time, someone suggested he meet with Andreessen. So he did. The two hit it off immediately.
Clark—with his newly retired time and fortune—brought an inner circle of tech visionaries together for regular meetings. “For the invitees, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity to talk about ideas, technologies, strategies,” one account would later put it. “For Clark, it was the first step toward building a team of talented like-minded people who populate his new company.” Andreessen, still very much the emphatic and relentless advocate of the web, increasingly moved to the center of this circle.
The duo considered several ideas. None stuck. But they kept coming back to one. Building the world’s first commercial browser.
And so, on a snowy day in mid-April 1994, Andreessen and Clark took a flight out to Illinois. They were there with a single goal: Hire the members of the original Mosaic team still working at the NCSA lab for their new company. They went straight to the lobby of a hotel just outside the university. One by one, Clark met with five of the people who had helped create Mosaic (plus Lou Montulli, creator of Lynx and a student at University of Kansas) and offered them a job.
Right in a hotel room, Clark printed out contracts with lucrative salaries and stock options. Then he told them the mission of his new company. “Its mandate—Beat Mosaic!—was clear,” one employee recalled. By the time Andreessen and Clark flew back to California the next day, they’d have the six new employees of the soon-to-be-named Netscape.
Within six months they would release their first browser—Netscape Navigator. Six months after that, the easy-to-use, easy-to-install browser, would overrun the market and bring millions of users online for the first time.
Clark, speaking to the chaotic energy of the browser team and the speed at which they built software that changed the world, would later say Netscape gave “anarchy credibility.” Writer John Cassidy puts that into context. “Anarchy in the post-Netscape sense meant that a group of college kids could meet up with a rich eccentric, raise some money from a venture capitalist, and build a billion-dollar company in eighteen months,” adding, “Anarchy was capitalism as personal liberation.”
Inside of Microsoft were a few restless souls.
The Internet, and the web, was passing the tech giant by. Windows was the most popular operating system in the world—a virtual monopoly. But that didn’t mean they weren’t vulnerable.
As early as 1993, three employees at Microsoft—Steven Sinofsky, J. Allard, and Benjamin Slivka—began to sound the alarms. Their uphill battle to make Microsoft realize the promise of the Internet is documented in the “Inside Microsoft” profile penned by Kathy Rebell, which published in Bloomberg in 1996. “I dragged people into my office kicking and screaming,” Sinofsky told Rebello, “I got people excited about this stuff.”
Some employees believed Microsoft was distracted by a need to control the network. Investment poured into a proprietary network, like CompuServe or Prodigy, called the Microsoft Network (or MSN). Microsoft wanted to control the entire networked experience. But MSN would ultimately be a huge failure.
Slivka and Allard believed Microsoft was better positioned to build with the Internet rather than compete against it. “Microsoft needs to ensure that we ride the success of the Web, instead of getting drowned by it,” wrote Slivka in some of his internal communication.
Allard went a step further, drafting an internal memo named “Windows: The Next Killer Application for the Internet.” Allard’s approach, laid out in the document, would soon be the cornerstone of Microsoft’s Internet strategy. It consisted of three parts. First, embrace the open standards of the web. Second, extend its technology to the Microsoft ecosystem. Finally (and often forgotten), innovate and improve web technologies.
After a failed bid to acquire BookLink’s InternetWorks browser in 1994—AOL swooped in and outbid them—Microsoft finally got serious about the web. And their meeting with Netscape didn’t yield any results. Instead, they negotiated a deal with NCSA’s commercial partner Spyglass to license Mosaic for the first Microsoft browser.
In August of 1995, Microsoft released Internet Explorer version 1.0. It wasn’t very original, based on code that Spyglass had licensed to dozens of other partners. Shipped as part of an Internet Jumpstart add-on, the browser was bare-bones, clunkier and harder to use than what Netscape offered.
On December 7th, Bill Gates hosted a large press conference on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. He opened with news about the Microsoft Network, the star of the show. But he also demoed Internet Explorer, borrowing language directly from Allard’s proposal. “So the Internet, the competition will be kind of, once again, embrace and extend,” Gates announced, “And we will embrace all the popular Internet protocols… We will do some extensions to those things.”
Microsoft had entered the market.
Like many of her peers, Rosanne Siino began learning the world of personal computing on her own. After studying English in college—with an eye towards journalism—Siino found herself at a PR firm with clients like Dell and Seagate. Siino was naturally curious and resourceful, and read trade magazines and talked to engineers to learn what she could about personal computing in the information age.
She developed a special talent for taking the language and stories of engineers and translating them into bold visions of the future. Friendly, and always engaging, Siino built up a Rolodex of trade publication and general media contacts along the way.
After landing a job at Silicon Graphics, Siino worked closely with James Clark (he would later remark she was “one of the best PR managers at SGI”). She identified with Clark’s restlessness when he made plans to leave the company—an exit she helped coordinate—and decided if the opportunity came to join his new venture, she’d jump ship.
A few months later, she did. Siino was employee number 19 at Netscape; its first public relations hire.
When Siino arrived at the brand new Netscape offices in Mountain View, the first thing she did was sit down and talk to each one of the engineers. She wanted to hear—straight from the source—what the vision of Netscape was. She heard a few things. Netscape was building a “killer application,” one that would make other browsers irrelevant. They had code that was better, faster, and easier to use than anything out there.
Siino knew she couldn’t sell good code. But a young and hard working group of fresh-out-of-college transplants from rural America making a run at entrenched Silicon Valley; that was something she could sell. “We had this twenty-two-year-old kid who was pretty damn interesting and I thought, ‘There’s a story right there,’” she later said in an interview for the book Architects of the Web, “‘And we had this crew of kids who had come out from Illinois and I thought, ‘There’s a story there too.’”
Inside of Netscape, some executives and members of the board had been talking about an IPO. With Microsoft hot on their heels, and competitor Spyglass launching a successful IPO of their own, timing was critical. “Before very long, Microsoft was sure to attack the Web browser market in a more serious manner,” writer John Cassidy explains, “If Netscape was going to issue stock, it made sense to do so while the competition was sparse.” Not to mention, a big, flashy IPO was just what the company needed to make headlines all around the country.
In the months leading up to the IPO, Siino crafted a calculated image of Andreeseen for the press. She positioned him as a leader of the software generation, an answer to the now-stodgy, Silicon-driven hardware generation of the 60’s and 70’s. In interviews and profiles, Siino made sure Andreeseen came off as a whip-smart visionary ready to tear down the old ways of doing things; the “new Bill Gates.”
That required a fair bit of cooperation from Andreeseen. “My other real challenge was to build up Marc as a persona,” she would later say. Sometimes, Andreessen would complain about the interviews, “but I’d be like, ‘Look, we really need to do this.’ And he’s savvy in that way. He caught on.’” Soon, it was almost natural, and as Andreeseen traveled around with CEO James Barksdale to talk to potential investors ahead of their IPO, Netscape hype continued to inflate.
August 9, 1995, was the day of the Netscape IPO. Employees buzzed around the Mountain View offices, too nervous to watch the financial news beaming from their screens or the TV. “It was like saying don’t notice the pink elephant dancing in your living room,” [Siino said later]. They shouldn’t have worried. In its first day of trading, the Netscape stock price rose 108%. It was best opening day for a stock on Wall Street. Some of the founding employees went to bed that night millionaires.
Not long after, Netscape released version 2 of their browser. It was their most ambitious release to date. Bundled in the software were tools for checking email, talking with friends, and writing documents. It was sleek and fast. The Netscape homepage that booted up each time the software started sported all sorts of nifty and well-known web adventures.
Not to mention JavaScript. Netscape 2 was the first version to ship with Java applets, small applications run directly in the browser. With Java, Netscape aimed to compete directly with Microsoft and their operating system.
To accompany the release, Netscape recruited young programmer Brendan Eich to work on a scripting language that riffed on Java. The result was JavaScript. Ecih created the first version in 10 days as a way for developers to make pages more interactive and dynamic. It was primitive, but easy to grasp, and powerful. Since then, it has become one of the most popular programming languages in the world.
Microsoft wasn’t far behind. But Netscape felt confident. They had pulled off the most ambitious product the web had ever seen. “In a fight between a bear and an alligator, what determines the victor is the terrain,” Andreessen said in an interview from the early days of Netscape. “What Microsoft just did was move into our terrain”
There’s an old adage at Microsoft, that it never gets something right until version 3.0. It was true even of their flagship product, Windows, and has notoriously been true of its most famous applications.
The first version of Internet Explorer was a rushed port of the Mosaic code that acted as little more than a a public statement that Microsoft was going into the browser business. The second version, released just after Netscape’s IPO in late 1995, saw rapid iteration, but lagged far behind. With Internet Explorer 3, Microsoft began to get the browser right.
Microsoft’s big, showy press conference hyped Internet Explorer as a true market challenger. Behind the scenes, it operated more like a skunkworks experiment. Six people were on the original product team. In a company of tens of thousands. “A bit like the original Mac team, the IE team felt like the vanguard of Microsoft,” one-time Internet Explorer lead Brad Silverberg would later say, “the vanguard of the industry, fighting for its life.”
That changed quickly. Once Microsoft recognized the potential of the web, they shifted their weight to it. In Speeding the Net, a comprehensive account of the rise of Netscape and its fall at the hands of Microsoft, authors Josh Quittner and Michelle Slatall, describe the Microsoft strategy. “In a way, the quality of it didn’t really matter. If the first generation flopped, Gates could assign a team of his best and brightest programmers to write an improved model. If that one failed too, he could hire even better programmers and try again. And again. And again. He had nearly unlimited resources.”
By version 3, the Internet Explorer team had a hundred people on it (including Chris Wilson of the original NCSA Mosaic team). That number would reach the thousands in a few short years. The software rapidly closed the gap. Internet Explorer introduced features that had given Netscape an edge—and even introduced their own HTML extensions, dynamic animation tools for developers, and rudimentary support of CSS.
In the summer of 1996, Walt Mossberg talked up Microsoft’s browsers. Only months prior he had labeled Netscape Navigator the “clear victor.” But he was beginning to change his mind. “I give the edge, however, to Internet Explorer 3.0,” he wrote upon Microsoft’s version 3. “It’s a better browser than Navigator 3.0 because it is easier to use and has a cleaner, more flexible user interface.”
Still, most Microsoft executives knew that competing on features would never be enough. In December of 1996, senior VP James Allchin emailed his boss, Paul Maritz. He laid out the current strategy, an endless chase after Netscape’s feature set. “I don’t understand how IE is going to win,” Allchin conceded, “My conclusion is that we must leverage Windows more.” In the same email, he added, “We should think first about an integrated solution — that is our strength.” Microsoft was not about to simply lie down and allow themselves to be beaten. They focused on two things: integration with Windows and wider distribution.
When it was released, Internet Explorer 4 was more tightly integrated with the operating system than any previous version; an almost inseparable part of the Windows package. It could be used to browse files and folders. Its “push” technology let you stream the web, even when you weren’t actively using the software. It used internal APIs that were unavailable to outside developers to make the browser faster, smoother, and readily available.
And then there was distribution. Days after Netscape and AOL shook on a deal to include their browser on the AOL platform, AOL abruptly changed their mind and when with Internet Explorer instead. It would later be revealed that Microsoft had made them, as one writer put it (extending The Godfather metaphor once more), an “offer they couldn’t refuse.” Microsoft had dropped their prices down to the floor and—more importantly—promised AOL precious real estate pre-loaded on the desktop of every copy of the next Windows release.
Microsoft fired their second salvo with Compaq. Up to that point, all Compaq computers had shipped with Netscape pre-installed on Windows. When Windows threatened to suspend their license to use Windows at all (which was revealed later in court documents), that changed to Internet Explorer too.
By the time Windows ’98 was released, Internet Explorer 4 came already installed, free for every user, and impossible to remove.
“Mozilla!” interjected Jamie Zawinski. He was in a meeting at the time, which now rang in deafening silence for just a moment. Heads turned. Then, they kept going.
This was early days at Netscape. A few employees from engineering and marketing huddled together to try to come up with a name for the thing. One employee suggested they were going to crush Mosaic, like a bug. Zawinski—with a dry, biting humor he was well known for—thought Mozilla, “as in Mosaic meets Godzilla.”
Eventually, marketer Greg Sands settled on Netscape. But around the office, the browser was, from then on, nicknamed Mozilla. Early marketing materials on the web even featured a Mozilla inspired mascot, a green lizard with a know-it-all smirk, before they shelved it for something more professional.
It would be years before the name would come back in any public way; and Zawinski would have a hand in that too.
Zawinski had been with Netscape since almost the beginning. He was employee number 20, brought in right after Rosanne Siino, to replace the work that Andreessen had done at NCSA working on the flagship version of Netscape for X-Windows. By the time he joined, he already had something of a reputation for solving complex technical challenges.
Zawinski’s earliest memories of programming date back to eighth grade. In high school, he was a terrible student. But he still managed to get a job after school as a programmer, working on the one thing that managed to keep him interested: code. After that, he started work for the startup Lucid, Inc., which boasted a strong pedigree of programming legends at its helm. Zawinski worked on the Common Lisp programming language and the popular IDE Emacs; technologies revered in the still small programming community. By virtue of his work on the projects, Zawinski had instant credibility among the tech elite.
At Netscape, the engineering team was central to the way things worked. It was why Siino had chosen to meet with members of that team as soon as she began, and why she crafted the story of Netscape around the way they operated. The result was a high-pressure, high-intensity atmosphere so indispensable company that it would become party of the companies mythology. They moved so quickly that many began to call such a rapid pace of development “Netscape Time.”
“It was really a great environment. I really enjoyed it,” Zawinski would later recall. “Because everyone was so sure they were right, we fought constantly but it allowed us to communicate fast.” But tempers did flare (one article details a time when he threw a chair against the wall and left abruptly for two weeks after his computer crashed), and many engineers would later reflect on the toxic workplace. Zawinski once put it simply: “It wasn’t healthy.”
Still, engineers had a lot of sway at the organization. Many of them, Zawinski included, were advocates of free software. “I guess you can say I’ve been doing free software since I’ve been doing software,” he would later say in an interview. For Zawinski, software was meant to be free. From his earliest days on the Netscape project, he advocated for a more free version of the browser. He and others on the engineering team were at least partly responsible for the creative licensing that went into the company’s “free, but not free” business model.
In 1997, technical manager Frank Hecker breathed new life into the free software paradigm. He wrote a 30-page whitepaper proposing what several engineers had wanted for years—to release the entire source of the browser for free. “The key point I tried to make in the document,” Hecker asserted, “was that in order to compete effectively Netscape needed more people and companies working with Netscape and invested in Netscape’s success.”
With the help of CTO Eric Hahn, Hecker and Zawinski made their case all the way to the top. By the time they got in the room with James Barksdale, most of the company had already come around to the idea. Much to everyone’s surprise, Barksdale agreed.
On January 23, 1998, Netscape made two announcements. The first everyone expected. Netscape had been struggling to compete with Microsoft for nearly a year. The most recent release of Internet Explorer version 4, bundled directly into the Windows operating system for free, was capturing ever larger portions of their market share. So Netscape announced it would be giving its browser away for free too.
The next announcement came as a shock. Netscape was going open source. The browser’s entire source code—millions of lines of code—would be released to the public and open to contributions from anybody in the world. Led by Netscape veterans like Michael Toy, Tara Hernandez, Scott Collins, and Jamie Zawinski, the team would have three months to excise the code base and get it ready for public distribution. The effort had a name too: Mozilla.
On the surface, Netscape looked calm and poised to take on Microsoft with the force of the open source community at their wings. Inside the company, things looked much different. The three months that followed were filled with frenetic energy, close calls, and unparalleled pace. Recapturing the spirit of the earliest days of innovation at Netscape, engineers worked frantically to patch bugs and get the code ready to be released to the world. In the end, they did it, but only by the skin of their teeth.
In the process, the project spun out into an independent organization under the domain Mozilla.org. It was staffed entirely by Netscape engineers, but Mozilla was not technically a part of Netscape. When Mozilla held a launch party in April of 1998, just months after their public announcement, it didn’t just have Netscape members in attendance.
Zawinski had organized the party, and he insisted that a now growing community of people outside the company who had contributed to the project be a part of it. “We’re giving away the code. We’re sharing responsibility for development of our flagship product with the whole net, so we should invite them to the party as well,” he said, adding, “It’s a new world.”
On the day of his testimony in November of 1998, Steve McGeady sat, as one writer described, “motionless in the witness box.” He had been waiting for this moment for a long time; the moment when he could finally reveal, in his view, the nefarious and monopolist strain that coursed through Microsoft.
The Department of Justice had several key witnesses in their antitrust case against Microsoft, but McGeady was a linchpin. As Vice President at Intel, McGeady had regular dealings with Microsoft; and his company stood outside of the Netscape and Microsoft conflict. There was an extra layer of tension to his particular testimony though. “The drama was heightened immeasurably by one stark reality,” noted in one journalist’s accounting of the trial, “nobody—literally, nobody—knew what McGeady was going to say.”
When he got his chance to speak, McGeady testified that high-ranking Microsoft executives had told him that their goal was to “cut off Netscape’s air supply.” Using their monopoly position in the operating system market, Microsoft threatened computer manufacturers—many of whom Intel had regular dealings—to ship their computers with Internet Explorer or face having their Windows licenses revoked entirely.
Drawing on the language Bill Gates used in his announcement of Internet Explorer, McGeady claimed that one executive had laid out their strategy: “embrace, extend and extinguish.” According to his allegations, Microsoft never intended to enter into a competition with Netscape. They were ready to use every aggressive tactic and walk the line of legality to crush them. It was a major turning point for the case and a massive win for the DOJ.
The case against Microsoft, however, had begun years earlier, when Netscape retained a team from the antitrust law firm Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in the summer of 1995. The legal team included outspoken anti-Microsoft crusader Gary Reback, as well as Susan Creighton. Reback would be the most public member of the firm in the coming half-decade, but it would be Creighton’s contributions that would ultimately turn the attention of the DOJ. Creighton began her career as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner. She quickly developed a reputation for precision and thoroughness. Her patterned, deliberate and methodical approach made her a perfect fit for a full and complete breakdown of Microsoft’s anti-competitive strategy.
Creighton’s work with Netscape led her to write a two-hundred and twenty-two page document detailing the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft. She laid out her case plain, and simply. “It is about a monopolist (Microsoft) that has maintained its monopoly (desktop operating systems) for more than ten years. That monopoly is threatened by the introduction of a new technology (Web software)…”
The document was originally planned as a book, but Netscape feared that if the public knew just how much danger they were in from Microsoft, their stock price would plummet. Instead, Creighton and Netscape handed it off the Department of Justice.
Inside the DOJ, it would trigger a renewed interest in ongoing antitrust investigations of Microsoft. Years of subpoenaing, information gathering, and lengthy depositions would follow. After almost three years, in May of 1998, the Department of Justice and 20 state attorneys filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft, a company which had only just then crossed over a 50% share of the browser market.
“No firm should be permitted to use its monopoly power to develop a chokehold on the browser software needed to access the Internet,” announced Janet Reno—the prosecuting attorney general under President Clinton—when charges were brought against Microsoft.
At the center of the trial was not necessarily the stranglehold Microsoft had on the software of personal computers—not technically an illegal practice. It was the way they used their monopoly to directly counter competition in other markets. For instance, the practice threatening to revoke licenses to manufacturers that packaged computers with Netscape. Netscape’s account of the June 1995 meeting factored in as well (when Andreessen was asked why he had taken such detailed notes on the meeting, he replied “I thought that it might be a topic of discussion at some point with the US government on antitrust issues.”)
Throughout the trial, both publicly and privately, Microsoft reacted to scrutiny poorly. They insisted that they were right; that they were doing what was best for the customers. In interviews and depositions, Bill Gates would often come off as curt and dismissive, unable or unwilling to yield to any cessation of power. The company insisted that the browser and operating system were co-existent, one could not live without the other—a fact handily refuted by the judge when he noted that he had managed to uninstall Internet Explorer from Windows in “less than 90 seconds.” The trial became a national sensation as tech enthusiasts and news junkies waited with bated breath for each new revelation.
In November of 1999, the presiding judge issued his ruling. Microsoft had, in fact, used its monopoly power and violated antitrust laws. That was followed in the summer of 2000 by a proposed remedy: Microsoft was to be broken up into two separate companies, one to handle its operating software, and the other its applications. “When Microsoft has to compete by innovating rather than reaching for its crutch of the monopoly, it will innovate more; it will have to innovate more. And the others will be free to innovate,” Iowa State Attorney General Tom Miller said after the judge’s ruling was announced.
That never happened. An appeal in 2002 resulted in a reversal of the ruling and the Department of Justice agreed to a lighter consent decree. By then, Internet Explorer’s market share stood at around 90%. The browser wars were, effectively, over.
“Are you looking for an alternative to Netscape and Microsoft Explorer? Do you like the idea of having an MDI user interface and being able to browse in multiple windows?… Is your browser slow? Try Opera.”
That short message announced Opera to the world for the first time in April of 1995, posted by the browser’s creators to a Usenet forum about Windows. The tone of the message—technically meticulous, a little pointed, yet genuinely idealistic—reflected the philosophy of Opera’s creators, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy. Opera, they claimed, was well-aligned with the ideology of the web.
Opera began as a project run out of the Norwegian telecommunications firm Telnor. Once it became stable, von Tetzchner and Ivarsøy rented space at Telnor to spin it out into an independent company. Not long after, they posted that announcement and released the first version of the Opera web browser.
The team at Opera was small, but focused and effective, loyal to the open web. “Browsers are in our blood,” Tetzchner would later say. Time and time again, the Opera team would prove that. They were staffed by the web’s true believers, and have often prided themselves on leading the development of web standards and an accessible web.
In the mid-to-late 90’s, Geir Ivarsøy was the first person to implement the CSS standard in any browser, in Opera 3.5. That would prove more than enough to convince the creator of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie, to join the company as CTO. Ian Hickson worked at Opera during the time he developed the CSS Acid Test at the W3C.
The company began developing a version of their browser for low-powered mobile devices in developing nations as early as 1998. They have often tried to push the entire web community towards web standards, leading when possible by example.
Years after the antitrust lawsuit of Microsoft, and resulting reversal in the appeal, Opera would find themselves embroiled in a conflict on a different front of the browser wars.
In 2007, Opera filed a complaint with the European Commission. Much like the case made by Creighton and Netscape, Opera alleged that Microsoft was abusing its monopoly position by bundling new versions of Internet Explorer with Windows 7. The EU had begun to look into allegations against Microsoft almost as soon as the Department of Justice, but the Opera complaint added a substantial and recent area of inquiry. Opera claimed that Microsoft was limiting user choice by making opaque additional browser options. “You could add more browsers, to give consumers a real choice between browsers, you put them in front of their eyeballs,” Lie said at the time of the complaint.
In Opera’s summary of their complaints they evoked in themselves the picture of a free and open web. Opera, they argued, were advocates of a web as the web was intended—accessible, universal, and egalitarian. Once again citing the language of “embrace, extend, and extinguish,” the company also called out Microsoft for trying to take control over the web standards process. “The complaint calls on Microsoft to adhere to its own public pronouncements to support these standards, instead of stifling them with its notorious ‘Embrace, Extend and Extinguish’ strategy,” it read.
In 2010, the European Commission issued a ruling, forcing Microsoft to show a so-called “ballot box” to European users of Windows—a website users could see the first time they accessed the Internet that listed twelve alternative browsers to download, including Opera and Mozilla. Microsoft included this website in their European Windows installs for five years, until their obligation lapsed.
Netscape Navigator 5 never shipped. It echoes, unreleased, in the halls of software’s most public and recognized vaporware.
After Netscape open-sourced their browser as part of the Mozilla project, the focus of the company split. Between being acquired by AOL and continuing pressure from Microsoft, Netscape was on its last legs. The public trial of Microsoft brought some respite, but too little, too late. “It’s one of the great ironies here,” Netscape lawyer Gary Reback would later say, “after years of effort to get the government to do something, by [1998] Netscape’s body is already in the morgue.” Meanwhile, management inside of Netscape couldn’t decide how best to integrate with the Mozilla team. Rather than work alongside the open-source project, they continued to maintain a version of Netscape separate and apart from the public project.
In October of 1998, Brendan Eich—who was part of the core Mozilla team—published a post to the Mozilla blog. “It’s time to stop banging our heads on the old layout and FE codebase,” he wrote. “We’ve pulled more useful miles out of those vehicles than anyone rightly expected. We now have a great new layout engine that can view hundreds of top websites.”
Many Mozilla contributors agreed with the sentiment, but the rewrite Eich proposed would spell the project’s initial downfall. While Mozilla tinkered away on a new rendering engine for the browser—which would soon be known as Gecko—Netscape scrapped its planned version 5.
Progress ground to a halt. Zawinski, one of the Mozilla team members opposed to the rewrite, would later describe his frustration when he resigned from Netscape in 1999. “It constituted an almost-total rewrite of the browser, throwing us back six to 10 months. Now we had to rewrite the entire user interface from scratch before anyone could even browse the Web, or add a bookmark.” Scott Collins, one of the original Netscape programmers, would put it less diplomatically: “You can’t put 50 pounds of crap in a ten pound bag, it took two years. And we didn’t get out a 5.0, and that cost us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever.”
The result was a world-class browser with great standards support and a fast-running browser engine. But it wasn’t ready until April of 2000, when Netscape 6 was finally released. By then, Microsoft had eclipsed Netscape, owning 80% of the browser market. It would never be enough to take back a significant portion of that browser share.
“I really think the browser wars are over,” said one IT exec after the release of Netscape 6. He was right. Netscape would sputter out for years. As for Mozilla, that would soon be reborn as something else entirely.
It doesn’t have any error handling or anything, but hey, it works:
Now imagine how some websites give you a URL to JavaScript in order to do stuff. CodePen does this for our Embedded Pens feature.
That URL is:
https://cpwebassets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js
I can proxy that URL just as easily:
Doing nothing special, it even serves up the right content-type header and everything:
Cloudflare Workers gives you a URL for them, which is decently nice, but you can also very easily “Add a Route” to a worker on your own website. So, here I’ll make a URL on CSS-Tricks to serve up that Worker. Lookie lookie, it does just what it says it’s going to do:
Right from css-tricks.com and it’ll load that JavaScript. It will look to the browser like first-party JavaScript, but it will really be proxied third-party JavaScript.
Why? Well nobody is going to block your first-party JavaScript. If you were a bit slimy, you could run all your scripts for ads this way to avoid ad blockers. I have mixed feelings there. I feel like if you wanna block ads you should be able to block ads without having to track down specific scripts on specific sites to do that. On the other hand, proxying some third-party resources sometimes seems kinda fine? Like if it’s your own site and you’re just trying to get around some CORS issue… that would be fine.
More in the middle is something like analytics. I recently blogged “Comparing Google Analytics and Plausible Numbers” where I discussed Plausible, a third-party analytics service that “is built for privacy-conscious site owners.” So, ya know, theoretically trustable and not third-party JavaScript that is terribly worrisome. But still, it doesn’t do anything to really help site visitors and is in the broad category of analytics, so I could see it making its way onto blocklists, thus giving you less accurate information over time as more and more people block it.
But as we talked about, very few people are going to block first-party JavaScript, so proxying would theoretically deliver more accurate information. In fact, they have docs for proxying. It’s slightly more involved, and it’s over my head as to exactly why, but hey, it works.
I’ve done this proxying as a test. So now I have data from just using the third-party JavaScript directly (from the last article):
Metric
Plausible (No Proxy)
Google Analytics
Unique Visitors
973k
841k
Pageviews
1.4m
1.5m
Bounce Rate
82%
82%
Visit Duration
1m 31s
1m 24s
Data from one week of non-proxied third-party JavaScript integration
And can compare it to an identical-in-length time period using the proxy:
Metric
Plausible (Proxy)
Google Analytics
Unique Visitors
1.32m
895k
Pageviews
2.03m
1.7m
Bounce Rate
81%
82%
Visit Duration
1m 35s
1m 24s
Data from one week of proxied third-party JavaScript integration
So the proxy really does highly suggest that doing it that way is far less “blocked” than even out-of-the-box Plausible is. The week tested was 6%¹ busier according to the unchanged Google Analytics. I would have expected to see 15.7% more Unique Visitors that week based on what happened with the non-proxied setup (meaning 1.16m), but instead I saw 1.32m, so the proxy demonstrates a solid 13.8% increase in seeing unique visitors versus a non-proxy setup. And comparing the proxied Plausible setup to Google Analytics directly shows a pretty staggering 32% more unique visitors.
With the non-proxied setup, I actually saw a decrease in pageviews (-6.6%) on Plausible compared to Google Analytics, but with the proxied setup I’m seeing 19.4% more pageviews. So the numbers are pretty wishy-washy but, for this website, suggest something in the ballpark of 20-30% of users blocking Google Analytics.
I always find it so confusing to figure out the percentage increase between two numbers. The trick that ultimately works for my brain is (final - initial) / final * 100.
I keep bookmarking Adam’s GUI Challenges posts/videos and, before I even have a chance to review and link them up, another one is already published! Fortunately, the homepage for them on web.dev is a nice roundup.
For example, a recent one is the split-button component (article / video / demo). It’s one thing to have a design spec, code it up so it works and looks right, and call it a day. But, dare I say that real front-end development is thinking deeper than that. In just this one component Adam looks at:
How the colors are set up and applied. The colors have a subtlety that makes them feel nice together. For example, the darkest colors are very dark versions of the base colors, but not black. It uses Custom Properties to set up a sort of menu of color combinations—but is, most importantly, set up for theming success as well.
The menu uses shadows to impart an appropriate amount of depth. Because multiple themes are supported, the shadows don’t do anything embarrassing like, reverse themselves, i.e. light shadows on dark backgrounds that look silly, or dark-on-dark shadows.
The use of SVG strokes (efficient! flexible!) which unlock CSS design options, like rounding the end caps.
Clicks (active and hover states) should increase contrast.
Everything is tested for keyboard usage. The menus open when tabbed to, and arrow keys move the focus within the menu which is accentuated by visual changes. A screen reader (VoiceOver, in this case) was also used to test things, for example using the ESC key to close the menu and remove focus is functional.
Reduced motion preferences are honored by not doing as much movement while the menu the opens and closes.
Visually, the only thing that opens and closes the menu is :focus-within in CSS. How simple! But aria attributes are still updated in JavaScript to properly express that.
That’s not everything, but that’s a lot, right? (The article has way more detail, including tools for inspecting what’s going on as it’s being built and small helper libraries that were used.) That’s what real front-end development is. Just “a button with a menu” has a ton of surface area to get right and dangerous implications for getting wrong.
If you like the idea of challenges, CodePen challenges you every week to build something along a prompt with ideas and resources. It’s fun because there are a bunch of people doing it with you, allowing you to see how others approached the same idea differently.
I keep bookmarking Adam’s GUI Challenges posts/videos and, before I even have a chance to review and link them up, another one is already published! Fortunately, the homepage for them on web.dev is a nice roundup.
For example, a recent one is the split-button component (article / video / demo). It’s one thing to have a design spec, code it up so it works and looks right, and call it a day. But, dare I say that real front-end development is thinking deeper than that. In just this one component Adam looks at:
How the colors are set up and applied. The colors have a subtlety that makes them feel nice together. For example, the darkest colors are very dark versions of the base colors, but not black. It uses Custom Properties to set up a sort of menu of color combinations—but is, most importantly, set up for theming success as well.
The menu uses shadows to impart an appropriate amount of depth. Because multiple themes are supported, the shadows don’t do anything embarrassing like, reverse themselves, i.e. light shadows on dark backgrounds that look silly, or dark-on-dark shadows.
The use of SVG strokes (efficient! flexible!) which unlock CSS design options, like rounding the end caps.
Clicks (active and hover states) should increase contrast.
Everything is tested for keyboard usage. The menus open when tabbed to, and arrow keys move the focus within the menu which is accentuated by visual changes. A screen reader (VoiceOver, in this case) was also used to test things, for example using the ESC key to close the menu and remove focus is functional.
Reduced motion preferences are honored by not doing as much movement while the menu the opens and closes.
Visually, the only thing that opens and closes the menu is :focus-within in CSS. How simple! But aria attributes are still updated in JavaScript to properly express that.
That’s not everything, but that’s a lot, right? (The article has way more detail, including tools for inspecting what’s going on as it’s being built and small helper libraries that were used.) That’s what real front-end development is. Just “a button with a menu” has a ton of surface area to get right and dangerous implications for getting wrong.
If you like the idea of challenges, CodePen challenges you every week to build something along a prompt with ideas and resources. It’s fun because there are a bunch of people doing it with you, allowing you to see how others approached the same idea differently.