Good Basic Web Design

Recently, I had a client contact me and asked about designing a website for him.  He wanted all the newest technology, a fully “Flash” site, all the bells and whistles.

My advice was don’t do it.  He was appalled by that answer and demanded to know why I was advising against it.  Because, I said, unless you want to pay an exorbitant amount for your design and then about 3 times that much for SEO and pay-per-click, there is no reason to design a site like that.  The average user doesn’t care about bells and whistles.  They want a site they can use easily.

Still he was not convinced.  Why would I have pay so much for SEO or pay-per click advertising, he asked.  A Flash site would look fantastic, surely people will come?

“Build it and they will come” may work in the movies, but not on the internet.  Search engine performance is the life blood of any website.  A Flash site does not allow the designer to add metatags, keywords or text.  Without words (actually typed into HTML) on a site, there is nothing there for search engines to “spider” and therefore nothing for them to index or search.  Your beautiful, very expensive website is pretty much useless for SEO, unless you manage to find someone very creative who has found ways around this dilemma and, of course, you would pay big bucks for that.  This also explains a large budget pay-per-click campaign to replace lost traffic by search engines.

He was still not convinced and found another designer who, of course, was willing to take the cash offered.  He contacted me when the site went online, and he asked me to look at it.

It was a truly beautiful site, done all in Flash, just as he had wanted.  However, on the home page, there was a huge white space at the bottom of the site.  Suspecting that the designer or a SEO company had “hidden” text in this white space, I ran my mouse over the area, and sure enough hidden text.  Hidden text is text placed on page that is the exact same color as the background. ( Example: white text on a white background. )

We were talking while I was looking at the site, and he asked what I thought.  I told him it was indeed a beautiful looking site.  I asked who did the SEO work on the site.  My designer, he replied.  Did your designer tell you that search engines ban sites that use hidden text?  What is hidden text, he asked.  I explained.  You mean that search engines will refuse to list my site!?  My answer was yes.

What can I do to fix it? He asked.  I replied that the text has to be a different color than the background.  But then people will see it and it will ruin my beautiful site!  I said, yeah, pretty much.

He was very upset and planned to call his wonderful designer, who was more than willing to take his money and design his basically worthless website.

So people, be careful what you demand when speaking with your web designer.  Listen to our advice when given.  Fancy is nice, but it isn’t necessarily better.  Generally just more expensive.

Kathy Barto
KMB Designs
Email me
www.kmb-designs.com

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Effective Website Content- what it means …

By: Inderjeet Singh

“Visitors don’t come to see just flashy designs; informative content is the prerequisite of website.“

If you do agree with the above statement, then, let me ask you a question, ‘Why content is the king’?

Simply, content is what makes a website popular and the words written on your website may build or spoil your web business. When we all do know that a website sufficiently depends upon its content, then why not to write the most beneficial content for your website? Writing effective and as I previously said, ‘the most beneficial content’ is not tough; in fact, it’s a very easy task, if you do follow some basic rules. Before we go and discuss those basic rules, let me make you aware about one thing. As per the records of various internet research studies, a visitor stays on your webpage just for 5-8 seconds, if the content fails to attract that potential customer, just think how many clients you’ll lose per hour? Let’s now come to effective tips to write effective web content-

Avoid grammatical & spelling mistakes

Let’s have an example. Suppose, you’re dealing with fireworks and your website contains various graphics exploding fireworks, I mean layout of the website is perfect. Just see the title of your web page, its ‘Cheep Fireworks’ (just suppose it). What would be the reaction of the visitor; he/she will laugh at you and would immediately click the back button.
That’s how you lose your customers. Please please please, always be careful that your spellings and grammar is correct. Always use spell checker and do care about commas, colons and semi colons etc. Always write sensible and unique content. Don’t let people laugh at you!

Content should be concise, clear and easily readable

It’d be beneficial if you keep the content short and to the point. Content should be concise as people don’t like to read lot of text and they do prefer the well written content as compared to several pages of just written content.
Secondly, it should be clear, means no repetitions and no extra writing. Content written in paragraphs seems easy to read so instead of writing from the beginning to the end of the page, segregate the content in paragraphs. Paragraphs should be short containing just three or four sentences.

Take care of the interest of visitors

Why you’ve placed the content on your website? Obviously, for visitors! So always keep in mind what visitors do expect from you. They want information and your goal is to anticipate their requirements.
If you do have a website about TV shows, then, tell them everything including what TV is, when shows do air, which show is out of running, which celebrity may join the new episodes and everything like that. It makes people to believe on you and your website. Try to provide them the maximum amount of information on your website and visitor will never think to go to some other site.

Avoid using multiple question and exclamation marks

This is issue which should be treated very wisely. Normally, people do think that multiple no. of question or exclamatory marks increases the curiosity of the reader. But nay, its really not like that. It seems odd and overly dramatic and may make the reader antsy. So, always keep this unnecessary stuff to a minimum.

Editing is more necessary than writing

Edit the content. Again edit it and keep on editing until it becomes ‘the best’. If there’s any mistake in your online content, correct it before thousands of other people point it out. First of all, check the content yourself for consistency in grammar, punctuations and capitalization etc. Have your content proofread. Make sure, it doesn’t contain any error and only then put it on the website.

In a nut shell, web designing company needs content for two reasons. One is visitors, as I’ve already said, take care of the interest of your visitors and provide them what they do want. Second is Search Engines like google, yahoo, Alta vista etc. To have a stable as well as high ranking in search engine results, ‘Always write as per visitors’ expectations but also as per search engine optimization strategies’, that’s way to have online success.

About the Author
Inderjeet Singh is a flash developer and a expert author of web design usability and accessibility issues. Visit web designing company or web designing purposes and free templates world class easily customizable websites.

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Website Design: Pattern, Color and Style

By: Webmaster G

The stream of Web designing is really enormous and composite. At present web design industry is at peak and likely to reach at the new heights in near future. Thousands of websites are uploaded everyday with the unique designs and features. Web designing is an inventive and artistic technique of representing your identity, organization or any other group through the website. A good website design is the composite mixtures of the mind blowing graphics, fonts, and colors, layouts, flash and sound. The web site or the web design is created in such a way that it could communicates with the visitors and construct a good first-hand impression.

There are a number of important fundamentals of a good & satisfactory website designs that a designer or the one who is looking to have a website should know.

Color:

The color used in the web site has a great impact on the overall design and looks. The colors management in a web design significantly changes and influences the frame of mind of visitor. While selecting a color a designer should be aware of the color compatibility of the different colors used in the website with respect to different operating systems, browsers and screens resolutions. While creating a website the web designer should utilize colors cautiously and judiciously. Colors converse in their particular speech and inducing passion straight away. Colors enroll a deep impact and if your site comprises of the impressive and inspiring color scheme then your intention behind having a website is definitely fulfilled.

Content:

Apart from good designs your website should have placed the main links, content in a proper way. Like the text present there on the website should have divided into small paragraphs, it will increase the readability and makes your site of much worth.

Graphics:

The graphics or the images used in a website are very important as they increase the looks of the design in a positive sense and if you perfectly placed the graphics in a good manner then your website will be excellent. The sizes, colors of the graphics should be well-matched to the nature and type of the corporation for whom you are making site for. While using graphics in the site a good designer should pay attention to the following points.

1. The graphics used should be of small size and its better to have small images.
2. Huge images may lead to slow down web pages
3. The graphics should be robust with the content.

Font:

Fonts used in a web design at different places are also imperative in order to generate professional designs.

1. Change the font sizes wherever necessary, to differentiate the topics, headings etc.
2. It’s good to use standard font families like “Rockwood LT Standard”, think your font style in relation with the browser. How your fonts displays with other browsers.
3. You can use one or 2 font families to make the design look more professional.

Layout:

There are different layouts that a designer can use in a website like 2 column layout, 3 column layout etc. A good layout greatly impact overall looks of a web design. Here are some of the tips regarding the layout

1. Bond with the standard layouts
2. The images should be properly used with in layout, instead you use
3. Images around the text but the images are treated as a layout element.
4. Utilization of the proper whitespaces is important in a web layout.
5. Determines how well the content of the page is turned-out.

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Designing & SEO-Which is Important?

By: Sarwinder

In the success story of a website, both design and search engine optimization (SEO) play an important role as their Iwork is vital for a successful online presence. While SEO helps in driving traffic to your site, the designing part helps in grabbing the attention of the users. Even though both are essential for the success of a website, yet they employ very different techniques and ideas.

Designing Part Any experienced web designing company, whether based in the UK, the USA or Asia, would keep one objective in common while designing a web site and that is what is the purpose of the web site and who is it being made for. In keeping with Web 2.0 trends, a web site today needs to be designed keeping in view the user’s perspective. It is a user-driven economy on the web now and all web sites must conform to what users want. It is not enough to have a wonderfully appealing graphic design or some superb flash and animation work on the web site. The web site also needs to offer enough interesting inputs to the user through relevant information, interactive features, user-friendly web design and navigation structure.

SEO Part If the designer is responsible for making the website look appealing and be user-friendly, it is the job of the SEO experts to make its presence felt amongst its target audience. SEO helps in driving traffic to a website to increase its visibility. SEO does not only mean placing relevant keywords at the right place. It is an intricate and laborious process involving indexing of pages, directory submissions, link building, talking about the web site in relevant social forums and networking sites and so on.

Which one is more important?

The credit for overall popularity of a website can’t be given singularly to either designers or SEO experts. It is a joint venture and there must be a balance between the two. One cannot single-handedly establish the brand identity of an online business without the support of the other.

Suppose, the SEO experts have successfully driven traffic to your site, but what happens if the user doesn’t find the site up to the standard? Again, what’s the use of a good website design if its online presence is significantly low? The web designers must understand the basics of SEO and on the other hand an SEO expert must comprehend the importance of designing elements required for branding. It is essential for both to understand and meet the expectations of the web site’s target audience. Users want both search visibility and appealing design and this in turn helps the web site in establishing a strong online presence.

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Study About Good Design and Bad Web Design

By: usharani vairam

What distinguishes a good web design from a bad web design are the key elements like text, navigation, links, graphics and overall general design are critically important.

Text:

For a good web design, you must ensure that the background should not obfuscate the text. Visitors come to the site principally to read the text and therefore the fonts should be sufficiently large not to cause eye strain and at the same time not too big. The content must be cogently written and in a user-friendly manner.

Navigation:

For a good web design, make the navigation buttons easy to understand and comfortable to use. If you use frames, make sure they are not too pronounced. If your site is large, provide for an index or a site map. Complicated frames, too many frames and avoidable scroll bars in frames – all make it a bad web design.

Links:

For a good web design, the link colors should coordinate well with the color of the pages. It is even preferable that links are highlighted so they are easily identifiable to the visitor. A bad web design has large and sometimes unwanted graphic files that are time-consuming to load. They have over-sized graphics that do not fit on the standard screen 640×460 pixels.

Graphics:

For a good web design, make the buttons elegant and of the right size. Make sure that every graphic link has a matching text link and graphics and backgrounds use only browser-safe colors.

General Design:

For a good web design, pages must be easy and quick to download. Good use of graphic elements such as photos, subheads, pull quotes to be used to break up large areas of text. Every web page in the site must be homogeneous and appear like it belongs to the same site. In a bad web design, there will be lack of contrast in color and text and haphazard presentation of content. Besides, bad web design also means that pages that look perfect in one browser but not in another.

To firmly decide whether the web design is good or bad, we must understand how users interact with web-sites, how they think and what are the basic patterns of users’ behavior – for the users are the ultimate judges. Visitors generally glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or indicative of the thing they are looking for. Unfortunately, there are large parts of the page they do not bother to browse. Please remember that while scanning a web-page, users usually search for some predetermined matter or anchors which would guide them through the content of the page. If a page contains high-quality content, users may be willing to compromise even if the site has too many advertisements and the design not of good quality. The golden rule is content is more important than the design which supports it.

It is strange that there are still so many badly designed websites in use. With a lot of tips from professionals available for designing good websites, it appears the web designers refuse to learn their lessons. It is cruel to make a visitor with a slow dial up connection wait for several minutes to load your site. The visitors are serious-minded and do not wish to watch some flash effects or a cartoon or some fireworks display, just to see your products on your site. Web sites can really drive people mad when you make them scroll left and right to read each line. Knowing no visitor likes horizontal scrolling, it is not clear why so many sites have horizontal scrolling.

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