Web Design Development Articles

So, you want to make money designing websites. You’ve got the know how, you just need the business. So how do you get started? There are many options for designers that are just getting started. Following are a few options.

- Offer your services for free. With so many choices out there, it can be hard to break into the field and find new customers who are willing to hire you. One option is to offer your services for free. There is one catch - the website you design will contain an advertisement for your business. While there may be no cost to your client, not only will you get free advertising for the life of the website you design, you’ll have a reference and a site to add to your portfolio as well.

- Do freelance work. There are many freelance websites out there that focus on matching up providers of services with businesses who need those services performed. Find a site to bid on web design work and get to it! Keep in mind that as you start out you may be offering your services for less than you normally would. The goal at this point is simply to get experience and references. Once you’ve built up your customer base, you can easily and reasonably raise your prices.

These are just two options on how to make money designing websites. There are many more options out there, if you put your thinking cap on. The goal is simply to focus on building up a customer base before you can make your first million.

Website is a handy and trendy marketing tool for business. For a good website, the visual web design must be attractive and must be able to grab the attention of more number of visitors. Web designing is an art and has to be done with interest and involvement. When done with involvement, the user-friendly feature will automatically get incorporated in the design. Stunning web design with good programming and marketing strategies will greatly increase the visibility of the website to the Internet browsers. From this introduction it can be understood easily that web design is the key aspect of a website. For designing a user-friendly website here are a few tips which I gained through my experience in web designing. These useful tips, when implemented, will yield good user-friendly web designs. Here we go.

1). What does the website convey? - Your answer to the question will lead you all the way to a good and meaningful web design. For designing a website, one should have a theme. On getting to know more of what the website is about, as a designer or as a Webmaster, it will be easy for you to design accordingly.

2). Planning for the web design - Planning makes work proceed smoothly. The first step in planning is research. Surf through the web to find sites similar to yours. Do a simple yet meaningful research to understand the pulse of the visitors. On doing so, your first impression of the website through your web design will always be the best impression.

3). Setting theme and layout - After your research and planning, the vital part of your web design is the collection of assets. The first step will be theme selection and webpage layout. There may be personal websites, informational websites, ecommerce websites and service providing websites. It is all in the hands of a designer to select a matching theme to satisfy the need and implement it attractively.

4). Web Page Design - Neat and informative web pages will be the most visited pages in the net. To design such a web page, the important elements to be taken note of are the header, footer, text area and the navigational area. Avoid using animated/flashy headers and navigational icons. Use uniform header and footer to give a professional look to the website. These, when designed with care and when followed, will result in good web design.

5). Site Map and Navigation - In web designing, the term navigation is very much apropos with user-friendly. Navigation within the website should very clear and easy. Always try to implement normal links to move around and avoid animated buttons. The column to the right of the webpage should have good navigational links. The site map is another important and easy way for finding web pages in the website. So, never forget these as these are the principal tips to be remembered while designing.

6). Usage of images and text - Web designing is all about expressing the ideas of the business to people. For it to be a success, use of correct images for communicating the content of the website to the visitors is a must. The text in the webpage must be search engine optimized and must convey the message clearly.

7). Page Size and Download Time - After placing the images, links and the text, the complete page should not exceed 30 KB. This size will ensure that the page is downloaded quickly within 5 to 6 seconds. This time is crucial time because either it may bring visitors or divert them to another website of the same type.

The above are a few important tips to be considered while designing a website. You can follow them or modify them to suit your need. But the fact is that designing is about presenting the information in an elegant, decorative and user-friendly way.

A website is a marketing tool, designed ultimately to boost your company’s sales. Yet so many web designers (and the companies that employ such web designers) neglect to use basic marketing principles to benefit the website.

The focus for web design/websites seems to be around two things;

• getting a stunning web design
• getting visitors to the website.

For many business websites (I have found small businesses websites to be particularly guilty of this) there is little thought to basic marketing principles. Such marketing principles are used elsewhere but for some reason many do not seem to use them when designing websites. So the question is, what marketing principles should you adhere to when designing a website?

Well the number one issue to consider is what message do you want to give to customers? This is also known as a positioning statement.

In my experience this is probably the hardest part of developing an website marketing strategy (or any marketing strategy).

To start you really need to define the type of visitors you want to attract to your website, consider:

• how old are they?
• what do they like?
• what problems / reservations do they have regarding similar products to yours?

You then need to create a message that appeals to them (sounds obvious but many neglect this). Personally I like to look at the problems customers may associate with similar products and then create statements to counter them. The statements are then written for the target web audience. For example if I am writing a message for a younger audience I may use different language to if I am writing for an older audience.

Next choose the most important reservation and counter argument, this will be the one to base the website around. Many try and use many statements on their website and in my experience this does not work. Delivering one message in a website usually works better than trying to pack your website with numerous statements.

How you deliver the message will depend upon your web design and the intended audience, but remember website visitors are lazy and do not like reading text, so use images where possible. Finally you must remember to back your statement up! Any website can claim anything, web users know this, so try and backup your statement. Do you have testimonials, case studies or some other way for the visitor to see how good you are?

Hope you find this useful!

We often put web design and marketing hints and tips on our blog http://redspiderwebdesign.wordpress.com so feel free to pay it a visit.

In the world of Web designers, a major error in website design is the incorrect use of colors. Poorly-defined color palette reflects the work of an unprofessional designer. When choosing colors, the principle must be the ‘choice and taste’ of masses as it will be viewed by them only, in large numbers. So, picking a color palette should be done very cautiously. The most common colors used in web design include:-

Blue - One of the most popular colors used on the Internet. It belongs to the category of so-called “safe” colors. The blue color is associated with such concepts as peace, serenity, reliability, credibility, honesty, purity, clarity. However, for example, light-blue color can symbolize depression. So while choosing blue color for your web pages, it’s advisable to be very cautious.

Green - It has always been associated with nature. It symbolizes the nature, health, future and youth. However, in some cases Green may be correlated with distrust and danger.

Yellow - It is the color of joy, happiness, friendship. Among the negative associations Yellow may suggest cowardice and disease. Do not use too dark yellow.

Orange - It is a symbol of warmth and energy. A very good color for focusing prominently on something.

Red - Red is the most appropriate color for capturing instant attention of the visitor. You can use it in the pages/text/images/logos that demand instant attention.

Violet - It is a mysterious color that suggests creativity, normally used for giving special elegance to the website.

Pink - It is the most feminine color. It is also associated with children and childhood.

Black - Black is a symbol of force, darkness and evil.

Colors

Different shades of colors, well applied in different situations are the identity of a sound web designer. It must be understood that, depending on the subject site, you should be limited to a certain combination of colors and shades. For example, the use of bright pink in the development of a business website will look, to say the least, strange. The same goes true for example, with the use of red color in the development of a website associated with medicine, which not only suggests visitor’s distress, but rather draws an association with blood and danger.

Colors compatibility with OS

When choosing a color palette, it must be remembered that on a variety of operating systems colors may look differently. For example, if a visitor will have a Mac operating system, it is unlikely that he sees the colors in the same way as he would see in MS windows.The factors influencing the different display colors include the installation monitor, the operating system, the type of monitor, graphics card, resolutions, etc.

When you change colors, you must guarantee the contrast between the background and plain text. For example, visitors may not have an ideal vision, and hence it may be difficult to read the light gray text on a white background. Some combinations of colors can cause irritation, for example, green text on a red background.

A successful website does not come overnight. For many businesses getting a truely successful website is an iterative process of constant improvement.

Improvement needs to be centred around your visitors’ needs, but how do you know what these needs are? Well the good news is that website statistics can help. As their name suggests website statistics can show you all sort of stats about your website.

Just stop and think, how useful would it be to know:

• Which are the popular pages of your website?
• Pages of your website which are not popular
• How long a visitor is likely to stay on your website for, and which web pages they are likely to see?
• Where visitors are finding your website from, is a particular form of marketing working well?

Knowing this information would be very useful. For a start you could see the unpopular pages of your website and then analyse why that is. Do visitors go to the web page and then leave your website (that page is a poor page). Or do visitors never find that web page in the first place (the web page is probably poorly advertised on your website).

Getting visitors to your website is not enough, you need to actively turn those visits into conversions. So how do you get web statistics? Well many hosting packages will include some form of web statistics, but I would recommend not using these and using Google Analytics instead (www.google.com/analytics). Google Analytics not only provides a wealth of information about your website in a user friendly manor, it also tells Google that your website is there.

Ask your web designer about installing Google Analytics on your website, or if you’re computer literate you can do it yourself (it is just a case of copying and pasting code into your web page).