Web Design Development Articles

An important design element that can give life to your site is photos. Photos can add a lot of character to the site, put visitors in the correct frame of mind to view your site, as well as help someone determine in the first five seconds if they should even bother looking at any other pages.

The most important thing regarding photos on your site is to make sure that they are optimized. This means making sure the photos are clear, properly sized, and grab attention. If photos have to be a small size to fit on your page, add on the ability for a visitor to increase the size of the photo to get a closer look if they wish. Also, do not leave blurry or unclear photos on your site. Visitors may equate your inability to take care of that small detail with the inability to accurately take care of their detailed order.

Adding a caption below photos may also help to increase visitor interest. Tell the visitor exactly what you want them to look at in the photo. The photos should match the text on that page. If the photo relation is not obvious, this could really help so that your visitor does not say “I don’t get it.”

Another important thing to keep in mind is the number of photos you have to put on your website. It is best to use multiple photos throughout your site. If a visitor is taking the time to click from page to page of your site, they are obviously looking to learn more. So why keep showing them the same image over and over? This is not going to make a great impression, instead it could give off a negative impression such as you do not offer a large supply of product or that you were too lazy to go out and get other photos for your site.

Finally, make sure that your photos are exciting and motivate visitors to take action. Do you think a photo of the front of your building or a sign with your name really gets visitors excited? Try to put yourself in the visitor’s eyes and think about what you would want to see.

Remember, your goal with photos is to make it easier for the visitor to envision themselves being helped by your product or service.

The impression that your website gives off in the first five seconds to a visitor is critical. This is the amount of time that it takes for someone to decide if they will look through the rest of your site or not. For this reason, it is extremely important to have a visitor-oriented homepage. A visitor-oriented homepage means that the visitor can easily determine who you are, what you do, and why they should choose you within the first five seconds.

To best way to answer the question of who you are is to have your logo prominently displayed. This does not mean to stretch the size of it so that it is very large and takes up a lot of room on your page. Keep the logo formatted properly and displayed at the top of the page along with your company name. Near the top of the page, it is also a good idea to have a sentence or phrase that tells what it is that you do. This will easily answer the second question. The third question of why someone should choose you can also be fairly easy to answer. Perhaps it is important to put an icon of an award you won, maybe it is important to display a short testimonial on the first page, or perhaps displaying the number of years you have been in business could be important. Whatever that important element may be for your business, display it on the homepage in a way that can be recognized quickly as verification.

Colors can also help a visitor to determine if they will stay on the site. A nice background color can set the tone of the site and put the visitor in the correct frame of mind for viewing. Make sure that the colors you use give off the correct feeling and impression of your business. Be careful of how many colors you choose because using too many can be distracting.

The font is also an important element in creating a visitor-oriented homepage. Make sure that you are using only one font type throughout the page. Also try and make all of the text just one size and use bold to emphasize important points. Many websites make the mistake of using small text in one section and large text in another section of the page to grab attention. Mixing different sizes, italics, bold, and different font styles can be a disaster. The reason is that it causes the eye to jump around and it takes away from the natural flow of the text.

Remember, the goal of your homepage design is to give off a great first impression, answer the three basic questions quickly, and put the visitor in the correct frame of mind to want to view the rest of your site.

Most sites become very attractive thanks to the right website design tools. These tools help a website become handsome not only in terms of aesthetics, but as well as in terms of efficiency and functionality. You don’t actually have to come up with complex designs, for the best sites usually consist of the simplest templates and tools. If you want to know more on how to come up with truly fantastic website designs, then here are the tips Yahoo Answers recommends:

First, you must focus on effective layout and navigation. Among the most important aspects in designing a website is to pay attention to layout and navigation. Your site would look more functional when it uses adequate white space, as your readers get to see more of your content. Your viewers won’t be distracted by the fancy backgrounds and special effects since their attention has been captured by the white space, redirecting them to the content. There are many free web site tools which you can use to come up with simple designs, just learn how to choose which ones you are going to use.

Meanwhile, if you plan to have too many links on your site, then you should use flyouts or drop-down menus for your main categories. This helps your site become cleaner and neater to the eye, and your audiences would not be confused in going to the different parts of your website. Some free website design templates do provide you with this kind of feature, so why not check them out.

The next thing you have to work on is enhancing the aesthetic appeal of your site. This is the part where you can use different free web site tools that generate HTML and JacaScript codes, making your task easier. You can find a good list of design tools at Yahoo Answers, so why not check them out.

Another important factor you should work on is to use simple rollover buttons and images. Fancy rollover buttons may be fancy, but they can make your site run slower and distract some of your audiences, so it’s best that you stick with the basics. There are free website design tools which offer plain yet functional images and buttons, so why not try and see if they will work well on your site.

Special graphic and photo effects on the other hand need special expertise, so if you are a newbie in developing website design, it is best that you try to use services which are ready and easy to use, not those that need complicated codes. However, if you tend to be more imaginative and already have good knowledge with regards to web design codes, then you can go ahead and create your own designs.

Finally, Yahoo Answers recommends that your site should be interactive and dynamic. You can do this by adding a Flash Player plug-in on your site, which is the most compatible player for most multimedia files. A lot of free website design widgets provide Flash-player functions, so better include them on your site as well.

How often do you browse the internet and find a page and quickly leave only to not read their content or view any of their pages? This happens all too often on the internet each and every day. This is because of tacky or unattractive web design that is not easy to navigate. Why have a web page if no one is really going to read it? They might have excellent content but if things do not look attractive you will quickly leave. There are a lot of elements that make a good web site design. A good web page should be dynamic, attractive, and easy to navigate.

Dynamics and Attractions Go Along Way

You need to find a way to make your site interactive because people want to interact. Think of it this way; what reason would your user have to come back? A good way people are making web site dynamic are by applying ASP.NeT, PHP, C#, AJAX, Javascript, etc. You site should use an effective color palette that is appropriate for your audience. Also, your page should not be all static unless it is just exceptional content. Static web pages are boring and way over used on the internet. Nothing is more unattractive than clashing colors that compete with each other. Also, make sure that the design works in every web browser and under the most common resolutions.

Typography Is Vital To Your Web Design

Design in print and in web design relies around the same principles. Readability and effective type can make or break a design. I would recommend that you use no more than 3 different fonts. This includes just three types of fonts too. For example Arial Bold is one and Arial Italic is another. Ask anyone who knows about design; a novice graphic designer or web site designer does not know typography. The size needs to be adjusted accordingly and with clarity. Make blocks of content rather than having a 150 line paragraph. I try to make spaces between ever six lines to help with readability. Make sure you make proper use of CAPS and do not over use them.

Navigation Is Key

Everything should be laid out consistently on your site. All the buttons should be in the same exact spot on every single page. If the user is hunting and searching just to find their desired content on your page; chances are they will just get frustrated and leave. A lot of people underestimate the power of an easily navigational web site.

Much has been said about website design. The topic itself opens a lot of ideas between internet savvies and website designers. In as much as every internet user wanted to have their own page in the web, webmasters can only provide them a pseudo-personalized form called web hosting. This page has a given set of functionality to enable users to download/upload files, post messages for individuals and groups, or design the page according to their preferences. Popular examples are blogging platforms and social networking pages. But these functionality are only limited to some sort of webmaster’s purpose in creating the page and cater only to the basic demand of majority of users.

Such backdoor encourages anyone to make and design their own website according to their preferences. However, getting a bad website design is far worse than the limitations of hosted sites. Not to mention making your own website needs payment versus free service of a hosted site. Having your own website could just be anything, but a successful website is really something. The following were just basic areas of consideration in conceptualizing a website design :

1. Purpose

The reason why a website has been created is a foremost consideration in website designing. In fact, every inch of a website and its sub-domains will reflect its purpose. The website purpose can range from business oriented, open information site, directory listings, blogging site, and even to extremely personal. This purpose will also control on what stuff the site is made of and even to its most subtle modifications later.

2. Organization

After the purpose has been established, the organization of the site will be composed of flow of operations on how every single user will interact with the page. Sometimes, it is called the blueprint of the website where placement of banners, main menu buttons, and topic tabs will be selected. The goal of website organization is the enhancement in navigating streams of data found on the site. Some even fortified it with an advanced algorithm scripts. Regardless of software applications to be used, a highly organized website will always enable users to land on the page where they wanted to be.

3. Color Scheming

Some may have been not so careful with this aspect but it can be as important as the website’s organization. After all, website designing is still both art and science. Appropriate color selection for every square inch of a webpage matters a lot in supporting the purpose and organization of the site. Aesthetically speaking, some vibrant colors may become insignificant in some sorts of combination in the same way as a dimmer hue can become a sound choice for a particular spot. Although noone could tell at what extent a certain color may become redundant or significant. Some website designers often used simulations on different color combination and at different levels of shade. In this way they can evaluate the visual appearance of the page in the web.

4. Size and Space

Different data types correspond to a certain size or space in the page. A size refers to the amount of memory a certain data type could consume while a space is an area occupied by a certain data type. A text can be the simplest and the smallest among data types but it can also occupy a considerable amount of space just to convey specific information. A picture, on the other hand, could paint a thousand words but it is likely to be static and cost more size than text. Video files offer great interactivity with the user but they consumes a lot of memory and takes time to be loaded in the page. Thus, a significant balance in using different data types must exist somewhere for a website designer to discover.

5. Promotional Features

Aside from the purpose of why a website has been created, every website designer should always anticipate the promotional features of the site. After all, why make a site when you can’t broadcast it? Website designers often incorporate the sites capacity to attract search engines since a significant number of internet users browse over search engines for every particular topic. In onsite search engine optimization (SEO), proper placement of topic words over the page will make it to be “crawled” by search engine robots called spiders. Conventionally, the more your website talks about a particular topic in a non-spammy way could make your site land on the primary search engine results pages (SERP’s). SERP rankings indirectly determine the number of users visiting your website.

Although website designing involves a lot of hard decisions to make highly successful websites, it is still so fun doing it. Imagine being a digital artist and your website is your masterpiece. The more you spend a little more time on every area of consideration, the more it will become detailed. It will also reflect on the way how you make your site more effective on whatever ends.

Website design can be very helpful in attracting the visitors you want and obtain more sales. It affects sales in a way that your site’s visitors can be attracted to avail the goods or services you are offering them.

There are many ways to make your website design very presentable.

Here are some pointers for a great website:

1. Website’s Color. Your website’s color should be pleasing to the eyes of your visitors in order for them to stay in your website and read all the things you are offering them.

2. Website’s Font.Make sure your website’s font used is readable. Website font attracts your visitors to read more and to know the things you are offering them. If they read on, they can eventually avail the things you are offering.

3. Website’s Layout. Your website’s layout must be good to have order and so that they can follow what you want to give them.

4. Download time.Be sure your website downloads shortly after being clicked. Avoid consuming plenty of your visitor’s time. Too much downloading time can discourage visitors to stay. So, make your site’s download time shorter. Remember, a second in the internet is already too long. So, try optimizing the loading time.

5. Easy navigation. Make sure your visitors can easily navigate inside your website to see every service you offer. Sometimes too complicated navigation can discourage visitors to continue exploring your site. Provide easy navigation in your website.

Website design can simply make or break your online business thus, it is essential for your website’s success.

A good website always targets on the user. Hence, it should be eye catching and sufficiently informative. It should convey authentic information to the user about your products and services. A good website comprises of some significant features like effective programming, objective-driven website design, proper maintenance, excellent content, efficient quality assurance etc.
Let us have a glance at the useful tips for the creation of a good website:

v Competitive analysis: Study the market well and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Browse through the Internet and take a tour of their websites and the key areas that they have focused on.

v Easy navigation: Make sure that your website has a neat navigation and the users are able to find the important links of your website without any problem. The users should have a good browsing trip through your website and they remain glued to the website.

v Clean lay-out design: Make smart use of white space to give your website a neat appearance. It should not look clumsy with too much use of images and graphics. CSS and W3C Accessibility guidelines, which set web standards, should be stringently followed to make your website compatible with international standards.

v Maintain consistency: Your website should have a consistent look through out. The font and background color should be same across all the pages. So that your design theme remains integrated throughout the website.

v Avoid fancy fonts, graphics and background: Avoid using animations and graphics. Don’t use heavy and useless images as they take a lot of time to get uploaded. Use fonts and font size that are easily available on all the computers.

v Good content: Content is a powerful traffic-building technique. It rules the web as more and more users will be enticed to visit it repeatedly. The content of your website should be updated on a regular basis. Ensure that your paragraphs are well laid out. The text should not be too crowded or stretched. The content of your website should be original.

v Search engine friendly: Make sure that your website follows the guidelines laid out by major search engines such as Google, MSN & Yahoo and also ensure that site map has been properly incorporated in the website. It helps search engines to understand the structure of your website.

v Browser compatibility: Your website should be cross-browser compatible. Use it with different browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla, FireFox etc. Ensure that all the elements of your website are well aligned, when viewed through different browsers. Too many complicated HTML designs should be avoided. Your website should be adjustable with resolution of all computers.

The website, thus created, will convey this message to your clients that you have paid adequate attention to even the minutest of the details and that you are professional in your business approach. This will form a strong bond between your website and your visitors thereby fetching you repeat business.

To those who know how it’s done, website design and development are simple and straightforward. To those who don’t, creating a website for their business looks like a complex, overwhelming task and they don’t know where to begin. Fact is, website development is both. Website designers can quickly create new sites for their customers that look great and are tailored to their clients’ needs. But starting from scratch can be frustrating and time-consuming, and the learning curve is pretty steep. Let’s see how an individual or small business without technical experience would go about setting up a successful website.

The purpose of most websites is creating a presence on the web. This presence can be to inform others of your services, to provide content and entertainment, or to sell product. At the most fundamental level, all websites are the same, ranging from small vanity websites all the way up to huge corporate sites: You need to have a name for the website, and that name, called a domain, must then be registered with one of the many entities that do website registrations (they are called registrars). You need to arrange for room for the files that make up your website on a server, either on your own equipment or through a website hosting company. You then need to design the website itself and upload it to the server. Finally, you must make sure that people find your website and come visit it. This last step is very important and relies in part on website promotion and marketing, and in part on a technique called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO means that a website is designed specifically so that search engines like Google can easily catalog it. This way, when people search for the product or service you offer, your website is more likely to come up high on the list.

Now how does one go about creating the site? First, you need to have a realistic idea of what kind of website you want, and how much you’re willing to spend. You can buy website templates for just a few dollars or even download them for free, but that only helps if you already know what you’re doing, and those templates are usually little more than a pretty front page. You can spend a bit more and engage an outfit that will create a custom website for you, but keep in mind that you will get what you pay for. Many so-called website developers will simply send you a bunch of files with a bit of customization, and then you’re on your own. That, again, can help if you’re already familiar with the web design process as you may be able to use the files as building blocks or for new ideas. However, it won’t help if you really need an entire site set up from scratch.

For many small businesses that need a website but do not have the resources to create their own, the best way to go is engaging an experienced turnkey website developer who will take full charge of the registration, design, development and implementation of the site. Depending on your needs, they can also set up hosting arrangements, administration tools, and even create the database systems you need to run your online business. In technical terms, most such sites will use standard HTML, PHP and perhaps ASP, but they may also include Flash and a variety of add-on systems, such as content management or customer relation management. Any site should always be built using search engine optimization techniques. Some website developers offer just basic SEO whereas others also provide link building, directory submissions and general website marketing and promotion.

Bottom line is this: if you need a website, get one. You can’t do business today without a good web presence. You can create a website yourself if you’re willing to invest the time in researching how it’s done and learning the tools, or you can hire someone to do it for you. If you hire someone, look for an experienced website developer with a good reputation, have realistic expectations of what it will cost, and make sure you clearly communicate what you need.

You don’t have to be a professional web designer to know how to design a site, although admittedly this can save you a lot of time. But if you know what you want and have a fair command of the HTML language, you can do it yourself. There are also many excellent web authoring tools such as Dreamweaver that can make the work easier for you.

Don’t be afraid to admit mistakes in your initial web design. This is the foundation of your website, so if there is anything that can be done to make it better, don’t hesitate to get back to stage one, so to speak. Here are some elements of good web design that can help increase website traffic for you.

Unique Titles for Each Web Page

Have you ever been to a website and found you couldn’t browse through its page history because all the pages had the same names? Don’t be lazy. Take the time to dream up a unique title for each page you make. Pick the most important keywords in it and make them a part of the title. Be creative. Dream up a title that you know will catch attention. Saying, “Sports Wallpapers” is too general. Be specific: “Beijing Olympics Wallpaper: Track and Field” is more like it.

Duly Accomplished Tags

Meta tags aren’t useless. They are there for you to use. In fact, everything in HTML code that you can put keywords into should be exploited. Give concise but detailed descriptions in your meta tags. These will appear in search engine results.

Industry-Specific Keywords

No matter what your website’s topic is, you want to exploit what popular - and not-so-popular - keywords are relevant to it. Again, to use the same example, “sports’ is far too broad. There are millions of pages with that word in it. If you want to get targeted hits - hits from people that are looking specifically for what you have - make your keywords exact. If you have an old cue stick by a once-famous 9-ball player, you want the world to know it. Maybe 99.9% of people won’t care, but the remaining 0.1% might.

Special Text Formatting

Not all text in a web pages are equal. Use header tags to break up long essays. Put your keywords in the choicest spots - headers, links, and emphasized text. By emphasized, we mean text that is specially formatted in bold, italic, underline or hyperlinks. Don’t forget your image files. Save them with keyword-rich names since they will turn up in image searches. The image alt tag can also be used.

These are just a few web page elements that you can adjust to increase your website’s traffic. Try it and you’ll see!

Trying to build a business online is quite hard if you don’t have the correct tools one of the most pertinent tool that you would need when marketing online is Lead Capture Pages but you don’t just want a lead capture page you need one that will dazzle and hypnotize your potential prospect.

First here is an outline what you will on setting up your Lead Capture Page properly

Headline - Your headline needs to catch the attention of your potential prospect, when creating a hypnotic headline you need to ensure to raise emotions, be it anger or a sense of pleasure emotions is very important.

Body - Now this is big It depends on if your lead capture page is also a sales page I recommend having a separate sales page, so on that note make your ad copy very short but try to make sure that it hit home.

There are a couple of things you may want to consider for your lead capture page adding Video or Audio, with video being so viral I would suggest to add a video clip to your lead capture page this will help your conversation rate the prospect feels very comfortable once they know they are talking to real person.

You can also add a e-book or audio clip for the user to download these are just some of the things that you can do to help boost your conversation rates. Your lead capture page should also be nicely design remember first impressions goes a long way seems like so many people have these lead capture pages that have such terrible designs.

Don’t forget once you have your lead capture page done you must add your Auto Responder setup to capture your leads.

Now for the newcomer I recommend using some sort of Lead Capture systems so that you will not have to worry about things like designs and autoresponders. This means if you can find a system that includes those things than you are in business.

There are plenty of systems out there but there is one in particular I like it is called Push Button Extreme. This system has beautiful designed capture pages and the autoresponder is included. This Lead Capture System has a twist the twist is that you can make money with Push Button Extreme matrix compensation plan.