Web Designing Essentials

To know web designing essence, let us first compare a poorly designed page from that of an outstanding one.

Poorly made page is passive, linear, confusing, pathetic and lacks concentration on details. Thus, it will not do you any good. It will just be a waste of time and effort.

On the other hand, an outstanding page is active, nonlinear, clean and consistent with its style and details. Moreover, this type of page can drag your e-commerce to full blast.

Now, let us discuss the significance of each essential quality.

Interactivity

This quality allows the reader to participate actively and willingly. Examples of interactive device are the following: tests, hypermedia, hypertext, games, chat rooms and the likes.

To be active with the site encourages revisit. This is because visitors are keen enough to know whether this site is enjoyable or not, educational or crap and inviting or flaccid.

Linear Organization

Functionality does not equate to boredom. Thus, do not make your web page more boring than a book and difficult to read like a technical thesis. You have to make it catchy, engrossing and illuminating. Classroom atmosphere lulls visitor to sleep, be sure to arrange your page in a way that it will not be to taxing on them to read your page.

Concentration on Details

There must be consistency as to details. On the educational aspect, cognitive loading, sequencing of information, feedback and erroneous text must be avoided since they represent bad design.

On the technical aspect, broken links, poor navigation and inactive pointers are annoying. Thus, if you want to incorporate the same into your design, be sure they are functioning well so as not to infuriate the visitors.

Graphic User Interface

Quality is your topmost priority. Hence, graphic user interface must not be overlooked. To give you a hint, do not use dull colors, avoid busy screens and the overuse of animations and graphics.

E-commerce web development is crucial to your web page. Be sure to apply them effectively and rightfully.

Designing Websites with Sales In Mind

Designing Websites with Sales In Mind

Word Count:

622

Summary:

Web designers (and software apps) can do some amazing things with graphics and colors for websites. Find out how to combine design and sales.

Keywords:

web site design, internet marketing ideas, internetmarketingusa

Article Body:

One of the very first decisions we make as internet marketers involves the critical choices in designing websites. We each have differing opinions and viewpoints of just what our site should look like. More often than not, these decisions are based on personal opinions or selections limited to the templates of the respective applications utilized for building the site. But there has to be more to this than personal preference - with no real basis for the logic and methodology tha should go into making the decisions!

What about this logic ---beyond the appearance - lets also look at the "sales" potential of one design versus another. Think about it, why do some websites sell better than anothers? Do you need a marketing degree to create a website? Does design have much impact on sales?

You may not realize this but many of the successful internet marketing businesses already figured out that design, or layout of the website should be as much of a marketing decision as the ad copy. Why is that?

Web designers (and individuals with software apps) can do some amazing things with graphics and colors. You will also have a much more professional looking site when an expert applies his or her handiwork. However, it is critically important to understand some of the key elements that smart marketers make certain appear (or NOT appear) on highly profitable sites. After all, having a "pretty" site does you no good if you are not getting traffic or revenue from sales. Being aware of these will enable you (or your selected designer) to keep in mind this balance between marketing and design. The three key elements are color, graphics, and layout.

COLOR: Designs with a dramatic color can make compelling choices for setting a mood. But reading on a computer screen demands as much contrast as possible, otherwise the reader will develop vision fatigue. You do not want to irritate or tire your visitors in any way or they may leave, so be certain that the main body of your website copy is black writing on a white background - or as close to that ideal as possible.

Colors also change appearance on different monitors, so what looks cool and calm on one monitor may be bright and glaring on another. Simple works.

GRAPHICS: Striking, bold graphics can be a real eye-catcher for visitors. Still, successful internet marketers are pretty much unanimous in stating that you should avoid flash graphics as much as possible. Again, they tend to tire visitors eyes or create a distraction from the written copy. Even if they are initially impressed by the work it may subconsciously annoy them. Simplicity is again the best way to go.

LAYOUT: The first 'fold' of your site is similar to opening a tractional paper letter. If you remove a letter from an envelope that is folded in three, you will obviously view the top 'fold' first.

This fold is what individuals will see without scrolling down the page. It is CRUCIAL that important elements like descriptive headlines, your contact number, newsletter subscription form etc. all show in the first fold. Do NOT place banners here unless they are the main element of your business as you will be giving prime space to other websites and your customer (which you fought hard to get in the first place) will be gone just as quickly.

These are just some of the important elements you should be aware of when designing your site. This "balance" will greatly increase your sales potential - once you incorporate this into your design criteria. With both design and "sales-ability" used as the foundation for the website in the initial design phases you will reap the financial benefits for years and years.

What should you do when designing a business card online

Designing a business card online is not any different from designing one offline. There are a lot of factors to consider to ensure that your business card will serve the purpose that it is intended in the first place.

When designing a business card online you should:

1. Try to design the business card yourself. Nothing like avoiding the charges you have to pay when hiring designers to do the job. Besides, you are your own boss. Nobody will tell or criticize you on what you want attained.

2. Use shadows on texts so that when you use light texts, it will be easier to see even though the background is also light. You would not want your readers squinting their eyes out just to see what is written in your cards.

3. Go for bulks. Did you know that having more quantities printed can save you a lot in printing costs? Many people do not know that by cutting on the amount of printing materials, they are paying more than they think they are. If you compute the overall value, you will see that you actually save more by printing more copies.

4. Opt for UV coating. UV coats for cards give them longer protection and color life. Business cards do not just serve as one day cards. For sure, you will want them to last longer so people will be able to use them for quite sometime.

5. Try out different business card design and layout. The design you want may not go with the image you have chosen. Try experimenting with various designs so you will get to see which one will look best combined together.

6. Convert to gray scale. This will give your cards a unique look that will differentiate it from other typical looking business cards. Gray scale tends to look good with color texts too. The colors are more emphasized.

7. Leave blanks. This provides simplicity – white space. This factor is especially needed if your business card is full of graphic and designs. By leaving some space, you give readers a chance to breathe from all that is being shown to them.

If you do not get the design you want, you are probably better off hiring experts to do the job for you. They can do this online too. All you have to do is approve the final draft and get them from a printer near you.

Creating a business card is made easy nowadays. All you have to do is think of something that is eye-catching enough.

Web designing: Is Your Website Doing Business?

Web designing is an important factor for people doing business online. Online business is happening everywhere and almost everybody is doing it these days. However simply having a beautiful website will not deliver you what you are looking for. Web designing is the amalgamation of different components. A recent study conducted by a leading research agency shows that these days more and more people come to internet for business purpose. To deliver results to customers you must have a website that caters to all their requirements.

Designing a website is a complex process involving many elements. However if a professional undertakes this work it becomes very simple for you. There are many professionals who will do the work for you for a certain amount of fee. It is advisable to leave the designing part to a professional. Before embarking on designing the website make sure that you know what exactly you are looking for. This will help you in giving a clear picture of your requirements to the pro.

Hiring a pro to do your work is a fantastic way of going about designing a website. Decide on a theme. It may be anything a color, a photograph, a logo or an image. Make use of it throughout the website. Keep a constant tab on the progress of the work done on your website. Your website must be very appealing and visually pleasing for the visitors. Take note that your site contains images and visuals which moves, flashes and talks to visitors online. This is a sure shot way of grabbing attention. Ensure that the contents in your site are regularly updated.

Have plenty of templates in your website. Templates are cheap and look very good in a website. A photograph speaks a thousand words. Add proper photographs in the right places. Photo editor can be used to make the required alterations in the photographs. You must take note that the photographs used in the site complements with the goods in which your company is dealing. Make use of proper color coordination to make your site visually appealing.

Include a site map in your website. Using site map is the surest way of keeping a website organized. Your website must be easily accessible to the visitors. With so much of competition in this field no one will go for a time consuming search to get what they are looking for. Make sure everything is properly displayed in the proper places. Another important factor which you must take note of is the target audience of your site. This is vital in determining the look of your site.

It is important look after your site properly. Check regularly to see if the information in your site is regularly updated or not. Test out to see if the links in your site are properly working or not. There is nothing more annoying than broken links to a visitor of a website.

Designing A Website That Sells

Would you buy meat from a grocery store that left the bad meat in with the good meat or wasn't clean? Would you buy a car from a sales lot that had totaled automobiles on the front lot? I wouldn't and neither would you.

Your website is your grocery store; your car lot. You must have an atmosphere that is pleasing to buyers. One that tells that buyer that you are not an amateur, but instead a trained, seasoned professional. Your site is a direct reflection of your product and that is why that having a well
designed website can make or break your sales.

The first thing to keep in mind when designing your website, is surfability. Take a few minutes a look around at several web pages. What makes them appealing? Were there some that you closed out of immediately? Why? Take notes and do your research. Keep in mind that when a person visits your site they have a goal in mind. They are either seeking information or shopping for a product. Give the person what they want without having to search for it. Be sure that all the information on your site is relevant to your product. Make the buyer think that they need your product to solve their problem.

Your main page serves a very specific purpose. It should be an avenue by which the customer can shop your site. It should be easy to view and load very quickly. This is your first impression and we know that first impressions can either close the deal or loose the deal. Make it simple. It is best to have links that are easily viewable by the reader that will navigate them to where they want to be. Tables are often a great choice when deciding on a way to design the main page of your site. Your main page
should load very quickly, chances are if it takes the page more than ten seconds to load even on a 56k modem, the customer will click away to save time, hoping to find the information or product elsewhere. To increase the loading speed of your main page you should avoid large graphics or excessive graphics. To many banners or special effects can cause a page to
load slowly as well.

To make your web site more appealing to the eyes, you should stick to mild colors. If your site is a content site where the user will be doing a lot of reading, it is best to stick to black and white. Color can be added when using tables, as a way to brighten up the page, but remember to keep the overall look of the page professional and appealing to the audience that will be visiting most often. Since screen resolutions vary among monitors, it is a good idea to set the pixels to a standard 800x600. You may also choose to set the tables in your web page to span a percentage of the page rather than a set number of inches. This will be sure to accommodate all screen sizes. You should remember that a lot of Internet users will not use the same browser as you, and therefore you should be sure that your site looks as good on other browsers as it does your own. You can do this by downloading several browsers through which to look at your page.

Be aware of the fact that the overall look of your website is a way to make money. The appearance of the site, if designed properly, can be an excellent marketing strategy for your product or service.

Designing your website

Designing your website

Word Count:

399

Summary:

‘First impression lasts’ is very much true for online business. Website content (texts, graphics and animations) must create a 3D picture of product/service in the mind of the consumers, and entice them to buy it. Content can make a business click or sick on internet.

Keywords:

shared hosting plans, reseller hosting plans , linux hosting plans, email hosting services, email web hosting, ecommerce hosting solutions, affordable web hosting plan, small business hosting

Article Body:

‘First impression lasts’ is very much true for online business. Website content (texts, graphics and animations) must create a 3D picture of product/service in the mind of the consumers, and entice them to buy it. Content can make a business click or sick on internet.

A website is like your online shop, your virtual interactive portfolio. For web design tool, it is important to determine your target audience and then design for speed, quality, and impact.

Speed
Keep the graphics to the minimum. Remember graphics don’t entice customers to pay up, the content does. The rule of graphics is use only where necessary.

Quality
A customer cannot see you or touch your product or service. He can only see what is presented to him visually on the website. Your product or service has to make an impact as to be able to make purchase it. Quality here matters a lot. Nothing but the best is the rule when it comes to quality.

Impact
The rule of website usability is that your website has just 20 seconds. You either make an impact on your customer or you don’t in these 20 seconds. To make an impact on your customer you need to get the right mix of graphics, colors, content and layout.

Impact of Content
Content is king, it is said. It either converts a visitor into your customer or it doesn’t. Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes transformed into high profile jobs, a 10-cent brochure into millions of dollars just because of the right word. Content should always be professionally managed by people who understand how it will impact your customers.

Impact of Colors
Pink is so feminine, ouch! Cute and light.
Blue defines power and professionalism. It’s also for space and networking.
Red is associated with love, passion, warning, excitement and action.
Green is for money, nature, animals, health, healing, life and harmony.
Grey is associated with neutrality. A sense of being reserved.

Website design tools
Serverplex.com features an excellent web design tool. No coding knowledge required. No HTML tags or any complicated code. A simple interface where you type in what you want. Add pictures. And you have your webpage ready. The icing on the pudding is yet to come. This tool is free!

Designing Your Site For The Search Engines

When you design a website, it's easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see. What you have to realise, though, is that you're going to have another kind of visitor with a completely different agenda: they're not going to be looking at your pretty logo and they're not going to be passing judgement on your background colour. What they're looking for is the content and structure of your page.

They're the search engine spiders, and they are in control of probably the largest section of your traffic. You need to please these spiders if you want your site to be successful. Here's how.

Make Your Structure Clear

Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways: you want it to be very clear to the search engine where the navigation is, where the content is, and where the headings are. As a rule, put navigation first in your page. Always use the heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.

Avoid using generic span and div tags and only making things clear to the user through CSS font sizes: instead, use every 'semantic' HTML tag that applies to your content. If you're quoting someone, use the blockquote tag; if you're posting program code, use the code tag. Search engines love this.

Keep Keywords Consistent

It's not usually worth deliberately saturating your content with keywords in hope of a higher search ranking – the engines have pretty much wised up to this tactic – but do make sure that your keywords appear consistently when they occur naturally. For example, for these articles, I have stuck with 'website' throughout, as suddenly writing 'web site' instead would bring down my rankings.

HTML and Javascript

It's worth noting that search engines read HTML, but they don't, in general, read Javascript. That means that using Javascript to insert text into your page is a bad idea if you want search engines to see the text. On the other hand, you might want to have just the text in HTML and insert all the other parts of the page with Javascript: this will tend to make your page appear more focused, although you should be careful not to insert navigation links this way if you want the search engines to follow them.

Use Meta Tags 

Yes, meta tags are out of fashion, and search engines pay no attention to them any more when it comes to ranking your site, but they're still important in one way: the meta description tag is still often used to decide what text search engines' users see when they find your site in their results! This can be just as important as the ranking itself – write something here that will look useful to the searcher, and you're more likely to get them to click-through. Don't forget that, while search engines are just machines and algorithms, the end result of it all does involve a human decision: to click, or not to click?

Avoid Splash Pages

You might think it's a great idea to have a 'splash' page displaying a full-page version of your logo (or an ad) to every user who arrives at your site, but search engines really hate that. Using this trick will get you ranked far lower than you would usually be, so you should avoid it – it's annoying to visitors anyway.

Include Alt Tags

Any time you use a graphic, include alt text for it – especially if there is text in the graphic. Remember that, as far as search engines are concerned, all your graphics might as well just be big black boxes. Test by removing all your graphics and seeing if your content remains relatively intact. If it doesn't, then you'll be turning search engines away.

Finally, Write Great Content 

The key with modern search engines (and, at the same time, the thing you have least control over) is how many people decide to link to your page from their page. How can you make more people link to you? Make your content useful. Make it something they'll want to quote on their blogs. Content is more King than it's ever been, and the best way to design for search engines is to make your content really stand out.

Web designing is a critical decision

Today, the best way to reach to the every corner of this world is by developing a website. It will just be a matter of few clicks and you will be in front of anyone who may be sitting anywhere in this world. That is the charisma of internet and websites. However, when you talk about websites, it doesn’t mean that all you need is a web space with a particular domain name; in fact, there are a lot of other things that have to be kept in mind.




Visual appeal of your website will be the first thing that will earn you a lot of visitors. Secondly, it will be the systematic approach that you must use in presenting the web contents and information about your products as that will make you to convert those visitors in regular buyers. So, it is all about web designing in the most effective way.





If you are looking to design a website, then the first option that you can always choose is to hire a professional who may let you bring your dream into reality. However, you can also do that on your own if you are having some previous knowledge about web designing. Apparently, it’s all about creativity, but, in reality, it’s much more than creativity as it requires a certain level of proficiency in dealing with specific designing tools.




Nevertheless, you can find these tools online and can proceed with your web designing. Also, spending some time on reading the tutorials on using some specific tools will always help. Also, there are so many languages and scripts that have to be understood in order to create a nice and unbeatable web design. You can also choose as if you require static web pages or dynamic web pages.




However, it will be relatively difficult and will involve greater awareness about technologies to create dynamic web pages as you may have to use JavaScript, Actionscript and other such scripting to make your web site lively.




To create dynamic contents, flash is another thing that can be used and in most situations, it will be the better idea to do that as there are some softwares that help you to produce graphics according to your liking. Although, it takes some time and efforts to produce a dynamic page with flash animations, but, it can really uplift the visual appeal of your website which is absolutely important.




However, when you will be designing your website, you must understand that it should not include so many heavy graphics including pictures and other electronic contents as they can hinder the speed of your web site. It is the basic thing of designing a web page as if your site will take time to get loaded, you will end up losing customers as no one have the time to wait for your site to load, especially, when they have other options to explore.




So, keep it simple, yet powerful along with a simple and comprehensible navigational structure which is momentous as well. Also, pay a sufficient attention to scaling and color scheme of your website to exude that professionalism that can grip the imagination of a casual visitor.

Designing Sites for Search Engines and Directories

In terms of layout, many web sites are not designed for optimum search engine and directory visibility. People or companies seem so centred on their corporate or personal images, products, and services that they neglect to design their web sites with search engines and directories in mind. Search engines and directories vary in the way they rank your web site in a search query. Some search engines place primary emphasis on the text within your title tags. Some search engines place emphasis on the main ideas presented in all of your text on a single web page. Some directories emphasize the text you submitted in their "Description" field. How and where you place your text, both in the copy your visitors see and within the HTML tags your visitors do not see, will affect your ranking

1. Keyword selection 
2. Keyword placement 
3. Keyword frequency 
4. Links & architecture
5. Site statistics 

Keyword Selection

Of primary importance is selecting the best keywords for your industry and the keywords you believe your potential customers will use to find you. Selecting the right keywords requires research.

Look at your company's printed materials. What words do you use over and over? When you speak to new and current customers on the phone, what questions do they frequently ask and what words do they use? Ask your current customers how they would find you on the Internet. Then go to the major search engines and directories. Type in the keywords you want to use. Study the source code of the web sites that appeared in the top 20. Look at how your competitors ranked in a search query. Adjust your keyword selection accordingly.

Keyword placement

Of equal importance is keyword placement on individual pages. The text in your title tag is one the most important elements for ranking well in search engines. The text in your titles should be descriptive, using the words and lingo in your industry, and should accurately reflect the contents of each web page.

For optimum search engine positions, your keywords need to appear at the top of your web pages. Thus, before you design your web page, ask yourself if you (or your web designer) have strategically placed your keywords within your title tags, meta-tags, headings, graphic images, and the first paragraph within your body tag. If not, you might need to rethink your site design.

Keyword Frequency

What is important to both the search engines and your target audience is keyword frequency and keyword prominence. Designing and coding your site with keywords in the right locations and the right frequency is an art form. Keywords need to appear frequently on your web pages, but if they appear too frequently, your site will be penalized for word stacking (also known as "spamming the index") or could be removed permanently from the index.

Also, some search engines ignore meta-tags. Thus, if you have included your keywords in your meta-tags but have not placed them elsewhere, you have missed a huge target audience, namely AOL users. Sites with frames have problems being indexed well because there is little opportunity otherwise to include additional text with keywords.

Very, very few web sites can get in the Top 10 of all the major search engines (AltaVista, FAST Search, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Teoma) without spamming. We cannot emphasize this enough: if you hire anyone (a submission service, an individual, an online promotion service, etc.) to do the services we just described, they need to have HTML and design experience, online marketing, and excellent copy writing skills. You do not want your web site to be permanently banned from a search engine or directory due to ignorance or lack of experience. Furthermore, submission services usually do just that: submit. Many do not perform keyword research, the HTML coding, and copy writing necessary to get a site optimally placed within the search engines. Ask a lot of questions before handing over any money.

Links & site architecture

Placing keywords throughout your web pages is useless as a search engine marketing strategy if the search engine spiders are unable to record the text on your web pages. Therefore, always have a link architecture (also known as a site map) on your site that the search engine spiders can follow. Oftentimes, this means having two forms of navigation on your site: one that your target audience prefers, and one for the search engines.

Site Statistics

For the first few months after you have your web site submitted to the major search engines and directories, you should see a jump in traffic. If you look at your site reports with your visitor statistics, which should do frequently, you will see when the search engines spider and index your site.

Hopefully, because you have been thoughtful enough to give potential customers a reason to return to your site again and again, people will bookmark your site, and your web statistics will show an increase in a "No Referrer" category under referral URL's. Your site reports should show you where your potential customers are coming from (i.e. which search engine or directory they used to find you) and which keywords they used to find you.

After your site has listed in the search engines and directories for a few months, review your site statistics and determine where the majority of your traffic comes from. Then focus your advertising efforts on those directories and search engines. You get better sales from targeted marketing than from spreading your net too wide.

One client did exactly what we recommended, from keyword selection to monitoring site statistics. They found most of their sites referral traffic came from Yahoo queries. They bought banner space from Yahoo for two months. Whenever two of their keywords were typed in a search query, their banner would appear. Their traffic increased over 500%, and their sales reached five figures per month.

Lastly, the saying "Content is King" still rings true. You can increase traffic to your web site, but if (1) people do not like what they see, (2) you do not offer potential customers what they want to buy, or (3) you do not give customers incentive to stay and/or bookmark your site, they will click off of your web site as quickly as they clicked on to it.