Top Questions Your Web Design Firm Should Be Asking You

Before any business owner develops a web site, they usually have something in mind regarding the esthetics, layout and overall budget they have for the project. While all of these are certainly an important part of building a web site, there are many more things to consider as well. If you are working with a professional web development firm, other questions need to be answered before you can have a site developed that will accurately represent your interests on the net.

One of the first questions they should be asking you is what your intentions are for the site. Are you selling products or services or giving out information? Is the site for entertainment purposes primarily or is it a business venture? If you are selling products or services, who constitutes your target demographic?

Once that has been established, a good web design firm will want to know how large you intend for the site to be. Will the site experience growth over time as pages are added for new products or services or as more content is added? Will the site require updating on a regular basis and if so, by whom?

Firms should offer you options on databases should you need one to securely store and retrieve information from customers, members and others who may visit the site. This is especially important for companies who rely on Internet orders for the bulk of their sales. Even for not-for-profits and other types of primarily informational web sites, however, visitor databases can be a necessity.

Last but certainly not least, a web design firm should inquire as to how you hope to bring traffic to your site. Will you be buying online advertising such as banner ads or pay per click? Will you be relying on search engine results to help your demographic find you? The latter will require some optimization efforts to make your site competitive for the keywords and phrases people might find you under. A good firm knows that even the most esthetically pleasing site in the world is ineffective if no one ever sees it.

Make sure the firm you hire is asking you the right questions and you will have a site you can be proud of that will serve its purpose well.

Things a web site Newbie should know to save money.

Things a web site Newbie should know to save money.




Word Count:


952




Summary:


Some recommendations that will save money for newcomers to the world of web design.






Keywords:


xsitepro,web page design,newbie,website design software,web page creator,article sumission, article directories, article submission software






Article Body:


Don’t subscribe to get rich quick schemes.

There are thousands of sites out there trying to get you to part with your money, and inferring that you will immediately start reaping the rewards. Don’t be fooled by compelling one page sales letters, often with copies of bank statements, and invariably concluding with free gifts worth hundreds of dollars. Often the letters are sprinkled with testimonials and attempt to close the sale by offering only a limited number left remaining for sale, or you are warned of an imminent price increase. Check some of them out. Make a note of the price and the suggested uplift date. Does it really happen. Check out some of the reference sites. Are they really sites of substance, in which you would place the utmost faith in their recommendations. Yes, you can make money, but is usually after the passage of time, and not without a good deal of effort.


Don’t pay for information on How-to.

There are thousands of publications offering, at a cost, to teach you how to bring about search engine optimization, rank highly with search engines or become an affiliate guru.

Keep your money in your pocket and seek similar advice for free. Let me start you off by pointing you at some free publications which will get you on your way, and all of which are available to download from our web site. Brad Callen’s “Search Engine Optimization Made Easy” is a useful read. To emphasise my point about rogue web traders, I did a Google Advanced Search for exact matches to the title. At the top of the first page, ranking No1 out of 26,400 was a site offering to sell you this free book for $29.95.

Ken Evoy’s Affiliate Masters Course is an excellent free read. Whilst one of its aims is to educate the reader about affiliate schemes, much of the content relates to pretty much any web site.

You might also want to download another good free read, “The Netwriting Masters Course.”


Don’t pay over the odds for domain registration.

There are thousands of sites offering to register domain names. Do find a site that not only provides search facilities to see if your chosen domain name is already registered, but also provides alternative suggestions if it is. Don’t pay more than $10.00 as an annual registration fee. Let me stress that we are not affiliates of the company we use. We last paid $8.95 for a dot com at Godaddy.com. We liked the access to nameservers so that we could activate the transfer of the domain name to a host of our choice. Do not subscribe to hosting at this site.


Do get yourself a suitable domain host.

There are some very important points here. To ensure minimum of downtime from your host do not join any of the free hosting sites. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Choose a site that offers to host an unlimited number of web sites for you. The fist host we selected still has a maximum of two sites before they start to increase the annual fee. You should possibly consider one that offers an unlimited number of autoresponders, if you feel that you may need this facility in the future. Although not the site we have recommended on our web site, you might find that Hostgator.com compares favourably with anything else. Make sure that you are comparing like with like when it comes to number of domains, web space, band width etc.


Don’t buy links or email addresses.

Don’t buy links and more importantly do not purchase from web sites offering you tens of thousands of email addresses. Whilst it can be a pain, you must build up your own links, and your own opt-in list of email addresses. To assist with link building, particularly with keeping track of where you are in a link relationship we use a truly excellent piece of software, outlined on our web site. Not only does it generate the link pages but it handles the sending of emails from templates.


Do carry out search engine optimization.

Your site will go nowhere unless you have carried out the basics. By this I mean searching for and using keywords, developing a link strategy, writing and submitting articles, and promoting your site in other ways. For keywords use the “Tour” at wordtracker .com and then try it for free. For SEO read Brad Cullen’s free e-book available on our web site. For tuition on how to write articles, go to Joe Robson's site at adcopywriting.com. Joe has had many years of copywriting experience, and his advice is free.


Do get good article submission software.

For our experiences do a Google Advanced Search for the exact phrase “Articles to Directories in the Newbie World” and select a site to read about our experiences. We found disappointing submission companies, mediocre software and again came across the heavy sell, one pagers with free gifts. This prompted us to design our own. We have now made the decision to share it with others, and we are currently preparing it for commercial use.


Get easy-to-use web design software.

Nearly all web design software writes the HTML code for you. Some packages are very cheap with, reflecting functionality. Others are very expensive, but with considerably longer learning curves. Nearly all require the purchase of some extra software for search engine optimization. We have recently carried out an in-depth review of a web design package which led us gently by the hand through SEO, and optimized each page for us. Feel free to visit the review at the web site shown below.

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.

Reasons Why You Should Have a Weblogger Installed on Your Web Site

I don't know about you, but when I built my first web site three years back I don't know anything about the webloggers. One day when I checking the features of my web host control panel (after two months of uploading my first home page) I saw the link For few days I was thrilled to know about this.

 One day I did a search on 'web stats' on Altavista. In the search results I came across very good software that tells a lot more about a site statistics. So I installed a free script on my site.

From till then to now I am using my webloggers to refine my web site links and tracking the ad campaigns etc.

So here are few uses, why you need a weblogger and how to use it:

***1. How many people are coming to your site:

This is an average number of visitors your web site is receiving hourly, daily or monthly. By this you can know how your web site is doing by all means. Are the visitors are targeted or not is not the question at this stage. Everymonth your number of visitors are increasing means you are doing a good job as a webmaster.


***2. From where they are coming(referers):

You can know from where or from which page the visitor is coming though this is not so in all cases. You can know which search engine or which affiliate sending you most of your visitors.


***3. What pages they are visiting most:

With your weblogger you can know which page getting maximum hits from search engines, which page frequently revisited by your visitors etc. If you find one, you can keep your main product link on these web pages. Offer a discount price for your product.


***4. How many pages they are visiting:

This tells you stickiness of your web site. How much time your visitor is going to spent depends on his intention to visit your site. If he comes with a search term 'search engine optimization' and he finds
a link to search engine optimization web site, he is not going to stay long.

If he revisits to check and compare your product his stay will be longer. So have a look on how much time each visitor is staying on average. Take care of few things like no pop ups, keep fast loading images, check links, good navigation. These keep your visitor a little more time.


***5. What keywords they are using in search engines:

Very important in search engine optimization of your web pages. See what keywords mostly used by your visitors and which web page coming up with which keyword. Why this is important means you can check
the web page that coming up with that keyword really contain the product they are looking for. You can also add those search words to your metatags.


***6. Which search engine sending you most traffic:

This is another good indication about your web site performance. Write down all the search engine names and try to further optimize your pages.


***7. You can see errors like '404 file not found' error:

This tells you a bad link or wrong URLs with spelling mistakes etc on your web pages .So that you can correct them. These error links are found as 'page not found' errors in your webloggers with the number '404'.
If people click to your 'order.htm' only to see '404 file not found' error, you are losing a sale.

***8. Tracking your advertising campaigns:

If you start an advertising campaign you can set up a seperate landing page for each of your campaign. You can assume that people coming to that page are coming from that particular ad campaign.


All these are useful in improving your website look, search engine position,refining your keywords and changing the pages that sending your visitors away etc.

Web Accessibility: What You Should Know

Overview




There is a lot of talk these days with regard to proper development practices and accessible web design. If you don’t think any of this applies to you or your website, you probably don’t understand exactly what this is all about. Web Accessibility refers to the practice of creating websites that will be useable for people of any ability or disability. Many things come into play when accounting for a person’s eye sight, mobility, auditory and logic skills.




Too many web development companies overlook the importance of coding a website in meaningful HTML. Utilities for blind users, such as text-to-speech software, make use of alternate text for images and properly named links. Another downside to overlooking proper HTML lies with the robots search engines send out to read your website. These computers that browse the internet by themselves can learn a lot more about your website, and get a lot deeper into your site when they aren’t confused by poor coding practices.




Many people have difficulty controlling a mouse with precision, and can become frustrated while attempting to select a small link. Web designers need to allow for enlargeable text sizes and create larger clickable areas whenever possible. Links should always be styled and colored different than body text so that even color blind users can quickly locate the links on any web page. Pages can even be coded in a fashion that allows them to be navigated without a mouse or keyboard should your audience be likely to require this.




No website should ever rely solely on a video or audio component to convey information. Problems here extend farther than those who are hard of hearing or have poor eyesight. You are relying on certain hardware and or software to be installed on the visitor’s computer. If a user has no speakers, or if they are turned off, they could miss your important message or even be annoyed if they were listening to something else. Visitors are valuable and you should never do anything to encourage them to leave your site quickly.




Aside from looking tacky, flashing effects are to be avoided to ensure those sensitive to seizures are not at risk. Content is both more effective and better understood by those with developmental and learning disabilities when it is written in plain text.




The Web Accessibility Initiative




The WAI started in 1999 by the World Wide Web Consortium and is viewed as the standard set of guidelines for creating accessible websites. Although there has been some criticism of their guidelines they have been working since 2003 to release the second edition of accessibility standards which will be much more technology-neutral. This will leave more room for interpretation and adaptability.




The guide goes into great depth on how to create accessible web content and includes a checkpoint summary by topic and priority. They discuss important issues and provide design solutions for a number of scenarios that cause conflicts.




The Future of Accessibility




We are at a point now where there is no doubt accessibility is important, in fact it is already a legal requirement in certain countries. Try searching Google for anything along the lines of ‘web accessibility’ and you’ll see the vast amounts of information available. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but we’ve come a long way over the last few years.




With more and more websites being populated with user generated content, a simple set of guidelines for web designers is becoming less useful. It is impossible to monitor this content for accessibility as it is being created at such a rapid rate. We are also seeing new assistive technologies that support elements like JavaScript, PDF’s and Flash which will create many new options for websites that remain fully accessible.

What colour combination should I use in my website and how it will helpyour visitors on the long run

To some people, the more colourful it is the merrier it is. However, in a more general definition of a well balanced website appearance, it is not always the case. Words such as nice, wow or beautiful can be very subjective when it comes to evaluating the appearance of a particular website. For some, a colourful, flashy and bright website can be appealing while a darker theme could be better for others. So the main question now is - how do you go about choosing the right colours for your website?

The biggest and most widely practised concept of web colour implementation is the RYB approach. Being the main three colours, Red (R), Yellow (Y) and Blue (B), hence RYB, these 3 colours are known to have a great impact on how web visitors react and interpret messages on your webpages. You'll realize that most of the links on the web are underlined in a default blue. Error messages are usually in red. Yellow provides a nice light addition which compliments dark backgrounds really well. Orange (red + yellow) texts for example is extremely popular with black backgrounds. Try it and you know why. Take a look at www.microsoft.com for example. It has an excellent application of the primary and secondary colours together with the support of black and white. Apply this technique to your web designs and you'll improve the overall layout appearance significantly, if not greatly.

Different classification of websites require different approach. In most cases, you don't want to have a corporate website with a black or any extremely dark background. Apparently a white background seems to signify formality and a certain level of layout cleanliness. Not that a dark background can't have a clean cut look, it is just a typical mental translation of human observation that the colour white is in fact the cleaner one or simply easier on the eyes. Black background in the other hand, frequently portrays something which is fancy, elegant, playful yet has a reasonable level of seriousness in it.

A majority of designers or rather webpage creators believe the role of emphasization by utilizing light and dark colours. For example, a dark background combined with a light content area, simply attracts visitors to emphasize more in the middle, which happens to be the content area. It simple works too if you have a light coloured background with a dark content area. Alternatively you can add patterns or images into the background to spice things up. Just don't get these additional items to change the original apperance of your colours. The only issue with background with exceptionally large images is that it might kill some of the attention that you want your visitors to have on your main content.

There's nothing wrong with having a website with either a light or dark background, provided that it looks good, and of course if it is nicely presented together with a readable content with a friendly user interface. How do you know if it looks good is simply something that can't be measured by words, but rather by simply looking at it. If you look at it and by some spontaneous self agreement, that you think the colour fits perfectly with everything else, then you've hit the big jackpot. If it works otherwise, and you just feel like there's something wrong, play around with the colours till you have that comforting feeling that you've done a great job.

You might be thinking right now, which colour goes with which colour? You can either browse all over the net, looking at websites and noting down good combination of colours as you go or you can simply go to http://www.colormatch.dk. This website is extremely simple and easy to use, yet very powerful in terms of features. Simple and straightforward, you simply choose one dominant colour for your website and it'll simply chooses for you 6 other colours which compliments your main colour, together with the colour codes. Simple as 1-2-3. Note that colormatch.dk only works in Internet Explorer browsers. Try googling for colormatch and get enhanced and modified versions of the original.

Additionally, always try not to get your website too dark or too bright. You can use either one or both of them at the same time, but not too excessively, and try to find a supporting colour which compliments or enhances your initial choice. Try to balance up usage of colour tones all over your website too. If you think that the upper right of your website is too bright compared to the rest of your page, then either you reduce the brightness to equal the overall layout or simply brighten up the rest of the website, in a controlled manner of course. If you're adventurous, replicate that bright top right area to the bottom right area, making the right area somewhat a "bright coloured zone". The key point here is to maintain the balance of your colour usage. You don't want to drive a car with one of the door being slightly and yet obviously darker or lighter.

Lastly but not least, try to limit the number of colours to a reasonable amount. 2 to 4 are good amount of colours, not counting black and white. Black and white are just simply too important to not to be used. If you really need to use extra colours, try to use a darker or lighter version of your main colours. If your main colour is red, wine red, crimson or even maroon are good alternatives. Even certain tone of brown could actually look like red sometimes. Try to "recolour" your graphics or get some graphics which tally with your overall selection of colours.

Another good concept to follow is to apply a colour scheme according to your logo. If you logo has orange and black for example, try to enhance that colour by applying those same colours as well as the same colours with different tones throughout your whole website. Some designers even select their colours based on the pre selected images they have for their website. Certain images are just tend to be too exceptionally perfect to be omitted, thus explaining such occurrences.

I hope this guide will help you to get your colours right and have a better understanding of what to choose and what not to do in any of your future web design works. Nevertheless, try not to limit your creativity and imagination based solely on this article. Get your ideas flowing and experiment with your ideas constantly. Good luck!