Web Designer : Time to get one.

There are many signs that can tell you that you need a web designer to hire. These symptoms include losing users as quickly as they arrive on your site, users constantly rely on the same page, your site is not listed on search engines, and much more.

A web designer is the best person you can rent for your online business if you find something wrong with your site. Many companies are online and they do not give their site a chance by having a designer for the first look. There are ways to tell why a site is not doing well online. A designer can do research needed to determine why the company is not going well and what needs to be done to correct the problem.

If you find that users never stay on your site for longer than 5 seconds, when they arrive on the home page then you may need a few simple things to change. A web designer can confirm what problems users have to leave. These problems can easily if the wrong colors are too light for the users eyes, a page that takes too long to load, and other things.

If you have many visitors to your site, but you’ll find them all leaving the site at the exact same page than maybe there is something wrong with that page. A website designer can help determine problematic pages and make them perfect, so they keep the user instead of running away. If you want users to your site and let them upon arrival you will need to hire a web designer.

One of the biggest problems that cause companies to fail online is they do not appear on the search results. A successful company always has a decent grade. A decent grade in at least the first or second page of the results of the search engines with keywords about the products and services offered by your company.

There are many signs that you might be experiencing that would be a red flag that you need a website designer to hire to help you with your online business signal. You will notice from your site once they arrive or at a specific page. You may not even be able to find your business on search engines. If your online business experience those things have to go to a website designer to hire for the company to run.

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Website Designer: better.

You have ideas and they’re great ideas. The problem is you’re not a web designer and you have no idea what it takes to make all those great designs you’ve seen on other websites. Fortunately, youdon’t have your ideas put on ice until you can go back to school and learn how a web designer, because you can hire an expert web designer to do the work for you.

Before you rush to the search engine and type in web designer, there are a number of considerations. First, you need more than just a few ideas in mind and you never need a generic search with only a title like the one just mentioned, or you’re sure to recover at least three million hits, most of which will have little or nothing to do with the type of expert you are looking to rent.

Take the time to your ideas to give coherence and synergy. Make sure you have a good idea what you want so you can effectively to convey these thoughts to the expert if you find them. Be prepared to offer constructive criticism and positive suggestions for how best to design your Web presence to accept. You are after all, hiring an expert and be someone you trust to give you their best to help you in turn, present your best.

A high quality web presence is the right color combinations, the correct text, graphics or photos needed, virtual tours where appropriate and sound to the professional look that you see on people because your company to show. Skillful website designers understand the importance of all these facets and how they work for you.

When choosing a person or company to this kind of work for you, you can expect to make some realistic costs. Seeking the services of the best website designer is not you, it means that you will have to spend a small fortune to get the work done. Just be sure that prices and services are clear for money exchanges hands and the work starts.

The most important factor when hiring a web designer is to communicate. If your deadline is short, this is very important to a web designer who may already be juggling several projects that have a short schedule. A professional web presence that load quickly, attracts customers and process the transactions you need to have done is worth the investment.

There is no doubt that the Internet is here to stay. Companies that advertise online to use the opportunity to showcase the goods or services they offer to people around the world. Your company deserves the same attention and the services of a smart web site designer, you can continue with your business and leaving all the initiatives of the design professionals who are skilled at making the best website on the Internet period! Hire a professional website designer and experience the difference can make your website profit!

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Website Designer: Choosing the best

In the present times that the Internet has proved an important medium for conducting business are, most people prefer their online business and sell their products to launch under a wider range of audience success and maximum return on their capital gain. And what people can help achieve this goal are “effective” web design and web development services. This is because, the fact is that a simple looking website with simple and outdated functions can not do wonders for your business. Instead of what can really help in boosting your sales and your reputation are so creative, beautiful and functional websites. Hence, in a nutshell it can be said that web services you can provide a website that is supported by interesting and informative content, easy navigation and also to use is what counts the most in online business successful.

The above factors make it necessary for online business owners of a highly functional and attractive website that is able to attract potential visitors and thus maintain their focus on the conversion to the customer / client. This factor has led to the increasing demand of web design services, followed by the emergence of numerous web design and web development services in almost every part of the world. However, it is true that the web design in Hong Kong but has been successful in gaining the confidence of the people with useful and creative services. So if you are planning your online business to start or renew your existing website, you can find very good quality if you spend time in looking for the web design and development service provider like http://www.source . com.hk / who can provide quality services.

Moreover, it is necessary to mention that since web design and web development is perhaps the most important aspect of a website, it is very necessary for you to use the services of the service provider are well equipped with the latest developments and features of advanced applications to provide you with excellent returns. So with this mind, we make out certain information which will greatly help you in choosing the best web design company.

Here are the aspects that you should ensure that the web design company you are, is well equipped with approaching (if you think of the reorganization of your website)

• The web design you choose should be clear and easily understood and used.

• Easy navigation and layout is a must to provide convenience to visitors.

• color and design you choose to use should be simple yet attractive and eye-catchy.

• It is also necessary to mention that no matter what the approach of your service, whether he wants to use content management system, also known as Web CMS or the manual procedure, the bottom line is that their services should be capable enough to offer you a beautifully designed website.

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Website Designers, Be Great!

It is probably safe to say that at least one quarter of the people on the internet have a website of their own, at one point or another. Some are very easy to start, while others are a bit harder to get up and moving.

The good news is that there are many ways to start a website, and you do not take a genius to a computer to do. You can easily, or you get something great without a lot about web design or computer programming codes to know. – Bob

Website designing is a very competitive field. Today there are many companies from the website, but only some of them are at the highest level.

It is not easy to design your website in the world to improve furthermore website designing concepts only understand by some of the people. If you want your website design is the best then you must follow these steps.

Firstly, when you start designing your website, make sure that what you want your visitor appeal. Because if you the fundamental idea that what you do, then it certainly more suitable for you.

Create a template that shows how your website will appear. Make sure your site is actually designed.

Second, make sure your site is visually according to your need. Try the appropriate level of creativity to use. It should not be just to decorate your page. You should use only appropriate graphics and visual design of your visitors who can be useful to improve.

Third, you content interesting and informative. It should also have clear and good ideas as essential as abstractions that your visitors entertained. The content may not be such as bluffing and duplication.

Tip: Make your web design flow for good navigation

Fourthly, your whole website designs have a very useful and easy to navigate. Ensure that appropriate navigation of the site to be. Your website must be user friendly design that is easily usable by visitors.

Fifthly, during your website designs take into account the principle of search engine optimization. You need to install it properly, the right meta tags in your website.

Choose a suitable domain name for your website.

Try to use your keywords more in your website design will be, because increasing the amount of traffic on your web page. You must build a solid technical support system for your customers as a professional website designer.

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Website Designer Frustrations

I believe some people create and publish websites for the sole purpose of tormenting their visitors. Browsing various websites and navigating the Web can often be like trying to read on an airplane while a kid kicking the back of your seat and the baby next to you alternates between screaming, crying and drooling on you. There are some excellent websites for sure, but there are a lot of terrible ones too. The latter are the bane of so many people there, especially those who use the site regularly.

The Net continues to grow in popularity and importance as consumers and businesses. Therefore, the quality of the sites should be continuous. Creating and maintaining websites of high quality is more important than ever. Higher quality means higher revenue.

Below are the top ten ways that a website designer misses the boat and contributes to hair loss and nervous breakdowns. Notice the common thread that runs throughout each of these. Namely, a bad website neglects to consider the site visitor experience in some fundamental ways.

1. Animation
Seven-year-olds like watching cartoons on Saturday morning, business people, professionals and most other adults. Sites that flashy Flash animations as an ‘include Intro’, animated gifs on every page, or flying words are really annoying. They take away the content and distract the visitor from achieving their goals. Unless your site is an entertainment site, try to avoid maddening motion. However, if your product or service can be better demonstrated using Flash, Quick Time or other multimedia, which is common, offer your visitors the chance to click a link to view it. But do not force them.

2. Too much scrolling
Once I scroll down a full screen’s worth, my eyes begin to blur, I feel somewhat lost, turning my head and my interest is decreasing. Computer monitors really are not the best medium for reading. The Net and many sites are so large that it is important to always clear reference to your visitors at all times while on your site. If a page requires two full screens scrolling or more, simply split into multiple pages.

3. Long, text-heavy and blocky paragraphs of unbroken text
I must really be a topic or desperately need the information to find out slogging through large tracts of unbroken text online. If I’m just shopping around for a product or service, you have lost me as I endure such torture. Again, it is difficult to read text on the Web than in other media such as books. Moreover, Web users are notoriously impatient, so make your content easy to read and not intimidating. Use titles, subtitles, small paragraphs, bullets and numbering.

4. No obvious ways to contact the company
If all you offer is an e-mail on your website, your legitimacy may be questioned. Why can not you answer the phone? Why hide behind an anonymous email address and cold? Make it easy for your existing and potential customers to talk with you.

5. Unchanging or outdated content
If I start reading content on a site and soon discover that the content was written three years ago, I split. With so much information out there, my reasoning is that there really comparable information online that is more power to be. If you fresh content on your site will attract repeat visitors. And returning visitors are more likely to convert into customers.

6. Long page downloads
It is amazing that this is still a problem. When I click on a site and have to sit there waiting to appear in my browser, I start sweating, picking my teeth, tapping my toes, rolling my eyes and soon want to throw my computer through my office. I’m obviously a little impatient, but again, I know there are other sites out there with the same information faster to download, so why wait? I’m gone.

7. “Me, me, me!” instead of “You, you, you ‘
In general, nobody cares about you, your company or your thoughts. What they do is care about what you can do for them. So sites that show pictures of the farm building or tout their deep philosophy on the way business should be conducted really do not bode well for keeping the interest of visitors of the site. On the other hand, sites that talk directly with potential customers about how they solve problems, make their lives easier, safer, richer or more comfortable have a much better chance of keeping the eyeballs glued.

8. Non-explanatory buttons or links
Here are some examples of the buttons let me dazed and confused: A wedding site with a button called “Blanco”, a site with sailing on a button called ‘The Lighthouse’, a book site with a button called ‘The Inside Story’ or a web site with a button called “Tea Time”. They sound like Jeopardy categories. Imagine trying to find your way on a highway where the different signs read here, “” Moon beams’ and ‘Lollypops’. Good luck navigating your way through. It’s the same with navigating websites. Button and link names to the user where the link leads to tell. Make it as easy as possible for a visitor to know where they’re going before they click. However, there are times when naming a link an ambiguous name may pique the curiosity of a user and get them clicking. But as a general rule, keep your links and buttons as descriptive as possible.

9. Inconsistent navigation
Imagine sitting in a restaurant and the waiter comes to you and hands you five different menus, one for appetizers, one for soups and salads, one for the starter, one for desserts, and one for drinks. Annoying. Now imagine if each menu had a different format, layout and method for listing the items. Brutal. I really do not want to work hard when choosing my food, I’m hungry and I just want a meal. Keep your visitors work hard either by expecting them to re-learn your navigation each time they enter another section of your site. They too are hungry, for useful information and they are even more impatient.

10. Inconsistent look and feel
When the look and feel entirely from one page to another in a website, I think I have another site, another company, a partner or daughter to visit. I get very confused. This screams poor planning and often results from tacking on new sections later after the original site was built. This can lead to design drift. It may be tempting to deviate from the original design, you can now have a better design. But wait until you get an entirely new generation re-design of the entire site before introducing a new look and feel. If not, then many visitors scratching their heads with one hand and possibly clicking away with the other.

Finally, a site that some of these notorious features is particularly painful to work experience. When I click on a site with five different fonts and colors, move to the core of the earth, takes zinging words and big blocks of text, lists no phone number and has content written and dated in 1996, I scream and know deep inside that pulling my fingernails are not as torturous as a minute longer to stay.

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Website designers know what they’re doing!

As hard as it can, but letting go of your website design ideas and listening to the customer can even benefit in the long term.

I know what you’re saying, you’re in the web design business long enough to know what works and just does not know what would be my customer? Well after approaching web design in the same way, I unfortunately had no option but to give my best laid plans and fulfill the wishes of my clients.

Construction of good websites usually means that it is too attractive to the eye, but also as a fully functioning for Search Engine benefits, but must display professionalism for the industry represented.

Comply with the W3C standards (W3C Markup Validation Service) for both HTML and CSS validation is crucial for a good design and programming (but not necessarily for the good Google PR), so we like to design the basic HTML and CSS Tahoma 11pt font formatting such use, to clean easily applied to text and image page layouts fun to read.

I will list some cases where the release has benefits for both parties involved and how in some cases actually resulted in little or no web traffic for the website.

Case Study 1. Architectural flash and font issues

Our client wanted to use Flash elements to different architectural display images with a nice transition between the images and changes in the original CSS Font used 11pt Tahoma font and replaced by Century Gothic 11pt, which is used in all their logos and the architectural design work.

As most would know embedding Flash files into your website results in W3C Validation undefined source failure, making the site invalid format. After explaining this, the customer felt the need for a nice graphical style flash image many times larger than the importance of quality Transitional valid HTML markup. For them, the appearance and perception of their website to their customers was much more favorable than meets the W3C.

In addition, they wanted to use the Century Gothic font instead of Tahoma. In designing Century Gothic has a much higher altitude than Tahoma and when the page is used increased height is greater than when using Tahoma resulting in the site are displayed with scroll bars to view under 1024 x 768 resolution, where previously it fitted across the page perfectly.

At the end of the customer’s desired effect they wanted and ultimately it is the customer who “always knows best.

Case Study 2. Box supplier is packaged in

Our client had started a new business delivering cardboard boxes for moving and packing. They wanted a simple site with heavy graphical image elements and little or no text on the home page.

Explain to customers the role of text-based search engine results and that having no “clear text” on the home page would reduce their visibility, they choose the design results.
Why you may ask would a company limit their ability to be found on search engines? Well the question still burns in us, but as mentioned earlier the ‘customer always knows best “and the decision is only to make them.

Their philosophy was simple, their website was purely for use as reference and not the additional source of business, as their marketing strategies would be enough to consistently garner business.

To this day I still wonder why they limited their marketability and especially on their website always online and can be searched at all times of the day.

So in short the best laid plans of mice and men (in this case web designers) can be a waste of perfectly good management as what I’ve said along that the ‘customer always knows best’ and eventually they are the ones paying for your service so sometimes its best to determine your guns and recognize defeat.

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Website Design Maintenance

Internet technology has advanced by leaps and bounds because of the number of websites are launched on the Internet. If the site is well located on the network your success is determined. Regardless of the objectives of your website should be maintained.

There are many reasons why the sites should be maintained. Your website design is your company profile on the Internet, which helps in converting your site visitor into your customer. It is essential to this profile on the network to maintain.

The websites are subject to cyber crimes such as phishing, spam, spreading viruses, fooling around with people’s personal accounts, etc., which are initiated by destructive hackers. In order to deal with this anti-social elements maintain the websites have become a necessity. Company sites are generally managed by their own IT department or EDP division. Some times the work is outsourced to companies specializing in the field of maintaining websites.

There are several factors that are considered to maintain the website.

Website traffic:
To understand the popularity of your website it is necessary to analyze site traffic. Site traffic refers to the daily hits received by your website from different sources. This report gives a thorough analysis of the pages on your site more popular, and also tells you about the sources where it is visited. Based on these reports provide a site can be renovated apt site promotion.

Link Validation:
Link validation is the most common part of web maintenance regime. This includes checking all links on your website to ensure that they are all in working condition. Having broken links gives a bad impression on your site.

Review Contents:
Content on a website is updated on a regular basis, depending on the type of industry and the diversity of visitors. Details such as new address, phone number etc are regularly updated regardless of the type of industry. A company must at this small but important additions to their existing content. In general, article publishing sites to add graphics to their websites.

Optimizing the images:
Images make websites more attractive. But these images take up much space on the website. To ensure faster downloads the image on the page visitors maintenance is essential. Optimizing images is very necessary because the loading speed and performance of the website affects.

Link Popularity:
This is done by search engine optimization or SEO. SEO refers to exchanging links with other sites of related domain. Link popularity is measured by the incoming and outgoing links on your website. The greater the number of links on your website, the higher the Page Rank. Maintenance helps make the site more search engine friendly.

Content Archival:
Newsletter article or a website rich in content. These sites should be a mechanism by which old content is archived and is available on request. These websites have a huge database of content that must be managed accordingly. This is done via the website site maintenance. But in this case, people who specialize in maintaining databases required. This is very important and time-consuming maintenance of the website profile.

Web Server Maintenance:
Server is the home of your website. Most of the third party hosting companies have their websites. The hosting company provides technical maintenance of your company. The routine maintenance includes monitoring of your server disk space, bandwidth and efficient performance. This form of maintenance is a regular affair and very easy to implement.

Layouts change:
Layout change is not a normal routine maintenance of the website. Layout change includes changing the whole website design and structure of the website of either the home or specific pages. They may include additional pictures, flash, graphics, content, etc.

The objective of any enterprise website maintenance is to keep the site attractive and up-to-date and to attract and retain visitors. Website Maintenance Company is a full-time and very responsible job, especially for websites that are continuously changing content. Also, a highly technical job, have a lot of software tools are to automate the process, but the uniqueness of each web site is not fully help of automation.

The focus of maintaining a website is to keep fresh, up dated and attractive to visitors. Maintaining a website is a very serious matter if you are dealing with whole personality of a business on the net.

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Website Designer: Choosing the right one!

It’s been several years since you had someone design your company web site and it is now obsolete. You lose business to competitors that quality web sites designed with great layout and navigation. This could be your first company website, and you want the best of your time and money.

How to choose a quality web design company that your business’ target for the design and redesign of this website will understand?

First you have a few questions.

1. What is your budget and time frame for completion of the web design or redesign project?
2. Are you using original content and photos for building this web site?
3. If this is a site redesign, do you plan to update images and content for this new look and layout of the web design company you need to supply to him for you?
4. Does anyone in your company has a basic writing skills and are able to view the contents of a website to update or will continuously work for a web design company you hire?
5. Are you looking for a local web design company?
6. Do you have an idea of your web design colors, layout and navigation?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help you if you have the right web design company can be found.

Now is the time to the right web design company available for your needs. Go to Google and search for local web design companies and you will see how many results to show. Take “Orlando web design” example: Results 8,860,000. Wow, there are lots of results for “web design Orlando.

Do not panic, you’ll probably a company that the quality of web design work you can do in the first 50 results. Quality web design firms will have a online portfolio of work that an example of their custom web design work will show. Start with the first web design result on the work your way down.

Examination of the portfolio to see if there is anything similar to the web design layout you imagine. You can tell immediately if this web design company is right for your company and its look and feel. Find out how long they have been in the web design industry and compare that with how many quality web sites they have designed at that time.
If this is a redesign, find out how many web site redesigns that have completed the website and ask to see before and after the redesign.

Find out if they have the staff available to work on all your web design needs and that they Programming Necessary to complete the work in a timely way to know. Ask for references, a top-end web design company will be happy to offer references on the web design work. Most web design references will be glad to talk to you about the quality job your potential web design company has on their website.

Depending on your web design budget, it may help to several quality web design companies to talk. You want to get at least 3 estimates and it does not hurt more.

Remember, when it comes to your business and your exposure to companies on the Internet, take your time locating a quality web design company. Your future may depend on it.

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Website Design : Get it seen

The Web has become a real jungle, and finding great new sites today is not always the easiest thing in the world. If you have a website yourself, you have to deal with the other side of this issue. How do you get noticed online, is there anything you can do to increase your popularity?

There certainly are! Here are the top five ways to enhance your site and increase your online visibility.
1. Powerful Hosting

This first point is especially important for those who do not have a website, but would like one to. After you have selected your domain name, the next step is choosing a hosting plan. There are many good, affordable alternatives, but what professionals usually recommend specialized blog hosting. This form of Web hosting you can set up a professional looking site in no time at all. Why is this important to mention when it comes to making your site more popular? Well, without strong hosting, you will not be able to handle the traffic to your new website, so you have no chance at all of the still very popular.

Of course, finding strong hosting is often easier said than done. The hosting industry has grown very popular in recent years, and this has led to a large number of companies offer different hosting services. But do not be fooled by the tricky way of making it sound like they are the best in the industry. We recommend that you work with a company that developed a strong reputation and experience in the industry. You could start by searching for Web Hosting reviews and other information to help you find the right fit.

When it comes to hosting, you should compare the various features of the plan. Make sure you at least 99.9% uptime guarantee and the customer support is easy to get. You never know when you might need them. Similarly, it is also good to know exactly what kind of numbers in terms of disk space and bandwidth you will not use and manage. Some providers also forbid their clients to the music or video files to upload to their servers even if it is for personal use. It is important to ask customer support for these problems before purchasing a plan. Some other things you might consider asking your domain name or registration information will be protected and how many email accounts you can use as part of the hosting agreement.
2. Optimize Your Website

To be truly successful online, you need a high ranking in search engines to get. To succeed in this, you should learn as much as you can about search engine optimization (SEO). The topic of SEO is extensive and can be quite daunting at first, but once you have mastered, you can immediately see the benefits and will probably wonder why you do not get to work with before. A few things you can do to get to ensure you get the right keywords to use and require your visitors and search engines. Writing for search engines is important because you want to get a high ranking, and writing for the visitors is essential because you want them to linger and return to your website.

If you are satisfied with the keywords and content on your site, it’s time to start working with link building. Search engines provide a large proportion of the value of a particular page / site by looking at the number of incoming links. Link exchange is one of the most popular and successful ways to a good position on search engines to get, and it’s really easy to do. Just a Web site that you want and ask the webmaster if they are interested in a link exchange – it does not need to be more complicated than that.

Having something interesting and distinctive on your page is a great way to attract potential partners link. For example, if you have a website domain names, why not a domain name availability checker to your homepage? It is likely to attract links from other sites related to the niche, and people will tend to come back if they want to know if a domain is available or not. Try more creative ways to distinguish yourself from competitors.
3. Benefit from Social Media Optimization

Although SEO, much of your site should be optimized, should not end there. Social Media Optimization is probably just as important, because it is one of the strongest marketing tools available today. A social media optimization campaign, a few different things. First make sure the content on your site or blog relevant to your subject and not outdated. Visit similar sites and enter the discussion in responding to messages / articles – do not be afraid to say what’s on your mind. Make yourself visible on Facebook and MySpace. Three other sites that might be useful for social media optimization, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. The latter two are not always applicable. Make sure you only take advantage of them when the time comes – you might do more harm than good if you do not.

Of course, do not forget your outgoing links to your website on a social media site use. Even if your link has a “nofollow” attribute attached to it (such as Facebook) will continue to attract new visitors and potential customers to your site. Finally, your campaign must be built on friendly platforms such as CoffeeCup Flash Blogger ™, which make it easy to create and edit content.
4. Get Involved Your Visitors

A crucial point to your site to grow in the number of visitors is concerned by them. Try to write in a personal style, and do not be afraid to leave an open question. If this should not do, why not hold a contest? This will most likely get people talking about your site. The price need not cost a fortune because people want, no matter what the price is competitive – it’s human nature.

Other easy ways to engage your visitors by including a forum on your site or the ability to respond to your posts / articles. Everyone wants to express their own personal ideas and thoughts on subjects and by doing them, you can also stimulate the return of visitors to see how their feedback was appreciated. As an added bonus, if the topic is more popular, the debate to attract interest from other websites too!
5. Emphasize usability into your design

Investing in good design is more important than some people seem to think. With a beautiful design, you will grow in confidence for your readers / visitors. An important fact to remember is not over-design of the website. No matter how many hours you’ve put into designing the site if no one understands how to use it. Let a number of non-Internet-savvy friends to navigate through your site before launching a full scale. If they find it easy, so the rest of your visitors.

It is difficult to say what a beautiful and functional design. What looks good to one person looks terrible for another. There are fundamental developments in web design, and if you, you can be sure most of your visitors please. A few popular web design trends for 2009 are multi-column layouts, large illustrations, and lots of white space.

If you wish to remain on the safe side, it’s a good conversation to the layout and design features make the page easily accessible and easy to understand. Try the default encoding and over-the-top Flash animations to occur. Some people can browser settings prevent them from viewing Flash, which means you could lose valuable visitors. Try to think how the visitor thinks, and your site will grow more popular and respected every day.

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Web Designer Tips

Web Designing is as easy as 1-2-3, claiming some of the software tools on the market that “generate” your pages for you. Unfortunately, many web designers today have fallen prey to this marketing gimmick – and the results are clear. Now and then one comes to a website that looks good with a particular browser and a screen, but look at it with a different browser, and you can not even read the plain text on the page. Worse, the number of operating systems that are used by netizens worldwide is given, these pages are not well seen by more than half the target surfers.

Let us suppose that this belongs to a web site that sells stuff online. The fact that half the users can not even see the page, translates into losses worth half the amount at once (maybe more) I think that makes a good case for the raison d’etre of this product! Web Design is, in my opinion, a cocktail of creative skills and technical competence – and no less important than the other.

In the following lines, I wrote down a few points I noticed during my travels online, important from the perspective of web designers. Some of them may be taken with a grain of salt because it is impossible to please everyone every time. But most of them are simple enough to be used as a rule of thumb.

1. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. A picture file, alas, is almost as large. Images, no doubt, improve the appearance of a page, but it is not advisable to go overboard in your page filled with images of a truck. Net surfers use a dial-up connection, and the average time to load a page should not exceed 5 seconds. If it is longer, the surfer will probably click away elsewhere. So, within this period all images on a page as well be loaded. So, as a rough yardstick, keep the total page size less than 30k.

Another important point to note is that each file at a separate HTTP request to the server. So many small images – even if they do not add up to much in terms of bytes – will slow down loading a lot.

Even if you use images for navigation, give a second thought to the users not seeing those jazzy, fantastic & amazing buttons that you spent hours to design. Yes, I’m talking about the ALT text attribute of the IMG tag. Do not forget to provide an alternate text for each image you use for navigation. (It can be left blank for certain images that are purely for aesthetic reasons, but let that one exception than the rule.) Although not apparent, ALT text can greatly help those users.

Modern browsers offer users the option to disable images. This gives an idea of how troublesome the unwanted images can be.

A few more attributes that your pages load faster are the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. Without this, your browser must wait for the image to download because it can not know how much to leave them!
2.

Navigability & functionality come before artistic excellence. It is no use making your site a masterpiece of art and the user can not navigate – even after they reach the main page, they have no idea how to go where they want to go.
3.

Above have in common is a kind of navigation that some people call Mystery Meat Navigation. This means that unless your mouse moves over an image, you have no idea where that link can be found here. Only when the mouse you see the actual link. This is cumbersome because users need to move the mouse over the place to find out which part is a link and what not.
4.

Follow K.I.S.S. principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid!
5.

Next is a very important practical suggestion: if your entire page in a table, the page can not be created (ie, the page will not appear on the screen) unless the entire table is downloaded. You might have noticed that on several websites, when there is no activity for a long time, and suddenly the entire page is visible. Hence suché to avoid a situation, you have to do is this: Split the table into two tables to each other, and let the top one be a short table That just the page header and a few navigation links displays. So now, immediately upon downloading this part of the page, users can see the header of the page – and prepares them for the long wait ahead, evenals she loves leaving your site to go to other sites, in the case of a slow connection.
6.

The ongoing browser wars have only one victim – the user. As a word of caution, stay away from all browser-specific functions. Because if a certain feature is supported by a browser, it will certainly not be supported by another. What you need these features, it should not hamper the display of the page in another browser that does not support such functionality. In other words, your page must gracefully break.
7.

Creating a new browser window to the authority of the user alone. Do not try to popup new windows to clutter the user. All links should open in the same window. An exception can be made for pages containing a list of links. It is useful in such cases, links will open in another window so the user can return to the links page itself. Even in such cases it is advisable to provide the user a prior note that links would open in a new window.
8.

Keep in mind the fonts-challenged users too. The ultra-jazzy “Cloister Black MT Light” font that looks so great on your machine can also be degraded in normal old Times New Roman on your user’s machine. The reason? He / she does not have the font installed on his / her machine – and one thing is clear – there is nothing you can do about the situation, sitting halfway across the world from them.
9.

Stay away from out-of-the-way hard-to-find fonts. Use plain vanilla fonts like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma and Courier. If necessary, make your jazzy fonts into an image and puts it on the page. (And while you’re there, do not forget Tip # 1.)
10.

A new design trick that is increasingly being used on the web has caught my imagination: It is a very functional navigation bar that guides you through all possible paths within the site. It looks something like this:

Home> Section> Subsection> Page

What is better than your users a convenient way of visiting just about every other page on your site, and inform them where they are!
11.

Another new trend on the web is not so inviting – various vendors come up with “revolutionary plug-ins” and undoubtedly the most amateur web designers jump up to spruce their pages using them. The reality is that most people do not have installed and would not care. Come to think of it, have you seen plug-ins on one of the most popular sites, including Yahoo.com, Amazon.com or Google.com? It’s just not the best thing to do . mention should be made here of Macromedia’s Shockwave Flash plug-in, which now has made its way on most computers today, and thus presents no harm in using vector animation on your site.
12.

Java is an often misused technology on webpages. Using Java programming language as a utilitarian, and not as a graphical frontend for your photos / images. There are several things you can do with Java, that does not mean you should do them all. Java applets are known to run slower, so users experience a certain sluggishness in performance. And what is worse is that Java is known that certain browsers crash. This is not something that everyone likes, especially when it is done for the sole purpose of showing a series of images in a slideshow!

The moral: Use it, but with discretion.
13.

Never underestimate the importance of the META tags. They can make the difference between your users coming to your site and go to your competitor – just because they could not find yours. Search engines depend heavily on the Keywords & Description Meta tags to their search database to fill. And again, the use in the writing of that discretion. Including a large number of keywords for the same page can spell trouble. The description should be a small, meaningful summary of the entire page that way even when out-of-context of the webpage itself, say will be in a list of search engine results.
14.

And the last point that all the points summarized so: Write for all browsers, all resolutions and all color depths. If you show people pages that look the best with their browser and their own resolution, which makes them feel “at home”, and you get a better response. Compare this with a website that proclaims “best viewed with Browser X at a resolution of 1024×768.” I’ll give you a choice between two options when you see a page like this: download the suggested browser (which could well be over 50 Megs), then you have a new monitor that supports high-resolution, and then your screen so you set the perfect photo. Or simply click away to another site. What do you prefer?

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