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Are You Choosing Your Website Colors Safely?
Many designers are overlooking the vitality of colors in creating a web site. Why is it vital? It is because it creates a mood – it can annoy, irritate or interest and uplift the spirit of the visitors. Your site can end up plain and boring or...
Bring Your Web Site to Life With PHP
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, better known as PHP, is a highly popular, server-side scripting language that can be embedded directly into HTML coding. PHP can do anything that CGI can do, such as process form data and auto generate dynamic content,...
Catalog Design Essentials
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getting outrageous. Good catalogs should look enticing and
pleasing in order to sell out. In order to come up with the
greatest designs for your catalog should follow some simple
rules....
Conceptualize, Build and Publish a Web site
Conceptualize, Build and Publish a Web site - What's required to get started All of us knowingly or unknowingly, use a standard decision making process in our day-to-day lives. The very first step of this process is to decide whether TO DO...
How To Double Or Triple Your Page Views?
It's easy, just design and engineer your main page in such a fashion that people will click beyond it into the rest of your site. If you are like a lot of webmasters, you're losing a significant number of visitors as soon as they get to your front...
How to Get Your Visitors to Create Content for Your Website
An ongoing challenge for webmasters today is to provide fresh content that gives visitors a reason to return to their site. Unless you have a full-time staff dedicated to creating regular content, the time involved can be crippling. Wouldn't it be...
How to Prepare Images for Your Web Site – Part 1
You are staring at the your monitor waiting for the image to download. It finally appears but it has blurry edges. You go to the next page but can't read the text because of the dark image in the background. The next page has animated images, that...
MAKING THE MOST OF WHAT YOU'VE GOT!
According to a new survey carried out by Alliance & where ID_NUM=9270; Leicester, one in five small business owners view tax as their greatest concern. The Chancellor has announced in his last budget that companies with profits below œ10,000...
Web Site Optimization: How to Optimize PDF Files for Web Sites
Portable Document Format (PDF) is the defacto file format for presenting device-independent documents on and off the Web. While PDFs have become quite popular on the Web, many PDFs used in web sites are designed for high quality print output and are...
When your graphic designer costs you money…
So how do you know when your graphic designer costs you financially and emotionally? When a file is not prepared correctly… When you go to press and have your media material produced in prints, and find out that the file was built incorrectly,...
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8 Tips for Designing a Great Website
Square buttons, round buttons, flashy buttons … will they match my shoes, my handbag or my tie? Are you stuck in a maze of buttons, headings, bullets, sub-headings and colour schemes?
STOP!!!!
Take a deep breath and read some practical tips for professional looking websites.
1. Select a colour scheme and stick to it.
If your company has a logo or preferred colours on its stationery that’s a good start. For those of you starting from scratch, choose two or three complementary colours and stick with them – don’t change colours on every page.
The most common colour schemes include:
- Red, yellow and white
- Blue and white
- Red, grey and white
- Blue, orange and white
- Yellow, grey and white.
If you’re not sure what colour scheme to choose, surf the internet and find a website that you like. You can then model your colour scheme on what already exists.
2. Use templates.
Can’t find a website you really like? Another option is to choose a template. There are many templates or pre-set designs. These come as part of your web design software (such as FrontPage) or you can check out some websites that specialise in designing templates.
Visit:
www.web4business.com.au emplates1.htm
www.newtemps.com
www.website-templates-resale-rights.com
www.123webtemplatesandmore.com
3. Provide an easy to use navigation system.
This is one of the most important issues to consider when designing a website. You need to ensure your visitors can find what they are looking for easily. Most websites either display their navigation bar on the left or at the top. And since most people are used to this type of navigation, it’s best to stick with it.
It also helps to include your navigation bar at the bottom of each page to save your visitors from having to scroll back to the top.
4. Don’t go overboard on special effects
Whilst it is ok to have one or two special effects to jazz up your website, spinning graphics and logos often distract your visitor from the content, not to mention
they can take too long to download. Your visitors may click away even before your spinning logo finishes loading.
5. Backgrounds
Ensure your visitors can read the text on the background, ie. no black writing on dark blue background or yellow on white. Also be careful that your links are visible before and after being visited. The default for links in most programs is blue (before being visited) and burgundy (after being visited), so if you have a dark background, ensure your links are light.
6. External Links
It is a good idea to open links to other websites in a new window. That way your visitors can easily return to your site when they are finished browsing the external link
7. Site Map & Search Feature
If you website is more than 15 pages, it is useful to have a site map or a “Search” feature to ensure your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.
8. Content is King
While it is important that your website looks clean and professional, it is far more important that you concentrate your efforts on the content and promotion.
If you want a professional website, things to stay away from include:
1. Flash intros, revolving globes, bevelled line separators, animated mail boxes
2. Loads of pop up or pop under boxes
3. Autoplay music. Allow your customer to play music only if they choose.
4. Hit counters of the free variety, which say “you are 27th visitor”
5. Date and time stamps, unless your website is updated daily or weekly
6. Busy backgrounds.
Don’t sweat the small stuff and get yourself focussed on what to include on the website and the best way to promote it. We will cover these topics in future articles.
About the Author
Ivana Katz is the owner of Websites 4 Small Business, a company specialising in the design and promotion of small and home-based business websites. She believes that every business deserves to have a successful website, no matter what its budget is. For more information visit www.web4business.com.au or email info@web4business.com.au
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