Web Design and all stuff related to it!

When followed, this guide will prove to be quite a valuable web design resource. From the inexperienced to the experienced, this guide has something for everyone.

The Process of Great Web Design Just to make sure we are all on the same page, lets begin with the basic definition for "web design". According to Wikipedia, web design is:

"a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic media delivery via Internet in the form of Markup language suitable for interpretation by Web browser and display as Graphical user interface".

The process of web design can be compared to the process of writing a research paper. In the conceptualization/planning stage, flowcharts (the outline) are created which illustrate the navigational structure of your website. In the modeling stage, static wireframes are created (the rough draft) which illustrate the skeletal layout for each section of your website. After the wire frames are created, graphics, colors and text are used to create the design of your web pages based on the layout of the wire frames. In the execution stage, your design is converted into a format supported by web browsers, text and content are added, and finally, your website is published live to the Internet for the world to see (final draft).

All three stages of the design process are equally important. Many web designers skip a stage in order to save time or because they don’t think that is is necessary. However, all three stages are necessary if your goal is to create a successful design and respectable website. Even if the three stages are used, there are many mistakes that web designers can make that will lead to poor-quality, non user-friendly websites.

It’s time to clean out the cabinet of bad web design practices and restock it with the good ones.

Stage 1: Conceptualization and planning

This stage is skipped more often than the other two stages. Most writers don’t enjoy creating outlines for research papers, and most web designers don’t like creating flowcharts either. Don’t be lazy. If you put forth the effort and plan out your website, then you will find the web design process to go smoothly with fewer mistakes made along the way.

There are a few things that you will need in order to effectively conceptualize and plan your website:

-a brain

-a pen and paper

-(optional) flowchart software

-a general idea of the different sections of your website

To begin, grab your pen and paper or launch your favorite flowchart software. We use OmniGraffle Professiona for Mac OS X which costs $150 per license but is well worth it if you create websites on a regular basis. If you’re on a PC, then SmartDraw is a great FREE piece of flowchart software that you can use. A pen and paper work just fine, though.

There are many methods to creating flowcharts. We are going to show you the most basic way to do it for the sake of time and the length of this article. If you want to learn more about flowcharts search for flowcharts on Google or Yahoo.

View the flowchart that we created when conceptualizing Chromatic Sites. (1) At the top of the flowchart we list the name of our website. (2) Next, we include each primary section of our website: Home, About, and Services. These sections are the main navigation for your website. What the names of each section will be is entirely dependent on the content of your website. Try to use as few sections as possible so that your visitors are not overwhelmed when navigating through your website.

(3) Next, add all of the secondary pages (subsections) that will be listed on each of the primary pages. For Home, we have included Professional Web Design, Web Development, and Search Engine Optimization. The secondary navigation needs to be more descriptive than the primary navigation. The deeper your websites’ navigational hierarchy goes, the more descriptive each label should be.

The Dos

-Less is more; keep the number of primary sections to a minimum. We use 6 sections on our website which is more than enough -Whether you use a pen and paper or flowchart software, keep things as clean and organized as possible. Although you (and anyone working with you) are the only ones that will be using the flowchart, it still needs to make sense -Your primary sections should use broader terms, while secondary and tertiary terms should be more descriptive

The Donts

Creating a flowchart is pretty straight forward; however, there are a few mistakes that can easily be made:

-Don’t use very descriptive terms in your primary navigation unless your entire website focuses on one narrow topic -Don’t try and lump multiple topics on the same page. Create a general section for these topics and from that section create subsections. This will make the subsection (descriptive) web pages more likely to have better rankings in the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask) Once you have created a concise and descriptive flowchart, you’re ready to move on to the second stage of the web design process:

modeling.

Stage 2: Modeling

In the modeling stage, static "wireframe" mockups are created. Each mockup illustrates a bare-bones skeleton of the layout for each of the web pages that will be included in your website. This stage is important because it gives us an idea of where different elements will be placed in our design. Some of these elements are:

-logo

-navigational menu

-content

-images, videos

To create these mockups, you can use a pen and paper or your preferred mockup software. In the past we have used Photoshop, but lately we have been using OmniGraffle Professional. OmniGraffle is not as resource intensive as Photoshop is and it allows us to assemble our wireframe mockups much quicker.

In addition, make sure that you have the flowchart(s) that you created nearby as you will need to reference these from time to time to make sure that you are mocking up all of the pages that will appear on your website.

Here is our example of how a wireframe mockup should look. As you can see, there are no colors or graphics included. This is exactly how a wireframe mockup should be – a skeletal layout of your design. The purpose is to be able to have a general idea of where each of the web page’s elements will be placed.

We usually begin from the top left and work our way down to the bottom. There is no specific way that a wireframe should look. Use your imagination. However, make sure that when creating your wireframes you don’t forget to include the most important elements of a website (logo, navigational menu, content placement, images/video placement).

If some of your pages will be using the same layout, then it is not necessary to mock all of those pages up (although you certainly can).

Just be sure to mockup any unique layout that your website will have.

You’ll thank yourself later.

The Dos

-mockup all unique pages

-include important elements (logo, navigation, content placement, images/video placement) -start from the top and work your way down -reference your flowchart created in stage 1 to make you don’t forget to mockup any pages -save, save, save – like with anything on the computer, save your mockup(s) every 10 minutes or so

-focus on clean, user friendly layouts -label your elements so you don’t forget what they are when you reference them in stage 3, execution -use other web sites as inspiration; there is nothing wrong with taking elements from other sites and making them your own (see "donts")

The Donts

-don’t include graphics or colors (that’s for the next stage) -don’t make your mockups too "busy"; focus on clean, well organized, user friendly layouts -don’t skip this stage; it is just as important as the first and the last -if you take elements from other websites, make sure you don’t plagiarize; there is a difference between being inspired by another website to create certain elements of your design and blatantly ripping off their layout and colors

Stage 3: Execution

In the third and final stage, execution, the planning from stages 1 and 2 are combined to assist in creating a live, interactive website.

The third stage is by far the most time intensive since you will be 1) creating the graphics 2) creating the content, and finally, 3) converting the web designs from images into code that web browsers use to present your website to the world.

By the time you reach the third stage, you should have a clear idea of:

-how your visitors will get from one place to another (stage 1, flowchart) -how your web pages will be laid out (stage 2, wireframe mockups)

If you don’t have a clear idea of these two things, go back to the first and second stagees and continue to develop them. You will find that the third stage is easiest when you have constructed a clear, concise battle plan for designing your website.

Ditch the pen and paper

In stage 3, you need to be using Photoshop or another image editing program since you will be using colors and graphics to create the layout for your website.

We usually begin creating the "home" page (index) first. Use your wireframes that you created in stage 2 as a template for each of the pages you create. However, instead of using solid boxes, use graphics, colors and text instead. Each page must look exactly how you want them to look on the Internet since this is the final stage of the design process.

Be sure to include the background for your navigation (but don’t actually add the text to your image). When converted using CSS (cascading style sheets), your navigation should be in the form of text and not images. Images are not crawl-able by the search engines (the keywords used in your navigation won’t be indexed in the search engine results pages, meaning fewer people will be able to find your website).

When you’re happy with your designs and feel that they are ready to be put on the Internet, it’s time to break apart the designs so that you can create a CSS based layout. For more information on converting your layouts to CSS or marking up your website in CSS, visit w3schools.com. After looking around the Internet, we couldn’t find a decent image-to-CSS tutorial – so expect one from us in the coming weeks. Converting your designs into CSS is extremely important since table layouts are a thing of the past.

Here is an example of a nearly-completed website of the layout we mocked up in stage 2. This was taken directly from our web browser and as you can see, there is now a logo, colors, a pretty navigation system, a footer, and a most importantly, a clean, organized layout.

Thanks to the planning in stages 1 and 2, our layout is well-organized and easy to use.

The Dos

-reference your templates that were created in stage 2; though it is fine to deviate from your original layout, you shouldn’t need to -do some research before creating your actual design; get ideas from other sites and make them your own (without plagiarizing) -include color and graphics to create the final look for your web pages -use CSS (cascading style sheets) to convert your designs from images into markup understandable by web browsers -reference your flowchart from stage 1 when coding your pages with hyperlinks; it is better to use a drop down menu that includes all (or the majority) of the links in your website on every page; this will allow for easier navigation and also make your pages easier to crawl when the search engine spiders stop by; a great place to get CSS drop down menus is at DynamicDrive.com -finalize your design while working in Photoshop or whatever image editing software you use; it can be a pain to make changes to your design once it is converted into markup (code)

The Donts

-don’t include the text in your navigation menus when converting to CSS; instead of using image text, use regular text that is readable by search engine spiders -don’t use tables when converting; even if you need to buy a book on CSS, it will be worth it; tables are dead -don’t skip the first two stages just to save time; your website WILL be better if you start from the beginning of the web design process (instead of at the end) -don’t forget to compress your images when they are cut apart for CSS; there is nothing worse than a slow loading website because of large image files; Photoshop has a "Save Optimized For Web" option (CS3 – "Save for Web and Devices")

Process Makes Perfect

By following a web design process such as the one illustrated in this article, you increase the chances of creating a website that is well-organized, easily navigable, and very user-friendly. Lets face it – if visitors get lost or become confused while attempting to surf your website, they might hit the back button and look for a more user friendly website. People do not like to think when it comes to finding their way around websites. Don’t make them think. You do the thinking by planning out your website from stage 1 to stage 3 and you will find that more people will enjoy visiting your website.

“Which of the PSD-to-HTML providers do you work with?” A few years ago this question had no sense because… there were no such companies. But now PSD-to-XHTML/CSS conversion services are sought-after and growing fast. Is it just a new fad or a real market need?

The idea of a PSD-to-HTML service is quite simple. Using Adobe Photoshop or other software packages, graphic and web designers create digital images — files with *.PSD, etc extensions. To convert them into a webpage template or blog theme, you need to develop HTML code. PSD-to-HTML companies are those who provide such a transformation.

The emergence of PSD-to-HTML services is not just chance.

A while ago we all celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Web. Media actively discussed achievements and outlook of the Internet. The appearance of design-to-HTML coding as a separate service also illustrates that the Web is becoming more mature. Really, specialization of labor and tendency to standards compliance are features of established industries only.

The own niche in the web development process

Each of the web development jobs — design, HTML/CSS coding, and programming in PHP, Java, etc. — plays its own important role and requires its own specific skills and aptitude.

I like the analogy with music creation: composers (in case of Web — designers) express their ideas in images. Then the music (websites) is written down by means of musical notation (HTML and CSS), arranged for different types of orchestras (browsers), and complied with recommendations of musicians’ associations (WWW Consortium) and music critics (search engines). Of course, quality instruments, sound equipment, and stage effects are a must (databases, chats, widgets, etc).

If each job is done properly, the website may get “Grammy”, i.e. a lot of traffic and place #1 in SERPs (search engine results pages).

Web standards, compatibility, and accessibility

PSD-to-HTML providers’ advertisements often say that a resulting HTML/XHTML/CSS markup will be “cross-browser compatible, W3C valid, SEO semantic, and hand-coded.” Why is it emphasized?

1. Cross-browser compatibility

Users are free in their choice which of the PC or mobile devices, operating systems or browsers to utilize. Browser producers are also free in which way to treat a webpage. To ensure correct website appearance in different environments and make it accessible to wider audience, browser-specific code is added to a website HTML/CSS markup.

2. W3C compliance

W3C is World Wide Web Consortium which develops and approves the main Web guidelines, specifications, and tools, including HTML and CSS. When a site meets W3C standards, it is like a Web Quality Certificate. As a first step in evaluating website validity, you can use W3C sites validator.w3.org and jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/.

3. Semantic coding

HTML and CSS allow getting the same webpage appearance in different ways. Semantic coding implies that you mark up your website taking into account content meaning and HTML tag semantics: e.g., main headlines — with the help of h1 tag (”heading1″) and so forth. Typically a semantic-coded site is more search engine friendly; search engines “understand” it better and rank it higher.

The role of semantic coding has been increasingly growing. Experts state that the coming Web will be completely semantic and provide more correct retrieving and processing data both by computers and human beings.

4. Hand- or automatically coded markup?

In many cases handcrafted HTML/CSS markups are better than those produced by specialized software. One of the reasons is a lot of semantic niceties which are difficult to code automatically. It is like software packages for design or programming — they help very much and quicken the process essentially but they don’t substitute designers or programmers completely.

What is the difference between PSD-to-HTML and PSD-to-XHTML services?

XHTML (eXtensible HTML) is the successor and modern extension of HTML and is recommended by W3C as a main markup language for today’s Web. XHTML/CSS makes a webpage markup more compact and flexible, table-less, and with clear content and design separation.

But there is a sound marketing/SEO aspect too: “PSD to HTML” and “PSD to XHTML” are often used as synonyms in providers’ marketing materials. Here are some other key-phrases typical for PSD-to-HTML service advertisements: “Design to XHTML/CSS”, “HTML coding service”, “PSD to markup”, just to name a few. In fact, PSD-to-HTML companies usually offer a wide range of services, including conversion of designs (*.psd, *.ai, *.png) into XHTML/CSS/AJAX markups, blog themes, templates for shopping carts or content management systems (CMS).

The competition forces PSD-to-HTML providers to develop XHTML/CSS code in line with the latest Web trends. PSD-to-HTML services help to make web development faster and easier, allowing designers and back-end programmers to concentrate on their specific tasks. Who benefit from that? I think all the Web community.

A Good Website design is an important step to register strong online presence. Although there are many factors contributing towards a classy website design, here are some common myths of web design we must take care of:

Role and choice of colors:

A nice and pleasant website design is imperative to attract web traffic. Most web designers believe that using lot of colors will add value to the website, where as in reality plenty of colors may destroy the appearance of a website. The website visitors may get irritated with too many colors and hence may never return. Website designers should focus using colors and affects that go well with the theme and purpose of the website. As a principal, maximum of 2 or 3 colors should be enough during a web design making sure that use of these colors doesn’t obstruct the visibility of the website.

Use of Graphics:

It is an absolute fact that graphics make things look nicer and communication easier, but it’s over dose may make these difficult. Few website Designers believe using too many graphics will add pleasant affects and credibility to their website. Yes Graphics can be utilized to lend it to a webpage but excess of it may prove intrusive and hinder usability of website. The web page carrying heavy graphics will take a lot of time to load thus affects accessibility. Web design which is a result of simple elegant graphics and loads easily is always appreciated by the web visitors.

Flash Affects: Are those attractive?

Flash is extensively used to create advertisement banners and liveliness in a website design. Flash banners, although deliver your marketing message with powerful eye-catching visual graphics, can serve their desired purpose only if they are used proficiently and carefully. Flash banners may add energy to a particular website design, but they can have many drawbacks as well. As Web designers use too many frames to illustrate an animation, flash banners are not downloaded easily in a web page unless you are connected to high speed internet.

Main drawback of Flash website designs is the fact that content of the web page is not yet indexed by any search engine. So the websites developed fully on Flash technology makes them a risky business option for companies seeking to enhance their online presence through search engine optimization.

All Flash websites need a plugin to view flash components in a web browser. Just think if just 15% of your prospective web customers don’t bother to download the plugin and install it to view your website; you have a good opportunity to lose a significant share of web business. And believe it that many wont simply bother. If used reprehensively, Flash website designs have an amazing capacity to be a serious frustration to your website users. Hence Web designers should offer the choice of non flash versions along with the flash versions, which permits the visitors to browse through the information with ease.

Your Website looks same in all browsers?

After building some successful websites many web developers love to pretend that the website will look all the same in different browsers as it appears on their machine. In reality there is a good probability that the website may not look same in all web browsers. Even worse is the fact that sometimes Website can look perfect in every Web browser on one machine, but other machine will render it other way in those same browsers.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a body that sets standards for how all Web browsers, like Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google’s chrome, should render HTML. However all these standards are merely guidelines and problem is that the programmers who develop Web browsers interpret these guidelines as they assume it is best to display HTML on your machine.

Therefore Web designers should test the website in all browsers and make sure that website is optimized with web standards adopted by different browsers. Also the resolution varies from pc to pc. Some users prefer to view the websites in 1024 X 768 resolution while others may view the website in 800 X 600 resolution. The web designer should ensure that the website looks good and same in all resolutions. The table width should be set in percentage instead of pixels while assigning properties to the table because it will help the viewer to view the website properly in any resolution.

With a rapid advancement of technologies and opportunities like web 2.0 there has been a dramatic change in web design. Earlier websites that where animated and flashy were considered to more fancy and trendy. But, if you look at the present scenario, today the accessibility and usability of a website has become more important.

Driven by web 2.0 technologies, the table design of the past has been replaced by layer-based, table-less XHTML and CSS templates which offers more flexibility in website designing together with slim and clear source code. CSS that stands for Cascading Style Sheets is a simple mechanism language that facilitates user for adding style to structured web documents. It is a new step in web design and allows web designers to systematize the style and layout of multiple web pages all at once.

Using CSS for website designing has been evolving for quite some time and today many web development companies are adopting this latest version. This tool is gaining its wide acceptance and recognition from all leading web design companies. It has actually opened the doors towards lots of powerful and rich opportunities. It even gives an edge to all those businesses and organizations who want to use the internet and their website to expand and develop their business.

If your website design requires constant changing of appearance then it can be as simple as linking a new CSS file or editing the existing CSS file. In addition to this, if you have a seasonal business and you want to design seasonal themes for your websites then you can easily create a different CSS file for each season. It facilitates any web designer to move display code out of the HTML elements in the relevant web pages, excluding the straight content and this further makes it a lot easier to implement changes to any web design. It also saves a lot of work when designing a website. As most modern browsers now support Cascading Style Sheets, so it’s safe and easy to use. Besides this, the major benefit of CSS is reducing bandwidth. Compacted code generated by CSS generally decrease the amount of bandwidth needed to host web pages, and this helps in reducing the overall fees.

Talking about some of the other great advantages of CSS is this tool even helps in making your website more search engine friendly. It separates the design and code elements of website and this in turn helps in making site more search engine friendly. Search engines always look at the amount of code on your site relative to the amount of content. Making the best use of external Cascading Style Sheets file gives you plenty of content relative to the amount of code because all of your design code is stored in a separate file. Moreover, this application also makes a website light-weight which is generally favored by major search engines. It removes junk HTML codes and keeps them well controlled that make them a favorite among the search engine spiders.

Cascade Style Sheets provide much more flexibility in terms of the website presentation. It can develop strategies for maximizing forward and backwards browser compatibility. On the face of it, CSS application provides plenty of exposure for web designer in the creation of attractive and standard web design.

One of the most popularly used web design techniques of today is called the Tableless Web Design or the Tableless Web Layout. This has been around since the start of Style Sheet Languages including CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language). Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as CSS are used to arrange elements and text on a web page. CSS was introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to improve web accessibility and to make HTML code semantic rather than presentational.

The Start of Tableless Web Design

HTML was originally designed for sharing scientific documents and research papers online. But as the Internet grew into the mainstream in the, and became more media oriented, graphic designers sought ways to control the appearance of the Web pages presented to end users, which is by designing a layout of the page. To this end, tables and spacers have been used to create and maintain page layout.

Though very effective, this caused a number of problems. Many Web pages have been designed with tables nested within tables, resulting in large HTML documents which use more bandwidth. Furthermore, when a table based layout is linearized, for example when being parsed by a screen reader or a search engine, the resulting order of the content can be somewhat confusing. Visit an online Web design Philippines site to learn more about using CSS in web design.

Powerful WYSIWYG editors such as the Macromedia Dreamweaver (now known as Adobe Dreamweaver) arrived on the market which meant Web designers no longer needed a good (or any) understanding of HTML to build web pages. Such editors indirectly encourage extensive use of nested tables to position design elements. As designers edit their documents in these editors, code is added to the document which is sometimes unnecessary. Furthermore, unskilled designers may use tables more than required when using a WYSIWYG editor. This practice can lead to many tables nested within tables as well as tables with unnecessary rows and columns.

The use of graphic editors with slicing tools that output HTML and images directly also promote poor code with tables often having many rows of 1 pixel height or width. Sometimes many more lines of code are used to render content than the actual content itself.

As the World Wide Web boom receded in 2001 and the Web development industry shrank, coders with more experience and greater industry experience were in higher demand. In a large number of cases UI development was carried out by coders with greater knowledge of good coding practice. It was around this time that many became critical of messy coding practices and the idea of tableless design began to grow.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were developed to improve the separation between design and content, and move back towards a semantic organization of content on the Web. The term “tableless design” implies the use of CSS to position HTML elements on the page but it should be noted that tables and CSS are not mutually exclusive. Many experienced HTML coders use CSS to manipulate tables frequently.

Advantages of Tableless Web Design

There are several advantages as to why CSS is much more efficient than using tables. These are Accessibilty, Bandwidth Savings, and its Maintainability.

Accessibilty

Because of the Internet’s rapid growth, disability discrimination legislation, and the increasing use of mobile phones and PDAs, it is necessary for Web content to be made accessible to users operating a wide variety of devices. Tableless Web design considerably improves Web accessibility in this respect. Screen readers and braille devices have fewer problems with tableless designs because they follow a logical structure.

As a result of the separation of design (CSS) and structure (HTML), it is also possible to provide different layouts for different devices, e.g. handhelds, mobile phones, etc. It is also possible to specify a different style sheet for print, e.g. to hide or modify the appearance of advertisements or navigation elements that are irrelevant and a nuisance in the printable version of the page. Check out and visit an online Web design Philippines site to learn more of what CSS can do for a web site.

Bandwidth Savings

Clever implementation of tableless design can produce web pages with fewer HTML tags thus reducing page download times. Using external style sheets to position page elements means more mark up language may be cached and further reduce download times for subsequent pages using the same resources.

Poor implementation of tableless design can result in many more lines of code used per page element which can increase download time. Tables have a defined set of rules which are clear and concise while tableless design often involves working around browser inconsistencies.

Tableless design does not necessarily imply bandwidth savings. If implemented correctly, the bandwidth savings are generally minor at best. It is still possible to build a lightweight web page with tables. The use of WYSIWYG editors or the technique used by the web page’s author will have a much greater influence on page download times.

Maintainability

Maintaining a website may require frequent changes, both small and large, to the visual style of a website, depending on the purpose of the site. Under table-based layout, the layout is part of the HTML itself. As such, without the aid of template-based visual editors such as HTML editors, changing the positional layout of elements on a whole site may require a great deal of effort, depending on the amount of repetitive changes required. Even employing sed or similar global find-and-replace utilities cannot alleviate the problem entirely.

In tableless layout using CSS, virtually all of the layout information resides in one place: the CSS document. Because the layout information is centralized, these changes can be made quickly and globally by default. The HTML files themselves do not, usually, need to be adjusted when making layout changes. If they do, it is usually to add class-tags to specific markup elements or to change the grouping of various sections with respect to one another. Learn how professional web designers use CSS to maximize the usability and effectivity of web sites by visiting an online Web design Philippines site.

Use of Tables in Modern Day Web Design

Because of the term “tableless web design”, some have interpreted this design strategy as an unconditional repudiation of all tables in web design. This has caused some to avoid tables even when tables are appropriate. Using divisions to simulate a table for the display of tabular data is as much a design flaw as using tables to simulate a division. Some sources clarify this distinction by using the more specific term “tableless web layout”.

On the other hand, using tables in web design, although most common, does not necessarily equate to using the table element (and related elements) defined in HTML 4.0. CSS also specifies a “table model” which allows the semantics of “tabular representation” to be applied: the “display: table” element. In this way, the decision and definition for tables is transferred from HTML to CSS. One reason this distinction is sometimes overlooked is because of the lack of support for the CSS table model in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 8 is the first version of the browser to support the CSS table model.

As I feel that web designing is one of the best career option for all who want to be a web designer with a dedication. Uncountable web designers one can find around the universe, from east to west and north to south. But the question is who is the best, and the answer is the person who creates good web sites, now again a question arise in the mind that how can one decide that a web site is qualifying good or bad merits. When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose.

Here are some important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well. Please read all carefully to avoid all the followings in your site:

1. Never use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2. Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3. Must have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4. Must have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5. Do not use uncontrolled audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it volume or muting controls would work fine.

6. Do not make your web pages bulky

Every website owner does not only want to get his website ready but also expect a big benefit by the website in terms of business and branding. So are you taking care about all these things also when you work on a website? If yes, then OK, and if no then read all it very carefully. First of all, avoid using heavy jpg files, optimizing all the images, avoiding excessive use of table, you can replace now table with div tag. Always use external css, provide alt tag to all the images, put separate title name to all the pages, and most important is don’t forget to use proper meta tags also.

7. Test your website’s compatibility with all browsers

Your website isn’t just compatible with a lot of Website browsers. One of the foremost reasons why your website design doesn’t click at all is because it won’t show up with majority of Internet browsers. Keep in mind that there are many types that can be utilized by Internet users. Classic examples include Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Crazy Browser. Thus, it only means that if you want to make sure that you can reach out to as many potential customers as possible, your website should show up in all of them. Before you upload your website, do some testing first so you can already correct possible problems.

8. Is your website is readable by all the visitors

Fonts are not friendly to Internet users. Besides the overall layout of your web pages, you also have to take into consideration the font that you are going to use. The usual mistake in website design is using very small fonts, which makes content very inconvenient for Internet users to read. Sometimes they are frozen, which means you cannot adjust their sizes. You should ensure that your font is readable by complementing them with the background.

9. Is your website is Search Engine Friendly

Web pages are not search-engine friendly. If you’re not taking care of your headline tags, not adding Meta tags in each of your web pages, or if you’ve been stuffing a lot of keywords in your websites, then you will surely not gain the favor of search engines.

We are currently in what is possibly the worst economic crisis in history. Web design companies and web designers are almost certainly wondering if they are safe or not.

This all comes down to one question. Will companies spend money on web design? The answer is :

In the short run: they will spend less

In the long run: they will spend more

My reasoning is based on my years of experience as a business owner and on my interpretation of the existing marketplace.

In the short run

People are uneasy at the moment. They listen to all the downbeat news and thus they are withdrawing from their expenditures and waiting to see what happens.

At this point you’re probably wondering what this has to do with web design. Well, for quite a few months of the recession, you will notice a slowing down in the web design business. Companies are worried, too.

So, what should you do as a web design company owner or a freelance web designer?

You sell cheap!

Instead of offering out of budget quote for web design jobs, offer more cost-effective web design packages.

You can easily do this by employing a blog as a base and then influence a pre-made web template that you would modify. With this type of package, you can offer customers the functionality found in a blog/CMS with an attractive website layout for just a fraction of the cost. It will take much less time for you to launch the website.

In the long run

I think that once the preliminary upset of the recession passes, companies will once again start to look at economical ways to obtaining new customers and to reduce the cost. The web is ideal for this so this is where they will turn.

Web design companies and web designers will need to be able to offer some web marketing ability for the sites that are thinking of branding. The web design companies who are offering this will have a greater ability to attract new customers. Thus, understanding how Google Adwords can be used with a well established website is something interesting to look in. Also, you will need to have an improved grasp on dynamic web technologies like PHP and AJAX in order to attract new customers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the present recession does not bring catastrophe for web design companies but what it means however is that you will have to adapt to the current reality. For those who adapt, it can be a very advantageous time.

If you’re looking for a reliable web design company that will develop towards your business goals, while looking fantastic with a high search engine ranking – check out Designzillas!

Is it really possible to hire a web designer and manage to go all the way from the start of your website to the very end with out a moment of frustration and disappointment? I think it is! It is a matter of knowing how to explain your needs to your web designer and also allowing him to advice you what the best options are for you.

So let’s start by asking ourselves what a web designer needs from you;

It is good to start by informing your web designer of the business you are conducting. Giving him a brief description of what you do should be more than enough. It will help if you provide your web designer with links to your competitors. Let him know what you like and dislike of your competitor’s website.  Once you have shown your web designer links to your competitor’s websites, it will be a good idea to show him other links to websites you like. Let him know about your color preferences, layout and graphics you would like your website to have. Provide your web designer with the content for your website in an organized manner. The best way to give your content to your web designer is in a word format or text format and you should actually use a word file per page in you future website. Let say that you have 3 pages; Home, about us, and our mission then you should have separated files for each page. In addition to that you should include a separated file called instructions. You will use this file to explain the web designer how to proceed with the content you have given him. Give your web designer THE FREEDOM TO DESIGN! One of the major catastrophes in web design is when the client thinks he can design a website. Firs of all; web designers are not the same as graphic designers. There are many variables to consider when you design for the web. Designing a website is not the same as designing a paper flyer.

Allow your web designer to design, he knows better than you. The one thing you can do is to let him know if you like what he is doing or not, and make suggestions but always listen to what he has to say. A good web designer will confront you and your ideas if you are going in the wrong direction. There are several stages when designing a website; the first one is creating a mock up. Your web designer will create a sample template of your website to illustrate the layout, colors, and the position of all those objects that will make your website com alive.

This first stage is crucial. You need to be very positive that you like the mock up before you give the ok to start designing your website. The reason is very simple; a mock up is nothing more than an illustration. What comes after that stage is the real deal; converting the template into a fully functional website. Trust me when I tell you that you do not want to tell your web designer to change the color of the back ground once you have approved the mock up. Your web designer will most probably get a tantrum and after that he will have to charge you an additional fee for extra labor. One final issue which is major and contributes to the patience of a web designer is the grammar of your content. Web designers are not secretaries. A web designer will gather together all the information you have given him for your website and he will make this work on the web. If today you give your web designer the text that belongs to the about us page, but tomorrow you change your mind and you send him again new text for the about us page he will not be very happy.

I have been designing websites for a long time now and these are real facts that occur to me as well as to many web designers out there every day. You can have a web designer create a great website for you, but you need to know that everything that relates to the web takes a long time to accomplish so the more you help us the better your website will be designed.

Designed By Lucas

CSS, which stands for cascading style sheets, has been around for several years now. This coding standard was first invented to make it easy for web designers to modify the appearance of their websites, without using any programming languages. For this reason, you will find CSS to be easy to understand, and easy to implement.

How CSS works.

CSS code can be incorporated into each and every web page on your website, or it can reside on a separate file. If it is on a separate file, you can easily include the file dynamically using a single line of code. After that, if you ever want to make changes to the CSS coding, all you need to do is to modify one single file, and the change will be applied to all pages across the website.

So what you can do with CSS?

You can use CSS to control all visual elements of your website. For example, you can use it to change the font size and colors. You can also use it to change the table properties, or the visual aspects of your web forms.

But there are so many different ways you can change the visual appearance of a website. So why use CSS?

Firstly, CSS is a client side scripting technology. In other words, there are no server implications. As long as the server can serve up simple texts, CSS will work. In this aspect, it’s a little bit similar to Javascript, except that you can’t perform programming using CSS.

Secondly, CSS is very simple to learn and pick up. If you are comfortable writing simple HTML tags, you can learn to use CSS. Also, because you can add CSS dynamically to your website, that makes it more convenient for you or your webmaster to maintain the website.

Thirdly, you have to remember that CSS was invented to complement HTML. No other scripting languages focus as much as CSS on the website appearance. It has very much become an industry standard, and can even validate CSS code on the official w3 website. Modern browsers all offer strong support for CSS.

CSS is meant to simplify your website. It’s not there to add clutter to your site. For this reason, the search engines love CSS. That’s because search engines find it easier to crawl and index web pages that are simple. There are no fancy scripting tags that confuse the search bots. So if you create a website using CSS, you are indirectly optimizing your site for the search engines. For sure, there is a side benefit that many website owners overlook.

Therefore, it makes sense to convert static HTML pages and other web images to CSS web pages. Your website will become more professional and modern looking.

There are a number of web designers who come up with print backgrounds for the sites that they make. These are most likely those who used to be print designers before joining the web design company they are part of now, or they are simply used to the control that is offered by print media. Remember though that print provides stability and permanence, and these two are not present in the Web. Realistically speaking though and speaking from experience if I may add, it is rather easy to forget this.

As you build your web page and have it tested on your browser, you somehow would like it to look exactly how you want it to. However, since your web design company requires you to test it in different browsers, you will see that they look different. As you move from one platform to the next, you will notice that there are slight but uncomfortable differences. This should be a good reminder that web design does not have the permanence and the stability that print does.

On the other hand, as the web designer, your web design company will most likely ask you to work with your customers during the web designing process. One of the most important things that you need to do is to explain to them the difference between the Web and print. Most clients would ask you to provide them your portfolios and web design plans. It is all too common for a web design company to receive customer complaints which stems from the fact that the website is not the exact representation of the print-out. To spare your web design company from this usual trouble, you have to learn how to properly work with your customers:

It is always good to have a portfolio printed out for clients to see. But bear in mind that it is not entirely a representation of your skills in web designs. When you do show them a portfolio, make sure that you also carefully explain to them the differences that they should expect on the final output web page. Make sure that you are upfront with them. If they set specifications for a graphical page and want specific layout, font and other web design elements, make sure that you also mention the possible trade-offs such as in the download speed and maintenance requirements. Lastly, it would be best to know what type of platform your customer will use. If you are a big fan of Netscape on the Mac, while your customer uses Internet Explorer version 7 for the Windows operating system, make sure that you bear this fact in mind when you come up with your designs. The page you come up with during the web design face may look very different on their platform.

So how then can you compromise the difference between web design and print? Well, you mostly need to rely on the web design techniques that you employ. Here are some tips to help you through this difference:

• Know your audience very well. It is imperative that you know who the potential visitors of the site are and for whom the website is to be made for. Know your client’s target audience and their characteristics or behaviors. If they are highly advanced users, they will most likely browse in UNIX or Linux on a 21-inch monitor. If they are rather more conservative, they are likely to use an Internet Explorer 7 on a 14 inch monitor. If your web design best suits your audience, your client will not come back running to your web design company to complain about the final site output.

• Test, test, and test again. You need to test your web design in each and every browser and operating system combination that you can possibly get both your hands on. You can use emulators if you are short of time and if you have no other choice, but nothing beats hands on experience through actual tests and runs.

• Never forget about resolution. Although browsers and operating systems are both important, there is one other factor that you need to consider in site web design. Keep in mind that if your client as well as their target audience will browse your final page on a browser than is smaller than you have designed on, there is a good possibility that they will be unpleasantly surprised. They might come back running to you, and your web design company might not appreciate that very much.

Using CSS can help you get precise layouts, but remember that your web design can never and will never be as precise as print. Remember this as implement the web design of your pages to spare you and your web design company a great deal of stress.