Easy Web Design Software For Home Businesses

by: Charles Brown

Designing your own website from scratch that you're proud of is not as hard as you may think. Especially nowadays, because there is software available that takes on much of the work that used to be relegated to the webmaster (which is you!).

In days past, in order to build a website from scratch, you had to know HTML, or "Hyper Text Markup Language." And really, you are still better off knowing at least the basics of HTML. Nevertheless, it's not required. Especially if you find easy web design software that does most of the work takes care of this for you. Now, every single HTML editor on the planet now features a "WYSIWYG" interface. (What You See Is What You Get.) So, in theory, you shouldn't have to know the first thing about hand-coding a website.

The reality is, however, not all HTML editors (or "web design software") does WYSIWYG well. Little annoying problems tend to crop up. For example, say you typed the following sentence using your site builder:

"Discover the best places to SCUBA dive in the Cayman Islands." Say you want "best places" to be italicized and "Cayman Islands" to be bolded. Here's what's supposed to happen:

In the background, your HTML editor is supposed to 'type' the phrase as such: Discover the best places to SCUBA dive in the Cayman Islands. (I put extra spaces between the tags for this example, in order to keep the article publishing software from parsing it like normal HTML.)

But instead, this is what you get: "Discover the best places to SCUBA dive in the Cayman Islands." Even though you selected the words "best places" and clicked the little graphical icon on your html editor's toolbar that represented italics, your phrase comes out non-italicized. And your bolded words are not bolded.

Well, in this instance, you'd have to go to the "Source View" of your HTML editor and manually insert the above HTML tags to make these things happen. This is a very annoying problem with too many popular web design software titles nowadays.

Another problem that will frustrate the heck out of you, is seeing a totally different result in the web browser than you see in your desktop. For example, your formatting changes are (apparently) taking effect as you type--just as it should (remember it's touted as being WYSIWYG)...

However, they don't show up when you publish the page to the internet! I don't know why, but this problem still plagues most web design software to this day.

Fortunately, there are a few (very few) good software titles that work for cheap, while doing all the other things to make your site stand out and (if you're so inclined) draw visitors by the hundreds.

About The Author

Charles Brown

Just because you spend lots of money on a HTML editor, doesn't mean it will be easy to use. Discover easy web design software that won't break your wallet. Charles Brown is the author and webmaster of http://honestysellsbest.com.

Web Design Projects Good Designs

by: Neil Parnham

Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

About The Author

Neil Parnham
DIY Conservatories http://www.diyconservatories-and-windows.co.uk/

How To Design A Web Page That Pays

by: Cliff Posey Jr

It is relatively easy to design a web page. It is much more difficult to design a web page that works, and more importantly a web page that pays off for either you or the web visitor. But if you want to create web sites or have a home based business that you can promote online, building a web page that pays is an absolute necessity.

So, how do you design a web page that pays? First off, you need to determine who will be getting the pay-off. It could be you or the web visitor, or better yet, it could be both of you. For example, an informational web page will be valuable to a reader looking for information and valuable to you if you have affiliates, links to products, or other sites you want to promote.

When building a web page or looking for a home based business, affiliate programs are worth considering because they add value to the site for the reader and can provide enough revenue for you to keep the site going. The best affiliates offer products that are in some way related to your site. In other words, if you have an informational web site relating to pet health, it wouldn't be a good idea to have affiliate links for tax software. You will be much better served with affiliates that sell pet vitamins, pet toys, or other pet related products.

If you want to create web sites or design a web page so that you can make money from affiliate programs, it is a good idea to research affiliates and the topic before you proceed. Making sure that affiliate programs exist in conjunction with the information you want to provide or the home based business you want to promote will prove to be very valuable later on as you try to get the site off the ground.

You will also want to make sure that you will be able to provide credible information to the site's visitors. For example, you will have a hard time building a web page devoted to coaching soccer if you know little about the subject. And without credibility, you stand little chance of getting site visitors to stop by once, let alone, again and again.

Credibility will also prove to be important when you look for affiliates. Often times, your site will need to be reviewed before you are allowed to participate in the affiliate program. If you design a web page that is not up to par, you will have little chance of being approved.

In short, take your time and do your homework. That is the only way to create web sites that truly pay off for you and your visitors.

About The Author

Cliff Posey, owner of CRP Marketing, owns and operates http://webbusinesstoolsonline.com. Cliff Posey has also operated several other successful web businesses including Love Song Cards and Radio Career Consultants. The content in this article was developed from his experience in these businesses.

Four Critical Web Design Rules

by: Nicholas Lapolla

When creating a new website or redesigning an existing site, there are four critical rules which the designer should follow to make the site effective and functional - and successful.

1. Easy to Read

When building a website, the first thing you need to be sure of is that your website is easy to read. When you write content, remember that most web site visitors don't read every word of a page - in fact, they only scan pages to find what they want.

Break up Your Content

Break up your pages and use headers between major ideas so people scanning your site can find what they want quickly. Use meaningful headers between each paragraph or major idea - this helps with SEO. Headers should be created with the H1 through H4 tags for SEO. Always use good writing structure. Additionally, avoid long paragraphs that run on. You should break up any long paragraphs.

Color and Fonts

To help readability, use high contrast colors between font and background. Black text against a white background may seem stark, but it is very readable. To make a website easy on the eyes, try an off-white background and a dark gray (almost black) text color.

Things to avoid with content color:

Avoid vibrant background colors like purple or yellow. Such back colors make text difficult to read.

Avoid using an image behind your text.

Avoid using bright text colors on bright backgrounds.

Fonts Matter

One simple statement covers the font issue:

Simple fonts are the best; the more fancy the font, the harder it is to read.

Since many browsers only have the standard font set, use standard fonts. In reality, there is no ""standard"", but there are certain fonts that are installed on most browsers. These include Arial, Verdana, Tahoma and Times New Roman. Your readers will see something different than you see if you use other fonts.

Standard Compliant Browser for Development

When developing and testing your site, use a Standards compliant browser like FireFox. If you develop your site to be standards compliant, it will work in most browsers, including MS Internet Explorer (IE). It is recommended that you test your site using the latest and last browser versions of IE (IE6 and IE7). To run multiple versions of IE on the same machine, TredoSoft has a free installer that will install multiple versions of IE. It works great!

2. Simplify Navigation

The menus and links make up the navigation that the visitor uses to get from page to page in a site. Always plan a site around how people will get from page to page. A visitor to your site should be able to get to what they want within three clicks of their mouse.

Multiple navigation points makes it easy to find things. Repeat the top menu and at the bottom. Also create a left or right menu.

Using links within your text to other areas on your site. You can create links so that they are good for search engine optimization (SEO). There are generally two ways to create links within your text:

The wrong way: ""For search engine optimization techniques, click here.""

The right way: ""Good techniques for search engine optimization are important to use.""

Using link text (anchor text) that describes what the link is about is the best way. Search engine web crawlers (programs that automatically index the contents of websites) visit your site, they ""read"" links. Spiders can index descriptive links into a subject or keyword category. Spiders have nothing to work with when reading a ""click here"" until it reaches the linked page.

This is Cross Linking - use it as much as possible when it makes sense to do so when writing your content.

3. Consistent Design

At most, one or two layouts should be used in your site design. As a reader browses your site, they should be able to get used to looking in the same place for your navigation, for your sub-navigation and for your content. That's all there is to say about that.

4. Lower Page Weight is Better

Page weight is the total size of a page on your site in bytes - code, text and images. Your site's page weight makes a big difference to your viewers. Lighter page weight is better for your readers because the page will download faster. The faster a page downloads, the faster they will get to the content.

What is Means to be Light

No large images. (unless the site's purpose is to showcase images, art or photos)

Fewer images are better.

Optimize images for the web at no more than 72 dpi

Use as small an image dimension as possible for the given design.

Use a table td bgcolor attribute or a background-color style attribute for solid color backgrounds.

Make gradients horizontal or vertical (not diagonal) so that you can use a small image ""strip"" and repeat it.

How ""Heavy"" Should a Web Page be?

Certain studies show that 64K is a good maximum webpage size. 64K is a maximum, however it is still, in my opinion, really big! The smaller the page, the better. 25K is good, 15K is even better. There is a balance between design and function. It is a good idea to focus more on function.

Try putting pages on your web host server as you build your site so you can test it as you go. For pages online, you can test the page weight to be sure you are on track.

Ways to make pages lighter:

Use linked style sheets

Use DIVs instead of TABLEs where possible

Use simple repeating backgrounds for effect

Summary

Visitors to your website should be able to find what they are looking for within about three clicks. Making a site easy to read with consistent page design, and easy to navigate will make it easy to find information. You will be on the way to building a readable, effective, functional and hopefully successful website if you follow these rules.

About The Author

Nicholas LaPolla has been a web applications developer for 11 years. He created http://AcmeWebResources.com to help others build or improve, market, and monitize their websites with a focus on web design, website seo / internet marketing, and working to make money online.