Web Site Design - Five essential tips

by: Greg Campbell

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 seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not 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". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. 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) 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) 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) Avoid using 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.

I hope this has been of value to you. Feel free to contact me with questions.

About The Author

Greg Campbell is a San Diego based entrepreneur, surfer and father of 2. He focuses on wealth creating through personal business training and marketing. http://www.megamoneymentor.com

SEO Web Design For Text

by: Chris Angus

It is well known that the best way to search engine optimize a website in terms of its design is to keep it as free as of many bells and whistles as possible (including images, banners and graphics.) However once you have some excellent copy to put on the front pages of your site your job does not stop there. You should make sure your web design is going to nicely support that text as well.

First of all make sure that there is no Flash, image map bytes, java script or any other kind of multimedia on that page. The search engine spiders will read that as blank space. Second of all make sure that you include text for your image ALT tags as well as for all of your anchor tags.

Thirdly, you need to consider how your HTML code will be prioritized and arranged on the page. It is also absolutely essential that your HTML code is clean as well. It does not matter if the web page looks right. It is what is beneath it that matters most to the search engine spiders (the sloppy HTML scraps and ends of mistakes that you don’t see.) If this is sloppy enough your website could end up being ignored or repressed for a long time before it actually becomes part of any page ranking.

You should also never underestimate the impact of your site’s functionality and architecture on the search engines. An assessment of this is definitely known to be a part of many of the algorithms that govern page rank popularity on the major search engines like Google. If a search engine does not think your site is well put together it can simply ignore it. This means that nobody will ever see the clever search engine copy that you were trying to get the site’s search engine optimized architecture to support in the first place. That, of course, would be a waste of time.

About The Author

Chris Angus is a SEO and website promoter. He helps to promote the following pages: http://www.my-great-site.com/cat/100/ http://urlsdirectory.com/Business/Industry/?s=A

Elements to Avoid in Web Designing

by: Colin Stables

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn't matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design -- accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I've come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I'd just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitor’s burden when viewing your site -- users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics -- user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it's illegible you won't be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct every time each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it's meant to do effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!

In Summary:

1) Avoid background music
2) Avoid Extra large/small text size
3) Avoid Popup windows

About The Author

Colin Stables owns and operates http://eBooksAtoZ.com.

Rules of Web Design

by: Neil Parnham

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 seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages on your website

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". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. 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 too many 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 valueable 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) 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) 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) Avoid using 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 on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

Written by http://www.diyconservatories-and-windows.co.uk/ of http://www.digital-view-web.co.uk/

About The Author

Neil Parnham

Web Design - Programming and Multimedia Services at Digital View http://www.digital-view-web.co.uk