Web design - 5 Essentials

The World Wide Web is filled with a diverse and exciting array of different web designs. Modern web technology has helped web designers to enjoy a wider range of options than ever before and allows for new and exciting websites. Studies show that 99% of web browsers are now JavaScript-enabled, and almost as many are Flash enabled. JavaScript and Flash offer endless possibilities to add tools and widgets and jaw dropping effects to really bring websites in to the 21st century.

There are however some basic essentials that we need to adhere to, and which are all too easy to neglect while we get carried away with all the latest gadgets. A common mistake that new web designers will make is to jump head first in to the latest gizmos and tools that they think will impress their clients, and display their technical prowess, while neglecting the basic usability of their website.

Essential item 1: Cross browser compatibility. A website needs to render correctly on all browsers. There are a range of browsers that are used by the Internet surfing public, and they all have their quirks and nuances. What looks great in IE7 for example may look disjointed in Safari. And may be completely unreadable in Google Chrome. The most popular browser at present is still Internet Explorer 7, but Mozilla Firefox is gaining ground. There has been a steep rise in Apple Mac users to which has led to a rise in Safari. Google Chrome is the new kid on the block but is gaining a great reputation, which is resulting in a higher amount of users. Opera is being used by a dedicated selection of Internet surfers. A good web design should be tested to work, look good and be effective in all of these browsers. A good way to achieve this is to ensure your website validates to WC3 guidelines, but they should still be manually checked.

Essential item 2: Accessibility. A good web design should be accessible to all. This means taking in to consideration people that may have poor vision, or may be unable to use a mouse. Text should be nice and big and contrast strongly with the background color. Black text on a white background is the best for visibility, but as long as the text has a strong contrast to the background it makes it easier for people to read. There should be a skip to main content link, which can allow visitors to tab their way around the website without using a mouse. All fonts should be resizable to allow users to make them bigger if need be. Taking the time to comply with accessibility guidelines will save you isolating any visitors with disabilities.

Essential item 3: User-friendly navigation. A good web design will provide an intuitive navigation system for people to find their way around your website. Web users are familiar with horizontal and vertical menus, so to remain safe it is best to stick with this format. It is easy to be tempted to try a unique navigation but users may not share your enthusiasm for change and leave your site with frustration when they don’t see an easy way to navigate your pages.

Essential item 4: Quick loading times. There is no use in having the latest Flash gadgets playing and huge detailed images when it takes minutes for the page to load. Surfers of the web have notorious short attention spans and low tolerance for websites that take more than a few seconds to load. If the page hasn’t loaded in over three seconds they may just hit the back button and look for a faster loading website. Ensure all your images are optimized to load fast, and use text links where possible.

Essential item 5: Contact details. You should make your contact details as available as possible for the visitors to your website. Email links and telephone details should be on every page, along with clear access to your Contact Us page. Your Contact Us page should always contain your company address, along with telephone, email and contact form. Even add a photograph of yourself or your company house to help build trust with your visitors, and make them aware that you really do exist in the real world. Anonymity is too easy on the web, and we are conditioned not to trust websites, so the more contact details you can provide the better.

These five essential items should be fundamental in the planning stage of your web design. They are easy to build in to a web design from the planning stage, but if neglected can cause a lot of work if trying to implement them at later stages. An effective web design has been proven to convert higher sales, and attract a larger volume of traffic than ineffective or unfriendly web designs. We all want to show off our skills and wow our visitors, but while doing be sure to NEVER forget the essentials of good web design. Or you will pay a high price for it later.

This article was written by Steve Ceaton, web designer and SEO specialist for DeepSpaceDesign. DeepSpaceDesign are an innovative and ambitious web design and SEO company based in the UK.

Web Design Checklist #1

The following guide provides basic information and helpful hints on the steps required to get your website up and running. It is based upon an imaginary company called Smith & Jones, a Leicester based vacuum repair company, specialising in Dyson vacuum cleaners

Find an ISP

An ISP (Internet Service Provider) will provide you with an internet account. Usually your telephone provider will offer this as an additional service. There are many ISPs but choose a reliable one, with a good reputation. You will need an ISP to get emails from your website. Some also offer free web space to host a website – avoid this aspect since many search engines discount sites hosted this way.

Do Keyword Research

What are keywords or key phrases? These are the search terms that potential customers use to find your company (& competitors) on the search engines like Google. So, for our example company, search terms such as "vacuum cleaner repairs", "dyson repairs", "vacum cleaners" (for the less literate), etc. Also remember, very few people search for single terms or words - like "cleaner" - they tend to use phrases.

Create a list of the trade terms & phrases that you think your customers would use when searching for the services that your company provides. Look at your competitors – what search terms do they rank well for? These keywords will be the building blocks for your website and for your online marketing campaign. They should be amongst the first things a web design agency ask you for.

Once you have your search terms and those of your competitors, try to find what are known as niche phrases - those terms that are relevant, reasonably popular (ie, used quite often) and are not being targeted by your competition. It will be easier to initially optimise your website for these terms rather than the most popular terms.

Think globally, optimise locally

As part of your keyword and competitor analysis conducted above, you should have a clear idea who your existing and potentially new customers are. Very often, your customers will be local to your business - for our fictional company, the majority of their customers will be based in Leicestershire. Therefore, people looking for vacuum repairs will look for a local provider or supplier. They are more likely to use a local search term - "dyson repairs leicester" for example. Never forget the local in the global economy!

Choosing a domain name

Choosing your domain name (or website address) is an important first step in establishing your online presence or brand. Often people think that they should use their company name as their website address – smithandjones.co.uk, for example. This is fine if you're a well known brand, such as Ikea. Sometimes though, it's better to choose a domain name that describes what you offer – dysonvacuumrepairs.co.uk (or dysonrepairs.co.uk ) might be a better choice for Smith & Jones, since Google looks at the domain name as being relevant when returning search results. Also, your web address instantly tells people what you offer.

Once you've chosen your domain name(s), you'll need to check that they are available and then register them. Go to http://www.freshwebservices.com/cgi-bin/whois.html & enter your preferred domain name. Then you'll need to register your name, if it's available – avoid choosing domain names that are registered or well known brand names, such as Coca-Cola.

Choose a web designer

It is possible to design and build your own website yourself, but remember this will be the first and possibly only chance you will have to impress your potential customer. Also, there is a wealth of information that you will need to make your website a success, not least to get your website highly placed on the search engines. A professional web design agency, like Fresh Web Services, have the skills and experience necessary to make the web work for you. Using a web design agency will certainly prove cheaper in the long run.

Hosting your website

Once your website is finished, it will need hosting – putting on a web server so that other people can find and use it. For the same reasons that you should avoid using your ISPs free web space, also look for a reliable web hosting company – many offer services that look too good to be true, which is usually the case. Also ensure that your website is hosted within the UK – Google may discount foreign hosted websites when returning UK search results.

Registering your website

Your website now needs registering with the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc). Again, this is something that you can do yourself or hire professionals to do it for you. Be warned though, getting this part wrong can seriously affect your website's ranking in the search engines. Also, avoid automated submission services – some search engines take a dim view of automated submissions. Fresh Web Services provide search engine submission as part of their web design services.

Publicise you website

Put your web address on all your stationery and advertising material, including Yellow Pages. Inform your local newspaper when you launch your website, send a letter to existing clients announcing that it's now live – perhaps offer an incentive or special offer if it is an online shop. Continue using traditional marketing techniques, just make sure that your website now forms part of these campaigns.

Track visits to your website

Keeping a track on the number of visits to your website and what search terms they used when finding your website is crucial to gauging its success and improving it. All our hosting clients get access to real time, online visitor statistics, including search terms and search engines used to find your website.

Keep your website updated

People and the search engines prefer fresh, current information. No one likes outdated information. A content management system (CMS) is the easiest way to keep your website up to date. We offer an easy to use and cost effective CMS – just ask us for more details.

Eddie May runs a Leicester web design agency, Fresh Web Services, which specialise in open source solutions.

Website Layout Designing - Web Design

Web design hints for tyros:


Want to have knowledge of tips and tricks in good web design?. Fine, let’s get gear up to create good website with simple and easy method from scratch. Here, how creation of website for your customer with nice and beautiful color combination can be done is going to be taught by me.


1.Every company has it’s logo which is identity of that company from color to design, so here we start from logo, Take the colors from log of your customer’s company for a complete color combination. It’s simple and easy way to select most suitable color combination in web design|.


2. Make two or three good color combination from logo colors with light and dark shades. Now start website layout designing, For designing layouts I prefer photoshop. As there are other softwares in the market such as indesign, fireworks, etc. but I like photoshop most.


3. A meeting with client is necessary for designing website to understand client’s requirement carefully since his satisfactions is what is crucial finally.


4. It is always better to assess his demands and draw a rough sketch then for time saving, but some of our friends skip this step and start directly designing with the help of softwares which is not right.


5. Keeping in mind the requirements of your client, make two or three choices of sketch. It is needed to be see whether the points in toto are available in the design as per all the points your client had suggested?. I am not saying you that you have to cover all the points but at least you should cover 80% to 90% of client’s requirement to increase client’s satisfaction rate.


6. Now, it is time to find suitable images which agree with your customer’s business, if all the things are ready, since images play an important role in web design. It is, therefore, necessary to choose images carefully as they make your website beautiful and attractive.


7. With proper selection of images as per client’s business you also need to select fonts carefully for the website. Font selection is also important for good and creative website designing.


8. Create all the Graphics for layout with suitable combination of color and visual effects carefully.


9. It is quite important to place every part of website carefully and give each part of it with equal importance, lest the site is thrown into imbalance.


10. Website’s images, Graphics and Typography are the three important areas which require suitable attention while creating and applying it to the website.

Besides above all the things you should also keep in mind that Website design become attractive and effective only it contains Easy Navigation, Neat and Clean Layout Design,

In the field of web design, creativity is an important skill. It should be remembered that your future employer should trust your talent in time-management and sense of creativity and impress with your ability to complete the task in time without a fall in the quality, howsoever good you are as an artist and has plenty of creativity. You can do this best by showing previous portfolio examples. Your school project deadlines can be shown as illustrations of effective working under pressure, if you are still in college or just out of it. If you are looking for web design sydney then http://www.heathgrayson.com/ is the best choice for you.
I AM A PROFESSIONAL ARTICLE WRITER FROM INDIA, SPECIALISED IN VARIOUS SUBJECTSAre you looking for top web design sydney which will in actuality advantage you in building best web designs? then heathgrayson.com is offering the best of the web design sydney to help you come out with best of the web designs for your websites.

How Can A Well Designed Website Boost Your Sales?

What good is a website that does not help you increase Sales? The answer, is 'NADA'. The most common mistake a small business startup or even an enterprise size company makes is contracting a Web Design Firm that ONLY creates websites.

As a case example of a failed Web site Design project, A company in Austin, Texas was looking for a website to start up their Air Conditioning repair service. They googled - web design austin - to find a company that provided web development. The mistake they made, was choosing a budget company that also promised to deliver their website quickly.

In summary, with this example of searching for 'web site design austin', this Air Conditioning company signed up exactly what they bargained for - a cheap - quick - non effective website that did not return anything for their initial investment.

The three things you should look for when searching for a Web Design company, is -

1. Does the company also specialize in website marketing?

2. Does the company also provide search engine optimization?, and

3. Does the company provide examples of successful business websites?

Most often, if you want successful web site design, you need a company that also specializes in marketing and search engine placement as well. Do not look for the cheapest or quickest website. A web site design company should focus on your product, services and company goals. More specifically, if your website advertises product, promotes, or sells product or services - your website needs to effectively convince a visitor to call, email, or purchase. If your newly designed web site does not do this successfully, then you have completely wasted your initial investment, and will have to repurchase a website from a Web Design company that can turn your site into a money making machine.

This particular example company searched again for web design. Austin is a great city thriving with technology and design - amongst many other cities that provide a lot of successful developers as well. The example company has since had a new site developed with their sales goals in mind, and is now making sales with their website - instead of having to rely on a sales person or hire more sales staff.

Happy hunting for developing a website that works for you!
FindMyCompany.com is a website development, web site designing and internet marketing company offering affordable web site design Austin. For more information regarding Austin search engine optimization services please visit http://www.findmycompany.com.