8 Tips for Designing a Great Website

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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.

5 Basic Rules of web page design and layout

Your web site should be easy to read

The most important rule in web design is that your web site should be easy to read. What does this mean? You should choose your text and background colors very carefully. You don't want to use backgrounds that obscure your text or use colors that are hard to read. Dark-colored text on a light-colored background is easier to read than light-colored text on a dark-colored background.
You also don't want to set your text size too small (hard to read) or too large (it will appear to shout at your visitors). All capitalized letters give the appearance of shouting at your visitors.
Keep the alignment of your main text to the left, not centered. Center-aligned text is best used in headlines. You want your visitors to be comfortable with what they are reading, and most text (in the West) is left aligned.
Read details on how to make your web site and web graphic images easy to read.

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Your web site should be easy to navigate

All of your hyperlinks should be clear to your visitors. Graphic images, such as buttons or tabs, should be clearly labeled and easy to read. Your web graphic designer should select the colors, backgrounds, textures, and special effects on your web graphics very carefully. It is more important that your navigational buttons and tabs be easy to read and understand than to have "flashy" effects.
Link colors in your text should be familiar to your visitor (blue text usually indicates an unvisited link and purple or maroon text usually indicates a visited link), if possible. If you elect not to use the default colors, your text links should be emphasized in some other way (boldfaced, a larger font size, set between small vertical lines, or a combination of these). Text links should be unique -- they should not look the same as any other text in your web pages. You do not want people clicking on your headings because they think the headings are links.
Your visitors should be able to find what they are looking for in your site within three clicks. If not, they are very likely to click off your site as quickly as they clicked on.

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Your web site should be easy to find

How are your visitors finding you online? The myth, "If I build a web site, they will come," is still a commonly held belief among companies and organizations new to the Internet. People will not come to your web site unless you promote your site both online and offline.
Web sites are promoted online via search engines, directories, award sites, banner advertising, electronic magazines (e-zines) and links from other web sites. If you are not familiar with any of these online terms, then it is best that you have your site promoted by an online marketing professional. (See our section, What to Look for in an Online Marketing Company, for some general guidelines.)
Web sites are promoted offline via the conventional advertising methods: print ads, radio, television, brochures, word-of-mouth, etc. Once you have created a web site, all of your company's printed materials including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, etc. should have your URL printed on them.
Not only should your web site be easy to find, but your contact information should be easy to find. People like to know that there is a person at the other end of a web site who can help them in the event that:

1. they need answers to questions which are not readily available on your web site;
2. some element on your site is not working and end users need to be able to tell you about it, and
3. directory editors need you to modify parts of your site to be sure that your site is placed in the most relevant category.

By giving all relevant contact information (physical address, telephone numbers, fax numbers, and email address), you are also creating a sense of security for your end users. They can contact you in the way that makes them feel the most comfortable.

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Your web page layout and design should be consistent throughout the site

Just as in any document formatted on a word processor or as in any brochure, newsletter, or newspaper formatted in a desktop publishing program, all graphic images and elements, typefaces, headings, and footers should remain consistent throughout your web site. Consistency and coherence in any document, whether it be a report or a set of web pages, project a professional image.
For example, if you use a drop shadow as a special effect in your bullet points, you should use drop shadows in all of your bullets. Link-colors should be consistent throughout your web pages. Typefaces and background colors, too, should remain the same throughout your site.
Color-coded web pages, in particular, need this consistency. Typefaces, alignment in the main text and the headings, background effects, and the special effects on graphics should remain the same. Only the colors should change.

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Your web site should be quick to download

Studies have indicated that visitors will quickly lose interest in your web site if the majority of a page does not download within 15 seconds. (Artists' pages should have a warning at the top of their pages.) Even web sites that are marketed to high-end users need to consider download times. Sometimes, getting to web site such as Microsoft or Sun Microsystems is so difficult and time consuming that visitors will often try to access the sites during non-working hours from their homes. If your business does not have good brand name recognition, it is best to keep your download time as short as possible.
A good application of this rule is adding animation to your site. Sure, animation looks "cool" and does initially catch your eye, but animation graphics tend to be large files. Test the download time of your pages first. If the download time of your page is relatively short and the addition of animation does not unreasonably increase the download time of your page, then and ONLY then should animation be a consideration.
Finally, before you consider the personal preferences of your web page design, you should consider all of the above rules FIRST and adapt your personal preferences accordingly. The attitude "I don't like how it looks" should always be secondary to your web site's function. Which is more important: creative expression/corporate image or running a successful business?

Covering Framing Mistakes

One common problem that face digital photographers are shots that have one side of your subject very close to the edge of the frame, or even have it chopped off by the frame. This can leave the shot feeling quite cramped, incomplete or uneven. For example when taking a portrait and you slightly clip the ear of your subject.
While you can never really add to the photograph to put more space around your subject (or recover the ear you clipped), cropping the image even tighter can take the focus away from the clipped part of your subject and make the image quite dynamic.
Whilst the following shot isn’t quite the framing mistake mentioned above it is an illustration of poor framing (that big light colored floor). There would be many ways to crop the shot to get rid of the floor including the one below it.
Read more: http://www.digital-photography-school.com/cropping-for-impact#ixzz13pEV9szu

4 stages of web site design

Stage 1 - Style Over Substance

The first stage is to design a site that the CEO, venture capitalists, and ad agencies like to see. There are all types of "bells and whistles" in this design. An entire site might be a Flash site. Or there might be some beautiful JavaScript mouseover effects or drop-down menus in the design. It's always a pretty design, but the message is clear -- style over substance.

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Stage 2 - Designing for Online Visibility

In Stage 2, the reality of an ineffective web design begins to hit, usually around 3-6 months after the initial launch. A site will typically get rejected by many of the major directories, not be indexed by the major search engines, or not get the traffic or sales that were projected based on the various types of marketing strategies used. Typically, that's when companies decide that they will try to hire a professional online marketer to promote the site. Doorway page companies, in some way, shape or form, rear their ugly heads.
Unfortunately, many web site owners fall for a doorway page company's pitch because the beautifully designed site couldn't possibly be the problem with low site traffic. Yahoo might have rejected a site, or the site might have been listed in Yahoo and the company cannot understand why they have no description next to their company name. But in no way would many ad agencies or doorway page companies want to tell potential clients the truth -- they simply did not design and write an effective web site -- because it would mean losing thousands of dollars in business.

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Stage 3 - Designing for Your Audience

By Stage 3, after spending an exorbitant amount of money on pretty web site designs and various marketing strategies, web site owners generally figure out that they did not design or write an effective Web site for their target audience.
Typically, web site owners will bring in a usability expert to analyze potential problems and present various solutions. Bringing in a search engine marketing expert to help with search-engine friendly design templates early in the design phase can save a company thousands of dollars in online marketing costs.

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Stage 4 - Site Redesign

After careful usability and search engine visibility analyses, web site owners finally have an effective web site. A site that is written, coded and designed for user friendliness and search engine visibility generally gets the most traffic and resulting sales because it was written, programmed, and designed for end users.