Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organized, focused and you really mean business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the “salesperson dressed shabbily” analogy, and you will get my point.

Until next time!

Pj

Tags: design, webmaster, designer, creation, website, web development

Design Tips, Graphics and Designs, Web Development

Hello again!

The other day a friend asked me to come up with a quick list of essentials for good web design. I jotted down a few things and I can assure you that if you have the following, you are well above average:

Text

• Background does not interrupt the text
• Text is big enough to read, but not too big
• The hierarchy of information is perfectly clear
• Columns of text are narrower than in a book to make reading easier on the screen

Navigation

• Navigation buttons and bars are easy to understand and use
• Navigation is consistent throughout web site
• Navigation buttons and bars provide the visitor with a clue as to where they are, what page of the site they are currently on
• Frames, if used, are not obtrusive
• A large site has an index or site map

Links

• Link colors coordinate with page colors
• Links are underlined so they are instantly clear to the visitor

Graphics

• Buttons are not big and dorky
• Every graphic has an alt label
• Every graphic link has a matching text link
• Graphics and backgrounds use browser-safe colors
• Animated graphics turn off by themselves

General Design

• Pages download quickly
• First page and home page fit into 640 x 460 pixel space
• All of the other pages have the immediate visual impact within 640 x 460 pixels
• Good use of graphic elements (photos, subheads, pull quotes) to break up large areas of text
• Every web page in the site looks like it belongs to the same site; there are repetitive elements that carry throughout the pages

Tags: webmaster, creation, website, web development, designer, design

design principles, Design Tips, Essentials, good web design, Graphics and Designs, Web Development, website, web designing, web standards

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practice 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 separate 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.

Tags: web development, website, designer, design, webmaster, creation

cripting languages, cross browser, Design Tips, design principles, firefox, Graphics and Designs, headquarter, image editing programs, important information, optimize, page content, prospective visitors, Web Development, web standards