5 Big Design Mistakes - Learn how NOT TO KILL your Buisness

The first thing you should remember when creating a web page: MAKE IT EASY TO NAVIGATE!
No one will give two pennys on your super designed site if they cannot find what they need! Create a site so that it will combine design and usability!
I have made a list of what I consider to be the worlds biggest web-page design mistakes. Look at this mistakes and learn from them!

I.Stupid, useless and annoying elements that don’t let the visitor find what they want.

1.STUPID SPLASH PAGE. Ok, maybe you will say that a splash page(if it is well done) could look cool. Yes it could. But think of the visitor’s time. That splash page is very often longer than it should. You could actually kill your sales. What do you think that a potential customer would prefer? To stay and look hours at your splash page or to go and buy the product that he wants so much? When you create a site, try to think more at the potential customer than how to expose your flash-creator skills. They don’t care about you, they care about themselves!

2.APPLETS AND PLUGINS. Use them ONLY if you really need them. Not just to spice up your website. Again, think again more at the visitor. Maybe they don’t have installed a certain plugin and your content wwill not work. Then, your website is useless and the potential customer goes to the competition. Now that’s really cool.

II.Thinking at Internet Explorer as the supreme ruler
Any professional-made website should be compatible with any internet browser. This is a rule. Always check your website to be friendly with all major browsers: Opera, Firefox, IE. Don’t send your visitors to the competition just because they don’t use IE.

III.Stupid created navigation.
A thing that any webmaster should do: Spend hours and hours thinking how to simplify the navigation! Ofcourse I’m jocking but when the site is created one of the first question you should ask yourself: “Is this site easy enough to navigate?” If your answer is no, then is bad. Really really bad. The visitor should be able to know at any time where in your website he is; He should now in just a few seconds how to reach the information he needs!

IV.To much information on one page
Structure the information. DO NOT put everything on just one page. Do not put to many menus on the page. Try not to kill the visitors eyes. Try to keep a easy to read layout. Most of the visitors hate to scroll.

V.Text
Do not use small texts. Why there are so many sites on the Internet with texts of such a small size? I have no idea. I tell you again: kepp your webpage easy to read. Use texts big enough so that the visitor can see what you are trying to tell him through the page.

This article was created by Lighezan Alexandru webmaster at SourceGsm: cell phone specifications.

6 Steps To Your Own Website

A lot of people these days are interested in getting their own place on the world wide web. Whether it´s a personal site like a blog, or a business site, they all need to have a decent plan before they get started.

A few years ago I started designing and creating websites myself. I started just to show off to others, but I noticed it wasn’t as easy I thought it was. I mean, it is easy to get a site online; you just buy a template, pay a coder, and pay some one to insert content and advertise for you then you’re done. But if you want to do things yourself, that’s where it gets tricky.

After a few sites, I managed to find a certain pattern in the process of creating and managing my websites.

1. I always start with an idea for subject and content. Believe me - never create a website about something you hate and know nothing about. Instead create a website about something you know a lot about and like to tell other people about. What also works is writing about a subject you would like to know more on, after doing your own research. Newbies can explain information to other newbies easier then pro´s explaining information to newbies.

2. Then I think of a design to go with it, to reflect its idea. Like if your subject is Boats, then don’t go with a flaming red design. Sure it could do it, but I would prefer for a blue, water-like design to reflect its subject.

3. If the design is done, you need to get it coded. Some create their designs while they code, but I prefer to use a graphical program to first create the whole design, just the way I want it to be. Then I slice it all (contact me if you want to read an article about that) and save it for the web. I usually have a small group of coders I trust to code my designs and they send it back to me when it’s coded.

4. Well then everything is almost done you would think. You got a design coded and everything. But the answer is NO. You are just starting. Sure you have a site and all, but you do not have hosting or a domain name. In order to get your site up and running, you will need something called hosting. It’s like when you buy a house it needs to be on ground. Well the hosting is the ground here, and your website is the house. Without hosting, your site is almost useless. These days you can choose between free hosts, which in my opinion aren’t great, but if you want to start and try out, I’d suggest you work with a free host first. And then there is paid hosting, you pay for a certain amount of server space and bandwidth and sometimes extra features.

5. Now if you have chosen to go for a free host, then please skip this step, cause you probably won’t be able to use it. A domain is needed for people to find your website. For example if you website is called BoatFish, then you could make the domain http://www.boatfish.com or http://www.boatfish.net, whatever you choose for. There are quite a large number of extensions you can go for. But I always suggest you go for a .com domain name. People tend to look for them more often than for a .net or any other extension.

6. The most important part of your website is your content. People stay or come back to your website because you have good content, or leave if you don´t. So please write up some good content for your site before launching it; this can cost you a lot of visitors. I can’t show you how to submit content, or what kind of content you should be submitting, this is something you should look into yourself.

7. Now you got everything you need to get your site online. And still you are not done at all. You can site around and wait for people to come to your website, but not many will. That’s why advertising will be your best bet to go for. You can link exchange and/or go for SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a great way to get many hits towards your website. I do not have any websites that haven’t been optimized for search engines, because I know seo’ing brings in many visitors, and customers. SEO means Search Engine Optimization, which means that it will try to rank you as high as possible at search engines. If some one searches for a keyword regarding your website they will see your site and click on it. This is seriously a great way to get many, many visitors.

8. Now your site is done and you can keep submitting content to your site, to keep visitors coming back. Good luck! And let me know if this helped you in any way.

---

If you want to get more articles or Webmaster related information go to Http://http://www.webmasterspalace.com. It’s a place for all webmasters to unite and get their resources from. My name is Klaas Koopman and I am a Dutch Webmaster. You can contact me if you need anything Webmaster related. Thank you for reading. For Designs go to http://www.kkportfolio.net.

Effective Webdesign

The Basics

Before starting on how to design a website effectively, how about clearing some basic web design concepts? Designing Effectively

Now that you know what web design and related terms mean, lets get down to the real thing: Designing Effectively How to balance artistic design with practicality and functionality.

Use of graphics and content

Unless your website is all about graphics, how to make them, edit them or just a bunch of links to graphics websites, I suggest you use graphics sparingly, especially the flashing, twirling kind. They not only detract readers from the content, but they also take ages to load. You do not want your readers to leave your website because your graphically attractive page does not seem to load fast enough. Then again, too much text is boring. So mix and match the graphics and text on your page, having enough white space so that the page is not plain annoying.

Layout and design

While designing, keep in mind that poor layout and design will make your pages unreadable and difficult to keep your visitors on your website for long. Some of the things that make a poor design and layout:

1. Text that is too small to read
2. Color combinations of text and background that make the text hard to read
3. Large graphic files that take forever to load
4. Multiple things that blink
5. Unclear navigation; over complex navigation
6. Paragraphs of type in all caps, bold, and italic all at once
7. Graphics that don't fit on the screen (assuming a screen of 640x460 pixels)
8. Animations that never stop
9. Complicated frames, too many frames, unnecessary scroll bars in frames
10. Cluttered, not enough alignment of elements

Some of the things that make a webpage stand out from the crowd:

1. Stay away from bad design features listed above.
2. Background does not interrupt the text
3. Navigation buttons and bars are easy to understand and use
4. Good use of graphic elements (photos, subheads, pull quotes) to break up large areas of text
5. A large site has an index or site map
6. Link colors coordinate with page color
7. Every graphic link has a matching text link
8. Animated graphics turn off by themselves
9. Pages download quickly
10. All pages have the immediate visual impact within 640 x 460 pixels

Planning

Most of the time, all it takes to design your website effectively is a little planning. When designing a website, it needs to be clean, uncluttered, attractive and easy for users to read and find what they need. Begin with a webdesign plan:

1. what colors do you want to use?
2. Are these colors complimentary?
3. What items - text, images, data - do you want to put in your pages?
4. What layout do you want? Look at other websites and then decide.

Follow the above steps to get a website that speaks for itself and your business. You can always contact me for suggestions and webdesign projects.

Tasneem Rangoonwala is a freelancer Web Development Co-ordinator at D.zigns Enterprise Solutions, offering webdesign, development and other related services.

Make It Easy To Buy From Your Site

You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you.

You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. Eliminate any chances of that to maximize your profits! Convincing your prospects to purchase from you is a hard job, but have you ever thought that you're making the process twice as difficult for both parties if your prospects are convinced but don't know how to buy from you? No matter how good you are at convincing your prospects, they won't buy if they find the process cumbersome. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this.

As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing? Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects' confidence. Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects' desired payment method.

Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet. After all, it wouldn't make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they won't be able to pay you when they want to. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.

Building Your Mailing List with Downloads

A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business.

However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website won't be enough to attract qualified prospects. First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you'll get some of them converted into your prospects! Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the harddisk collecting virtual dust.

Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie. For example, let's take a look at a very good example -- apple.

Com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via -- guess where -- iTunes! In reality, you do not need to offer such a "heavyweight" download such as a full-feature software like iTunes. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on.

The old adage "the money is in the list" cannot be true enough -- if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects.

Improve Usability of Your Website

Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors.

Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn't load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the creme de la creme of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell.

The Importance of a Sitemap

- Navigation purposes A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site.

If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

- Organization and relevance A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time.

- Conveying your site's theme When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time.

- Site optimization purposes When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

How To Have Websites Built For You The Cheap Way

Have you ever seen those advertisements in newspaper classified ad sections that offer a 5-page website at $500? These companies are established companies with physical locations, therefore they have to increase the amount they charge to pay off some overheads: office rent, designer's wages, advertising costs and so on.

All this can change if you know where to find the best deals, the best designs for the lowest price. Think about it, if you only need 5 simple pages to present some simple information, why waste hundreds of dollars for it? Just spend a little time to sit down and do it yourself. The best way to do this would be to go to elance. Another route you can take is to design your website yourself. You'll be able to design your own sites even if you do not know a single line of HTML code with the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.

There, you can post the abstract of your project and get thousands of freelancers to bid on your project, so you will surely get the best deal. On the other hand, they will be able to design images with quality similar to those of designers from big companies, so it's a "no-brainer" choice. On top of that, you will be able to choose the designers based on their experience, past transactions and ratings, so your value for money is secured. Com.

Normally, if you want to have professional designers custom build your site, you must be prepared to dish out at least a few hundred dollars. Here's a rough guide: First, you must understand that it is a rip off to get companies to design websites for you. However, choose freelancers with care. Therefore, it would be wise to find freelance designers who work from home. These people are often working from home so they do not have a high operation cost like that of a company.

Good Design Practices

Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. Make sure your website complies to web standards at www. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. 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. Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website.

Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the headquarter of an offline company. W3. Org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion. Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary.

This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content. 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. Reduce the number of images on your website. 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.

Generating Revenue With Good Planning

Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks.

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly. For example, you might have a "food" section, an "accomodation" section and an "entertainment" section for a tourism site. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you.

Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away! As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page.

You can also earn from programs like Google's Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site.

5 Important Rules in Website Design

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 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.