While few companies can boast as we do that our first ten clients are still with us today, many companies often change Web design firms to get a new perspective on how their Web presence could look and perform. The following paragraphs serve as a Buyer’s Guide to use when shopping for a new Web design company.

First, determine what exactly you’re shopping for. Is your Web site down a lot? Do you frequently have email problems? This may or may not be your Web site designer’s problem. Many design firms outsource their Web site hosting operations and if that’s the case, you may just need a new Web host. While most companies prefer to work with a Web site design company that also hosts their Web site because there are great cost savings to be realized in this type on environment, this isn’t always the case and is a question that needs to be asked.

In addition, does the firm you’re evaluating perform all of their services in-house or are they outsourcing development to India? This has become more of a common practice due to the extremely low labor costs, but if your site is changing frequently, this can present a lot of problems in delayed response, delayed postings, and other issues associated with working with such a time difference.

Furthermore, what kind of clients does the design company have? Do they have an online portfolio that you can view to see examples of their work? The best way to assess a Web site development company’s capabilities is to look at their previous work. This will show you

what they’re capable of doing as well as whom they’ve worked with in the past. If the company has a lot of experience in a particular industry, they can bring invaluable information to the relationship.

In addition, how long have they been in business? While the Internet is only 10-12 years old, companies that have been around the better part of a decade have done so because they generally do good work. Make sure that you’re not looking at some fly-by-night company that just popped up in the sponsor listings in Google.

Finally, avoid anyone offering the $500 Web site. If your business is interested in a professional Web site (as opposed to something built by your nephew), you have to be prepared to spend several thousand dollars. There is a lot of graphic design and advanced programming work involved and it takes time to do this. You’ve got to establish a realistic budget if you want to have any success online.

Most legitimate Web site design and hosting companies can do a great job for you, but determining the one that is the best match for your organization is up to you. Use the ideas outlined here to help narrow the search and then pick the one that you feel most comfortable with.

WebSolutions Technology, Inc. is a privately held full service Web site design, development, and hosting company based in the suburbs of Chicago. All design and hosting services are performed onsite by their team of professionals and WebSolutions is currently celebrating their tenth year in business. Please direct any inquiries to sales@wsol.com or call 630.375.6833.

The top ten fonts for website design might change in order, but for the most part the fonts that make up this list stay the same due to their popularity. In general, the top ten list includes Arial, Frutiger, Futura, Gills Sans, Helvetica, Lucida, Optima, Palatino, Agfa Rotis, and Univers.

The reason these fonts are so popular is because they are simple and easy to read on computer screens with low resolution. As a result, most of the time fonts that are unique, wild, and distinctive are not used on web pages so as not to distract the reader from what is trying to be said and communicated through the font on the page. Since the website uses content to get the point across, it is prudent to use fonts that are easy to read. If you make it difficult for a visitor to read the content, they will more likely leave than put forth the effort. Consider the following points as well when developing your fonts for your website.

- Big Fonts

This is your web page and likely your livelihood, not a term paper or research project that has a defined style. Because of this, you can use big fonts, bold them, make them stick out and attract the reader. You can drive your point home with larger fonts and they also will be significantly easier for your visitor to read. The object of your website is to present

information that is easily seen, read, and found by visitors. So, go ahead and increase the font size even in regular text that is not in a heading or title. Many of your visitors will thank you because they will not have to put on their glasses or strain to read the text. Sometimes bigger is better.

- Sans Serif

If you have no idea about fonts, how they translate to your web page, or how they will affect your visitors and ultimately sales, then you should definitely stick with a san serif font. The reason for this is that these fonts are the most legible and provide the best readability for visitors in a low resolution atmosphere. Don’t take risks with your fonts, go generic and use a sans serif font. Your visitors will thank you for it and your sales will not suffer from it.

- Simple is Safe

Again, don’t let yourself get carried away with your fonts and designs. Instead, keep the thought in mind that simple is safe. If you want to be bold and brazen in your website design then don’t take that route with your fonts. Keep it simple, basic, and easy to read, and you will benefit significantly more than if you try to mix it up.

Michael Turner reveals step-by-step how you can increase search engine traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

Since I made the switch 6 months ago to a tableless design on my main site, I’ve noticed some interesting things:

• My search engine rankings have dramatically improved
• My bandwidth usage has dropped about 50-75%
• I can now make changes to the look and feel of my site easily by just changing the one file, the stylesheet.

Let’s look at why my search engine rankings improved. Now that I have less un-indexable code on my pages, the search engines can now spider my site quicker. Less code, more content, therefore a better ranking. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Bandwidth costs money, and unless you have a really good hosting plan with lots of bandwidth, then your larger files will take up more room on your server, and take a lot longer to load. Tableless designs use up considerably less bandwidth and are more accessible.

Every once in a while I may want to alter the look of my site. I like to change font colors, link colors, menu items, etc…Before I started using tableless designs, these changes took me hours to do. Now

I just open up my stylesheet, make the changes I want, and in a few minutes I have my site updated with the new look and feel. It’s so easy!

For a client who wants to make their own changes, tableless designs could literally save them thousands on tech costs.

Most of my clients still want sites with tables. I now give them the choice of either style. After all, the customer needs to be happy, right?

Some people have the misconception that utilizing tableless designs means having a boring and less graphical site. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Take a look at one of my favorite websites: http://www.csszengarden.com/. At that site you can really appreciate what can be accomplished through css-based tableless designs. Beautiful!

Make the switch to a more profitable, usable, and accessible website!

Copyright 2005 – Karen Blundell

Karen Blundell is a web designer and internet consultant based in Welland, Ontario. Her focus is to assist home and small business owners succeed on the internet. You can find out more about her services at http://webzonecentral.com

There are a lot of reasons your site may need a re-design. Some may be more obvious than others. You may have asked yourself the question: Can my site benefit from a re-design? Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will have an answer. The most common reason to redesign a site is that it’s outdated. If your site hasn’t been updated in the last 3 to 5 years you may want to have it evaluated. Some new programming has come out over the last few years. Today’s newer sites have cleaner designs. Some scripts are no longer needed. Newer programming can improve your sites functionality. If your site is an e-commerce site, your code may have too many charters in the query strings. You can benefit from a clean up of those dynamic urls.

Does your site have a plain or “flat” look to it? Are the colors dull and lifeless? How does your site stack up to your competitor’s site? You want your site to appeal to your visitors. If your site looks amateurish, people may be hesitant to buy from you. An attractive layout tells potential customers that you take your business seriously and so should they. Is your site hard to navigate? Have you added links to your menu that are now out of control? Re-designing will help you organize your site for better use by the user. If your site is too confusing and people cannot find what they are looking for, they will leave. Depending on what type of business you are engaged in, there may be thousands of sites just like yours. If potential customers can’t easily navigate to what they need at your site, they will quickly go somewhere else.

Is your

site still hosted on a goecities or other free hosting service? Domain names are cheap. Some even come with free or low cost hosting. There is no reason why you should be on a free service. To be taken seriously you need to establish your company name or brand. That starts with a domain name.Finally, is your site optimized to help you acquire a high ranking on search engines? If not, your site is likely not helping you reach your full potential. Remember, no matter how good or bad your site looks, no matter how easy it is to navigate and no matter how clearly your layout expresses what you have to offer, nothing will come of it unless users actually visit your site.

Think about whether or not your site suffers from:

Bad color scheme

Use of old or bad SEO methods

Confusing layout

Lack of overall optimization. (Save money doing SEO and re-design together)Long loading times

Unnecessary, old and outdated pages

A programming method that precludes you from initiating your own updates

Non search engine friendly pages

These are just a few reasons to have your site re-designed. There’s a lot of improvement that can come out of a site re-design. Ask yourself if these common problem areas may pertain to your site. If they do, you may be losing potential customers or clients. In short, you may be losing money.After you have your site re-designed, write a press release. Let the world know your site has a new look. If “Mr SEO “does your site re-design, we will distribute your press release for FREE.

To learn more about web design and SEO visit http://www.mr-seo.com. There you can request a free web design quote. Also visit Joe’s blogs at http://mrseonewz.blogspot.com/

Simplicity is the heart of effective web design

Keep it simple. Will ya?

Have you ever wondered over the striking commonalities among some of the tremendously functional sites of our time? Just spare some thoughts on the features of sites like Cisco, Marshall , Dell, Amazon, etc., and the answer would not elude you.

Yeah. You have got it. Plain and simple. Friendly and functional. No cosmetics. No facelifts. No fuss. Simplicity matters in web design as it does in other spheres of life. Web design is not a medium to show off your technical prowess. Nor, you are supposed to demonstrate your superb graphic acumen. These are necessary but only in moderation; let them not dominate over your site friendliness and usability.

Here are some useful and rather important tips that will help you– turn on the right track–to establishing a site professional in appearance, and high in quality and usability.

Formulate your mission statement and understand your target audience

A mission statement or statement of direction on where the company intends to go in the foreseeable future is critical. It will definitely provide some stability from which the website can springboard forward. You must pursue some explicit goals to excel on the web. You must be pretty clear on the counts like :

• What’s the purpose of the site?
• Who is the site’s audience?
• How will success be measured?
• How to gather feedback and involve your audience in your design?

Mere high intentions and a cool design aren’t going to sustain your development and production processes if you are missing out a concrete statement of your goals and how to achieve them. In its sheer absence, a website cannot deliver a consistent, steady message to customers, can hardly be a platform for quality.

Ponder well on your layout and navigation

A clean layout and neat navigation that employs a lot of white space enhances your site’s look and appeal. Be focused focus on your content. You can better use dreamweaver templates for your site – all pages or a group of pages have one basic design and only the content varies. And this will be taken note of—hopefully with an appreciative eye.

• Make it sure load time on the site is optimal
• For making load time low on your site, you can choose from the following options.
• Minimize graphics, flash and scripts: They occupy huge space, and thus need to be minimized.
• Optimize your HTML & script code: See to it that your site doesn’t have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
• Use server side include (SSI) files: SSI files once called from the web server remain in its cache, and on subsequent requests they load faster.
• While designing take into consideration all screen resolutions

A site that is easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay on and read your content. If your site doesn’t seem to look good for a particular resolution it is likely that the visitor will close the browser window

feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. Therefore, designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution will ensure a visually appealing and professional site.

Make your site interactive and rich in content

To make your website stickier you can add a few simple interactive applications like site polls, surveys, a guest book, an event calendar, newsletter sign-up, etc. There are many applications on the net but you need to choose them wisely.

Macromedia Flash is another way to add interactivity to your site. 95% of the world’s browsers have the Flash Player plug-in, so you need to think about compatibility as long as your movie can be played by lower versions of the Flash Player. You may well try having a HTML and Flash Sections “Entry (Splash) Page” if you have a heavy movie to accommodate users on slow connections.

Make your site scalable and cross browser compatible

Making your code and design scalable pays you off well. This is crucial simply because as technology advances and configuration of computers and their monitors keep increasing and varying it becomes impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and platforms.

Also, check your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Opera 7.0 and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the world’s browsers.

Incorporate consistency all over your website

Consistency is crucial as it could give your site a more professional look and feel, and also makes way for easy navigation. For consistency to pervade throughout your website, try using database templates to create a common look and feel for your site.

Although database template is not commonly the answer for all web sites, and may not be practical for smaller sites, it is a big help for all pages in your site to share common elements, and reflects a high degree of page-to-page consistency. The advantage arising from it is that it is all the more easier to create, and make your site consistent regardless of changes in personnel. Database templates also facilitates you to make changes to your site much more easily, and help you change certain elements without recreating the entire page from scratch

The dividends of simplicity can not be ignored and put at stake

While designing a website it is important that the site is attractive, fast-loading, user friendly, focuses on your content and has a high stickiness factor to it. This is probably what it takes to be professional in appearance, high in quality, and value added in functionality. Any deviation from the cardinal principles of simplicity may well backfire, and energies so spent can go down the drain. So, miss out on the finer points of simplicity, and stay tuned to face the music.

Rashmi Longia is a Web Designer at BlueApple, a Web Design and Development Company with a well connected development infrastructure in India having a strong portfolio of global clients offering superior web services and solutions at competitive costs.

Internet marketing is a different ball game altogether when compared to traditional marketing. A brick and mortar store employs salespersons to guide and advise its customers. No such equivalent of a salesperson exists for an online store. This could be one of the reasons why people shy away from online stores.

Given these circumstances, it is of vital importance that your web store should be as interactive as possible. An interactive website makes your visitors feel more comfortable and increases your chances of making a sale. A well designed website is the first step to make your visitor comfortable. Enough has already been said about not choosing flashy colours or having excessive graphics. I will now elaborate on the importance of having a feedback form in your website.

Every site will invariably contain a “Contact Us” section. Information usually present in this section includes the business name, e-mail address, physical address, telephone numbers etc. But what is missing in many websites is a feedback form. Consider a scenario where your visitor has a query and wishes to contact you. If you don’t have a feedback form, your visitor will most likely choose to e-mail you. There are numerous intervening steps that your visitor has to perform before he can e-mail. Such steps like opening his/her e-mail program, logging in etc. are distractions and your visitor’s attention is easily diminished. Moreover if your potential client is on a public computer he/she may not have access to his/her e-mail and it is extremely unlikely that he will remember and contact you once he/she gets back to his/her computer.

All this can be avoided by having a simple feedback form in the “Contact Us” section of your website. Your visitor won’t even be leaving your site when he/she

fills up your form. The very nature of forms makes it easy for you to collect information from your visitor. For example, if your visitor requires more information about a particular product that you are selling, he/she can choose it from a drop-down box listing all your products and then type his/her query. Consider the alternative: if you didn’t have a feedback form in your website, your visitor would have to type your product name in the e-mail and then type the query – more pain to your user.

The very fact that feedback forms have so many advantages may lead you to believe that they are very hard to implement. You would be surprised to know that they are one of the simplest things to have. Forms consist of very simple HTML and there are numerous tutorials available on the web for creating them. You also need a program/script to process the form and a simple query in your favourite search engine would find many such scripts. A simpler method would be to sign up for a remotely hosted form processing service so that all your form processing needs can be outsourced. You will find that the entire process takes about 10-15 minutes or lesser and you can have a feedback form up and running!

Now that I have shown you that it is so simple to have a feedback form and there are numerous advantages associated with it, there is no reason for you not to have one!

Ajay R is a vastly experienced web-designer and developer. He is also the webmaster of FormBuddy.com, a free remotely hosted form processing service that allows you to easily create and process feedback forms without the requirement of knowing any programming language.

As the internet evolves from its infancy into maturity, website development, design and marketing becomes more and more sophisticated – and more and more complex. Content manipulation, various scripting methods, fancy graphics and effects… and on and on… allow us to create some impressive web sites.

A good gauge of this complexity is the a slew of new internet-related acronyms which popup on a consistent basis. Heck, I don’t know what half of them mean. But one acronym I do know – and it’s not an internet creation – is nevertheless key to the development and design of any successful business website. Perhaps you’ve heard of it – K.I.S.S. As you probably know, it stands for ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid!’. And it’s a methodology widely employed by the best web developers, designers and marketers in the business. A philosophy that provides the foundation for all successful revenue-generating web sites.

From the largest, multi-product online business conglomerate to the one-page one-product mini-site, the purpose is the same. Provide visitors, whether internet savvy or first time surfers, with an online experience that’s fast, efficient, easy to understand – and dare I say it… yes, enjoyable.

Whether your an entrepreneur building your own web site, or reviewing one built for you by a web development and design expert, it is important your web site, your online business, adheres to these eight simple, yet essential, design principles. Heed them, and online success is sure to follow. Ignore them, at your peril. Here they are.

Each web page must have a purpose – and that purpose must be clearly stated. While a consistent design ‘look and feel’ is vital across all pages of your web site, each page has a specific function to perform. And that function should be clearly understood by all visitors to your web site. Whether it’s to elicit feedback, provide feedback, promote your company, present product information, etc., all play a role in your ultimate goal of growing your business.

Navigation around and through your business web site must be clearly visible and easy to use. See my article on web site navigation for more details.

Avoid distraction and clutter by minimizing usage of fancy flashing and moving objects, which provide more sizzle than steak, and make your essential products or services harder to find.

All business websites should have contact information clearly visible. A ‘Contact’ page is minimum. It’s also advisable to include contact information on every page of your web site. You never know when the urge to turn from prospect to customer will strike your visitor.

Not everyone has broadband. Yes, there are still a fair number of users

surfing the internet with slower, less efficient, dial-up access. That may change in the future, but it’s a reality today. Ignore this substantial customer base and you’re business will surely suffer. To avoid this pitfall, pay careful attention to eliminate internet-clogging elements on your web site. When possible, use text instead of graphics, static graphics instead of animation, several smaller pages instead of one large page. Do this and you can feed quite well on the desertions from your flashier competitors.

For those who are broadband users, who are not negatively effected by all those ‘bells and whistles’, who may actually enjoy such an impressive display, remember, ‘form follows function’. This is especially important on a business web site, where functionality is key. All else is fluff and distraction.

For those of us who may be ‘visually challenged, make sure your web site is easy to see. Avoid fancy fonts and use the more legible standard-bearers, such as Times New Roman, Courier New, Arial and Verdana. For standard text, use font sizes of at least 10 pt… 12 pt is better. On many a web site, font sizes of 8 pt or less are used, perhaps in an effort to avoid the need to scroll. Let me tell you… it’s much better to scroll than to squint. For when I squint, I usually stroll… right out of the site. It’s also a good practice to limit the use of italics as they too are harder to read. Lastly, pay attention to text and background color. Although white text on a black background looks cool at first glance, it can quickly strain the eyes. You don’t want to do anything that will cut your visitor’s journey through your business web site..

Whenever possible, limit page lengths to no more than two page-downs. It is better for performance (page loading) and visitor attention when pages are short, quick reads. If necessary, breakup your text into multiple pages, with a ‘continued’ designation at the bottom of each page. There you go. Eight simple, yet essential, web site design principles that can spell the difference between online business success or failure. Always remember, you’re never more than one-click away from visitor abandonment. K.I.S.S. your website and it will reward you abundantly.

About the Author:

Alan Richardson is a well-known internet consultant and publisher with http://www.optimalwebservices.com – a Web resource firm in North Easton, Massachusetts, offering free advice and information for web-based small businesses and entrepreneurs.

To read other articles by Alan, click http://www.optimalwebservices.com/articles

To signup for the free ‘Optimal Web Services for Small Business’ ezine, click http://www.optimalwebservices.com/subscribe

Marketing and communications professionals are constantly looking for creative ways to promote their businesses and organizations. It’s a way of life. Where a normal person sees a refrigerator magnet, a marketing specialist sees a chance at continuous visibility. Where a normal person sees a free postcard, a marketing specialist sees potential publicity for his company’s new service. Where a normal person sees a collection of pictures and words online and calls it a website, a marketing specialist often does the same thing, and that’s a problem.

The web is our most powerful, yet most neglected tool in marketing. Very few organizations truly take advantage of its power. Many of my clients become my clients because they need to update their branding. They need a new logo, office materials and marketing materials. They most often have a website, but it typically isn’t what they want to update first. When I ask employees what they want to get out of new branding, the answer is either “nicer business cards and things to send/give out” or “don’t bother me.” This is a tremendous insight into that fact that selfishness is a huge motivator. Employees rarely visit their company website unless it’s their job to do so.

They personally give out their business cards and other collateral and they want those materials to reflect well on them. Or, in the “don’t bother me” group, they just want to do their jobs and don’t want to be hassled by some annoying designer. At any rate, the website becomes secondary and employee’s needs are first.

The lesson here is this: if you want to get into the mind of your market, you have to discover what selfish need they have that will get them to visit your website and give you business. The web is powerful because it provides instant answers for people actively searching for information. The web is not just about pajama-clad 20-somethings looking to buy CDs before bedtime. Every demographic imaginable has representatives online actively seeking you out. For example, a company employs a PR specialist to help build business. That PR specialist knows that she needs to align the company with a charity to offset some of the company’s prior bad behavior and create a story for a press release.

If she stumbles on your organization’s website and reads about your history, annual events and contact information, she may move on. But if your website discusses how your services dramatically helped specific people, how you are growing each year, how if she gives over $5,000 her company will be listed in every publication you produce, and how your corporate donor program has positively affected another company like hers, she may pick up the phone to talk to you. Throw in a choice of a free Spa package at the local très-chic spa or 10 free movie passes with her $5,000 donation and she may just send a check.

Here’s another example: I am redesigning the website of a geography-themed game company based in Redmond, Washington. Their site currently provides detailed information about their games and lists where the games are available for purchase. The images are large-easy to see but tough to load. All of the information about each game is provided at once. In addition to implementing a way for people to buy the games directly online, the main purpose of the redesign is to give visitors some choices. They are able to decide how much information they need by reading a few sentences about each game and then clicking if they want to read more. Or, they can opt just to go buy the game and read nothing.

Or, they can take the geography quiz on the home page and see if they are smarter than most of the population. It’s always nice to get an answer correct and read “Good for you-you did better than 92% of the

people who took this quiz.” (People like to be told that they’re smart, but they love to be told that idiots populate the world and they’re not one of them). The 92% who get it wrong just have another incentive to buy one of the educational games. The point is to make the site about the visitors, not the company.

No one visits your website for you. They visit your website for themselves. The things that you think are important about your company or organization really don’t matter unless they drive visitors to your site. For example, most websites outline a company philosophy, culture or mission.

Go check out your web stats and see how many people return to that page. That information can certainly be on your site, but for your own professional health, take it off the home page. Put it somewhere that people only have to see if they really want to. Besides, a visitor will interpret your culture and philosophy by the design quality of your site before they ever read a word.

A powerful website allows your company or organization more options and exposure than any other medium. You can experiment. You can change and update information freely. You can tell your public about special events, new products, case studies, or research that you are doing at virtually no cost. You can connect your customers to other useful companies. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you or your employer has a website. Answer these ten questions about your website and see if there is room for improvement.

1. Who visits your site and why?
2. Are visitors getting what they need when they visit? Are they getting it fast?
3. Are visitors giving you what you need when they visit?
4. What are you giving visitors that they can’t get at other sites similar to yours?
5. Does your site look clean, professional and trustworthy?
6. Is the design intuitive? Is it easy to navigate?
7. Can your site be found on most major search engines?
8. Do you have a way to track the number of visitors to your site and what pages get the most hits?
9. Is there an incentive on your site to get visitors to return on a regular basis?
10. If you picture the people, philosophy and culture at your company and then visit your site, do you feel like they’re the same?

One common roadblock to having a truly effective website is a lack of personnel to actually keep it up. If your company has someone who updates your site regularly, you’re in great shape. Do an audit; see if you’re appealing to the selfish drive of the people who visit your site and if you’re providing them with what they need when they visit. Discuss the pitfalls in your website with coworkers and figure out a remedy. Be creative about what you offer your public to get them to your site and keep them coming back. Prize incentives are effective but can be expensive. Links to relevant articles, a monthly e-newsletter, or weekly trivia games also work well.

If you don’t have a person who regularly updates your site, find one. Either a regular employee or a contract employee willing to give you a certain number of hours per month will work. When you come up with an obscenely effective way to increase your business, you want someone there to update your website immediately.

Ultimately, if you think about your website with a sense of relief that it pulls its weight by increasing your bottom line, you’re in the right place. If not, take yourself to a spa or a movie, and get ready to embark on your most important marketing project ever.

Audrey Nezer is an award-winning graphic designer in Seattle, Washington. Her company, Artifex Design, creates playful, edgy and effective marketing and communication materials for companies and organizations throughout the United States. Visit http://www.artifex.net to learn more (and win a prize!)

You spent countless hours designing a site with fantastic colors, attractive images and beautiful layout but it failed to click, did this ever happen to you? Many of the apparent reasons could be lack of planning or inappropriate design elements. A well thought site never fails to click. To avoid this kind of situation it is very important for a web designer to plan things in advance and foresee the impact of the site. Ask a couple of questions:

Who is the target audience?

What is the purpose of the site?

What all functionalities are to be included?

If you have done your homework and have the capability to come up with a snazzy design, you will definitely make your first impression a lasting one.

Once things are planned, its time for the design elements to be taken care such as:

Layout:

Simplicity is the key here. Keep the layout simple and straightforward. This will help you to build a site that is user friendly and accessible. Place the things that are most important and functionally basic to the site’s purpose at the forefront. Avoid clutter because it distracts the user.

Navigation bars:

Keep the navigation of your site really simple. It is one of the determining factors to ensure traffic to the site. If a first time user of your site finds the navigation easy in the first couple of minutes of his contact, he will definitely come back.

Place the navigation menus on top or left of the home page because almost all the sites on www follow this pattern. This is where most of the users are used to look for menus. Main menu should be placed on all the pages at the same place and try to keep the navigation same all through the pages. Avoid scrolling horizontal. If the site is relatively large, include a sitemap.

Color:

Site that is visually pleasing is a sure shot. So, always use eye-pleasing colors. Don’t let your personal choices take over the required color scheme that goes with the taste and purpose of the site in question. You might wonder but white spaces also make great impact. Use a lot of

white space to emphasize a few things. Too much color, words or clutter may result in sensory overload of the user.

Readability:

No reader on net will make an effort to read the text that is not comfortably readable, even if your site is very useful and beautifully laid. So do not loose out on this front and follow some standard norms of font size and line length.

Font size and type:

Optimal font size is 12-13 pts. Use professional font types like Verdana, Arial, and Helvetica. These are system default fonts. Avoid using fancy fonts like Comic Sans and the ones that are externally added. Always use darker text on light background. Light text on darker background is hard to read and has a blinding effect.

Graphics:

Graphics are a powerful tool to communicate. They can say a million words in lesser space as compared to the actual text. But use them judiciously because too many images increase the load time. So make sure that you optimize your images before adding them to the website. Use a “gif image” if it has smaller number of colors. “Jpeg” is advisable if there is more of text to be incorporated into an image.

Download time:

More the loading time, lesser is the number of audience to your website. So try to keep the page size as small as possible. Always keep in mind, there are many broadband users but greater numbers of the ones who have dial ups. So try to minimize the size of your web pages but still maintaining the quality of the images.

Testing:

This can be a very crucial factor since almost all the users of your website will be having a different combination of software and hardware available on their system. So it’s advisable to check your site on as many as varied computers. And also if there is any malfunction or bug on your site, its better to know it yourself rather than people telling you (if someone is bothered at all).

Above mentioned points can enhance your website presence as beautifully as you ever imagine.

For more details, please visit our website BluEnt eSolutions

Meenu Suri

When it comes to search engine ranking “cute won’t cut it”.While search engines can generate a mind staggering volume oftraffic what they feed off specifically is content. Searchengines utilize software known as crawlers or spiders.Unfortunately spiders are blind to web design they do not indeximages or flash animation. Essentially a spider will visit yourwebsite peruse your content and report back to the search engine.

Based on the creepy little crawler findings your site achieves aranking. The higher the ranking, the more visible your sitebecomes and a greater number potential customers using searchengines will be more likely to find you. Needless to say ourgoal is to achieve the best possible ranking. So given thatbeauty is only skin deep and content is king, “Why would youspend thousands of dollars to hire a professional web designer?”What’s worse; drive yourself crazy looking for originalconcepts, matching appropriate color schemes etc, etc, etc…

Nevertheless people are influenced by the estheticcharacteristics of your design, and quality web design lendscredibility to your brand. While design might not be the mostimportant reason visitors end up finding your site, it is one ofthe key ways to keep them coming back again and again.

Before you do anything rash, check out the alternative. Websitetemplates are ready-made web designs created to be used as abasis for fast and high-quality website. Each template is uniqueand completely customizable right out of the box. What is more,most quality template shops will provide you with a free sampletemplate so you can evaluate the quality of the product and tryyour

skills before you buy.

These quality website templates are also perfect for self-taughtdesigner such as myself always hungry for knowledge and lookingfor inspiration. I can’t count the number of times I have stareddesperately at my laptop in search of a new idea or two. Nowwhenever I’m stuck, one of the things I like to do is browse toone of these template shops. In seconds I’m perusing throughhundreds of different flash animated templates. Once I comeacross a design that I find particularly intriguing I’llpurchase the template download the complete set of source filesand study it. Ultimately I’ll be able to pickup a new maskingtechnique, duplicate a fancy movie clip, advance my knowledge ofActionScript or simply find simpler solutions to old remedies.

In sum you have a couple of options available depending on whatskill you posses. If you feel comfortable around html and youhave time to do it yourself remember you’ll always be able toget online help in a hurry. Check out the template help centerknowledgebase or speak to a website template specialists aboutyour problem. Also many good quality template shops willcustomize your website template for you and even integrate manyuseful script add-ons such as contact forms and the like, allfor a small fraction of the cost of going through a conventionaldeveloper.

Dave Collado is a senior design consultant at http://www.Foamers.net and freelance webdesigner since 1999. Foamers.net offers quality websitetemplates template customization, flash templates, phpnukethemes, phpbb themes, osCommerce templates, SWiSH templates, webdesign tutorials, and many other website design and web hostingservices.