Thursday, February 14, 2008

Website Design Tips

1. Avoid Complications: Animations and sounds on your webpage can divert attention of the visitor. Users who have slow dial up connection seldom like websites with these features, because animations and sound increase the loading time of webpage.

2. Use Small Size Pictures: Webpage with pictures is a good idea. But large size pictures increases the load time of webpage. There are numerous graphic software applications available in market which can compress graphics files so that webpage take less time to load on your visitor’s web browser. This will ensure that the visitor gets a fast website to look at and navigate through.


3. Contact information of your website: Your website visitors may want to ask some questions related to your website or goods/services offered on it. So don’t forget to include your contact information or link to it on each page of your website. Make yourself available to the visitors.

4. Check Website Links: Check your website periodically to ensure that it works correctly. If your website contains links to other websites, check it periodically because the target webpage may have been removed or some problem might have cropped up with the web link itself. Also, ensure all links to other web pages of your website are operational at all times.

5. Website Content: Use proper color, text size and fonts for your content. Never use too dark or too light colors. However you can increase the size of text to improve readability. Never underline the text to highlight it because underlined text and links look same and it is difficult for visitor to differentiate between them. Standard fonts used are “Verdana”, “Arial” and “Times New Roman”.

6. Include Navigation: Navigation links on webpage helps user to explore your site. If your webpage is too long never includes navigation links in the bottom because user have to scroll down to get to them.

7. Load Time: One important thing that you should keep in mind while designing your website is its load time. A webpage that loads quickly is always appreciated by the visitor. You can reduce load time by minimizing the use of images and animations. Also, follow HTML and CSS based coding. Avoid using too many scripts on a webpage. They slow it down. Remember – keeping website content (both text and graphics) short, crisp and simple would do wonders for your business website.

8. Browser Compatibility: Check your website performance with different web browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Opera. These are the main browsers used worldwide. Your corporate website needs to look and perform same on different browsers. If your website has JavaScript operational on it, there is a good chance that it may behave differently on different browsers. Ask your designer to test it on multiple browsers and weed out any browser compatibility issues.

9. Text link Information: Adjacent to the text link on your webpage, include a brief description about the link or about the webpage it links to. This will helpful to visitor to find what they looking for and will help them to make decision on whether to visit those sites.

e.g. – Best Design Services provides premium quality web banner ad (web banner ad samples) design services at highly affordable charges.

10. Manage Webpage Width: Maximum width of your webpage should be not more than 770 pixels. This allows visitors having 15” monitor to easily see your webpage without scrolling left to right. Manage the website content in such a way that it does not need to scroll left or right.

Keys to effective Logo Design

Before designing a logo, we need to understand the purpose of a logo. A logo defines your company. It charts out your identity and cuts out a niche for you under the sun. It’s upon you to make it a cozy and enviable one.

A perfect logo will boost your visibility and brand image in the market. It will strengthen your integrity and enhance your brand popularity, which would quantify into more sales for you. Hence, an effective logo designing process is indispensable.

To design an effective logo, you first need to understand the types of logo prevalent in the market. Some of the commonly used logo types are given below:

1. Text Logo Design: The text logo design focuses on text and style. It’s the best choice for corporations whose names define their functions, for example, TCS ( Tata Consultancy Services). To enhance its effectiveness, you can use different fonts and colors. Text based designs are usually used in case of insufficient funds or the company name not being an established one.

2. Symbol Logo Design: This type of logo design includes only symbols, images and shapes but not text. These images convey complete or abstract image of the business or company. Hence, it’s recommended to use symbol logo design for your company only if it has a high level of brand recognition or you have a unique symbol that defines you in the industry. Symbol logo design is highly non-preferable for start-ups.

3. Text and Symbol Logo Design: Text and Symbol logo design includes both the business name and the symbol. Different approaches of alignments and orientation are used to integrate text and symbol. Text and Symbol logo is the best choice for medium and small size companies or start-ups. Over and above that, a Text and Symbol logo is easy to copyright compared to the symbol logo design since in the former the logo is used in conjunction with the business name.

Website Design Basics

In Today’s world a website is need of every business, organization or an individual. It is the fastest and cheapest medium to reach more people around the world. It helps to expand business worldwide. Design and appearance of a web site play an important role to attract visitors to your website.

Here are some basic website design tips that would help in designing an attractive and productive website for you:

1. Do Some Research: Before making any decision check out some related web site for design, layout or scheme? This will surely helps to make better decision.

2. Try something different and unique: Always go for inimitable design. Add some animations, pictures, etc. to make website more appealing. But do not overdone web site with animations and pictures because this make webpage heavy and it take long time for loading.

3. Content: Content should be simple and easy to understand. It should be solely related to your website. Avoid grammatical and spelling mistake. Use different font style to make content more interesting. To make content more understandable use some examples.

4. Colors: Colors reflect aptitude and perception. Colors have a considerable impact on people’s emotional state. Always use good and soothing color combination in your website. To much bright colors make web site visitors physically sick because their eyes are bombarded by those loud colors.

5. Compatibility: About 80% user of internet around the world use the Microsoft internet explore for browsing and rest 20% use the Netscape, Mozilla Firefox etc. so check out compatibility of your WebPages with these browsers and make required changes.

6. Music: Avoid using music on your WebPages because some people do not like music on website. Also, the download time of these sites is long. Another problem can be the quality of sound that is being streamed to the website visitor. Always keep in mind that visitor may not agree with your music preference and it may turn him/ her away from your website no matter how attractive the website design is.

7. Speed Matters: On internet, speed is a critical factor. Many people still use slow dialup connections. So load time of webpage should be as less as possible. Make your webpage as light as possible.

8. Divide Your Work: Users always avoid long pages, and may not have enough time to read all the content. So better approach is dividing long pages into small pages. Put some hyperlinks to specific topics on a website page.

9. Frames: Frames create many problems with all kinds of browsers. With frames it is hard to get a decent rank with the search engines. Try using minimum frames in your web site design.

10. Simple things are preferred: People love simple things. Nobody likes to do or learn difficult things. Make your site simple so that it is easy for visitor to navigate your website. These simple tips will provide you a basis for putting up the best website design for your business.