DB Graphic design

How to Create Good Web Design?

There are many different types of web design, from those built using website templates and ‘build your own’ site building applications to complex content managed and e-commerce web designs such as those used by big brand names like Amazon, eBay and Tesco.

Some companies, even some big name companies, have unprofessional looking and badly designed websites. Some have amazing looking websites but because of their high graphical content and minimal text content can take an age to load, are not user friendly and do not provide what the visitor wants.

Good Website Design

Though many aspects of website design differ from site to site, many things remain the same throughout the majority of websites on the internet. Most notably is the navigation or menu.

The way in which a website’s menu works and looks is very important, as ultimately, visitors to a website are looking for certain criteria that will make them either stay and interact or leave. This ability for a website to keep visitors interested is sometimes referred to as stickiness. Visitors want an attractive visually exciting experience, but perhaps more importantly, they want ‘ease of use’.

Website usability is a key factor for websites that want their visitors to stick around, make an enquiry and ultimately complete a transaction and order a product or service.

Easy to Use Web Design

Internet users tend to prefer easy to use websites, because they do not want to have to learn how to use a website every time they find a new one. They should be able to use a website after only a few seconds of looking around a homepage, any more and they will leave and browse elsewhere.

The need for fast user interaction is vital and therefore having a fast loading website is also important for a website to succeed. Even with faster internet connections such as broadband, internet users don’t want to wait around.

Just imagine, if you go to a shop on the high street and are totally ignored by shop assistants at the counter for 5 minutes, even after you have made it clear you want help. There is a correlation here to how an internet user may feel, when they arrive at a website that has been poorly designed, is difficult to use, unfriendly and slow to load.

Making sure that a website has been well thought out and designed with the user in mind, displays a company’s unique selling points within easily recognisable eye catching calls for action and has a clear, easy to use menu is key to its success.

Flash Web Design

With recent web design advancements, such as the introduction of Flash animation and high definition video content, impressive websites have been produced to take advantage of much higher levels of visual effects and interaction. However with this ‘high end’ web design, comes a price, more often than not, web designs which rely heavily upon Flash content are often ridiculously slow to load. They often have a progress bar, which slowly goes across the web browser to signify when the website will finish loading.

This is much like the progress bars that you may be familiar with if you use video editing or 3D rendering software, or if you use games consoles where they are displayed whilst you wait for games to load.

Internet users on the whole do not want to wait 3 – 5 minutes for a web page to load even if it does feature high resolution images, animation or video. They want fast informative content rich websites. If they wanted to watch an animation or video they would watch TV.

Good Flash Web Design

This is not to say that Flash animation is all bad news and shouldn’t be used in web design. If used subtly and in small amounts it can make a website more visually appealing without slowing the load time down too much. Suitable uses for Flash animation in web design are things such as; Flash banner advertisements, Flash video and interactive Flash forms for online questionnaires or business presentations.

Using Flash for a whole website design however, is not such a good idea. It slows the user’s experience down because they have to wait for elements of it to load. Also, sites totally developed in Flash tend to use unfamiliar menu structures and features. This can confuse visitors who just want to quickly interact with the website and not be amazed by the way the menu animates.

Just because you can do these things in Flash, it doesn’t mean they have any real working value in the real world. They may look pretty, but if they are not functional and only irritate the visitor then they have no real value.

Flash Web Design & SEO

Another argument against using Flash to create a whole website is that it dramatically reduces the effectiveness of your websites’ Search Engine Optimisation. Flash web designs are made up of one main file within a web page which search engines find difficult to index. This is because the text within them is usually graphical text and therefore is not usually accessible by search engines.

Some recent developments allow some text to be displayed for search engines in Flash websites, but this is nowhere near as effective as text content within traditional HTML based websites.

Don’t Write Off Flash in Web Design

Although Flash does have its limitations it also has its good points if used correctly. For instance; Flash animation is usually smaller in file size than traditional gif animation and because of the way it is made the animation flows smoother than gif animation too.

Having said this, I would recommend only using Flash in small areas within a site to compliment other imagery that makes up the overall design.

Finding a balance between minimal graphical elements, imagery, Flash and good quality informative text is the key to a successful user friendly website. This isn’t to say that web design needs be boring. By working with quality web design companies there’s no reason why you couldn’t have a visually exciting, well designed, easy to use and successful website.

Visually Stimulating Web Design

When visitors first arrive at a website, they want to be impressed and engaged with what the website has to offer. This will be determined by the ways in which the web designer has laid out the website’s content text, images and features.

Arranging elements such as imagery, text, graphics, flash and video in such a way as to keep the visitor interested in the website is the key to good web design. If a website has poor design and doesn’t grab the attention of the visitor in the first few seconds, then it may well be dismissed as just another average website. This ultimately means the visitor will go elsewhere to spend their time and, more importantly, money.

Good Web Design Layout

A lot of time and money is spent making sure that the right elements of websites are positioned in the right places. Companies spend large amounts of money conducting research into how internet users use their websites.

This type of research shows where their visitors’ eyes concentrate the most, which elements of the website they click on first and generally how they interact and use their websites.

Most internet users will look primarily from the top left either across the page, or down the left hand side of the web page through an internet browser via a computer, mobile phone or TV set.

I would hazard a guess, that they are looking for the company’s name or logo, their main selling points or slogans and then what the website has to offer in terms of what is featured in the menu. After which their eyes are probably drawn across the page content and over to the right hand side. Successful web design usually takes this into consideration and will ultimately affect the way a website looks.

There are of course rather famous exceptions to this rule for instance one rather well known search engine has a web design which is quite different. The main focus and core functionality in their web design is located right in the centre of the page. This however, isn’t any ordinary website with tens or even hundreds of pages of products and services to display, its main focus is its recognisable logo and of course its search box. It does however feature a small minimal menu across the top of the web design, which flows from left to right. So even they have taken onboard some of the research undertaken into internet users’ habits.

If you go looking at websites after reading this article, I can guarantee that most of the web designs you’ll see, will have a left hand menu and a defined header bar with a company logo and slogan across it.

www.lynda.com www.lynda.com Fireworks can play an important role in website production. In this movie, Jim Babbage explores new layout feature enhancements added to Fireworks CS4, including pixel-precise guides, the new smart guides, tooltips, which contain X and Y coordinates to help you place elements in your design. He also reviews changes to the Pages panel, the new ability to wrap text using the Text In Path feature and lastly, using symbols and nested symbols in your web design.

There are several essential components of Web 2.0 advertising, but nothing can do the same magic that word-of-mouth does. Therefore, while you are developing strategies for advertising, you must try to focus on using the social networking tools. It will help you expand your online presence by making new connections with the various segments of online communities. There are several advantages of using the social network in this regard. For example, your active participation will provide you with the required proximity to your clients. It will also play an important role in changing the dynamics between you and your customers. With the increasing frequency of social contacts, the list of advantages just goes on and on. In fact, it will not be an exaggeration to say that social networking is one of the easiest and most effective ways of Web 2.0 advertising. The greatest thing about it is that the service does not cost you anything.

• Since the social networking gives you an opportunity to learn more about your target audience, you can get a better feel of the market. It will be easy for you to know about the preferences of your customers, such as the kind of products and services that they like or dislike.
• When you use social networking for Web 2.0 advertising, you and your target audience would not need to hunt for each other.
• In comparison to the conventional methods of advertising, the web 2.0 brings more productive results in less time, that too, without costing anything.
• The advertising venues opened by the innovative technologies of web 2.0 have proved to be a blessing for small businesses with limited funds.
• Every business has a specific image and style. The Web 2.0 advertising gives you complete control and you can easily maintain the image and style of your business that you have created over a long period of time.
• Perhaps the greatest advantage of this kind of advertising is that it does not cost you anything. You run productive advertising campaigns, but unlike the conventional methods, you do not need to pay thousands of dollars for that. You do not need to pay even a single penny.
• Web 2.0 advertising provides you with global access to your customers without worrying over how the advertising campaigns are being taken to the different parts of the world. You can easily expand your reach to an unlimited number of customers.
• Recognizing and reaching the correct target audience is very important for the success of any advertising method. Web 2.0 advertising does not only save you a great deal of time and money, but it also provides you with an opportunity to get the maximum exposure for your business through a little effort.

Affiliate marketing is one way in which bloggers utilize their blog to generate revenue. The amount of revenue generated by a blog featuring affiliate marketing links may vary significantly depending on the amount of traffic the blog receives as well as the compensation offered for the affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing essentially entails creating a link on the blog to another company’s website. The other company then compensates the blog owner according to a previously agreed upon contract. This compensation may be awarded in a number of different ways. The blog owner may be compensated each time the advertisement is served, each time a unique website visitor clicks through the advertisement or each time a blog visitor performs a desired action such as making a purchase or registering with the website. This article will discuss some aspects of affiliate marketing which bloggers should understand including selecting opportunities carefully, maximizing the income potential for these opportunities and understanding the requirements associated with these affiliate marketing opportunities.

Selecting Affiliate Marketing Opportunities

There is a wide variety of affiliate marketing opportunities available. Many different companies and websites offer affiliate marketing opportunities. In most cases the blog owner simply needs to submit the website address of his blog along with some other basic information for approval. In most cases the company is not likely to reject the application unless the content of the website is deemed to be objectionable or otherwise in conflict of interest with the company’s goals. However, although getting approved to display affiliate links on your website is a rather simple process, this does not mean blog owners should select these affiliate marketing opportunities without discretion. It is a far better idea to carefully select affiliate marketing opportunities with companies who are of interest to the target audience of the blog.

A well focused blog that is reaching a specific target audience should seek to display marketing links directing website traffic to companies which complement the blog without acting as direct competition to the blog. This helps to ensure the blog visitors will not only be interested in the affiliate marketing links and therefore more likely to click on the links but will also help to ensure the blog visitors do not find the affiliate marketing links to be bothersome.

Maximizing Affiliate Marketing Opportunities

Once blog owners have selected affiliate marketing opportunities it is time to consider how they can maximize the profit generated by these links. There are a couple of critical factors which blog owners should carefully consider to help maximize their profit from affiliate marketing. This includes regularly evaluating the effectiveness of the affiliate links and promoting the blog to maximize traffic.

Blog owners who incorporate affiliate marketing into their blog should regularly evaluate the effectiveness of the affiliate links. This can be done by comparing the percentage of blog visitors who click on the affiliate links to the overall blog traffic. A blog which has high traffic but a relatively small percentage of visitors who click on the affiliate links should consider making changes to attempt to entice more blog visitors to click on the links. These changes can involve the aesthetics, size or location of the advertisements. Making only one change at a time is recommended because it makes it easier for the blog owner to evaluate which changes are most beneficial.

Blog owners can also help to maximize the profit from their affiliate marketing opportunities by doing self promotion to drive additional website to the blog. This will likely be beneficial because higher website traffic will generally translate to greater profit from affiliate marketing. Additionally, the blog owner may want to occasionally mention companies for which they are an affiliate to generate interest in the advertisements on the website.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing Requirements

Finally, blog owners should pay careful attention to the affiliate marketing agreements they enter. This is important because some companies may place restrictions on the usage of a link to their website. This may include restrictions such as avoiding objectionable content, not including links or advertisements for direct competitors or restrictions on the appearance of the affiliate links. Failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in the blog losing affiliate privileges and the blog owner being denied compensation.

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