Tag Archives: Basic

Basic Web Design tips Ignored

Posted on October 2, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

Web researchers found that you have about 2 minutes to make that first impression a good one. Visitors will judge your site in those few seconds on its professionalism and appropriateness to what they are looking for.

In fact, a website can lose about one-third of its potential customers due to poor design, according to a recent user study conducted by some professionals.

Take a long hard look at your site. Or ask a friend to give you a brutally honest review of your site. Does it pass the test of professionalism?

Are the graphics of good quality and clear? Is the formatting, font size and font colors consistent throughout the site? Or does your site commit design mistakes that speak amateur as soon as it loads?

There are some common mistakes website owners make that may cause visitors to leave early. What are these?

They post “Under Construction” signs all over the site.

Under Construction signs posted all over the website spell unprofessional in a big way. Seasoned site owners understand the power of patience. They know that timing the launch of your completed website is much more effective than doing it prematurely.

Be patient. Wait until the website is complete before publicizing your site. Doing it this way, your visitors will be impressed and gain trust faster. They won’t feel uneasy and run away because they see amateur stamped all over your site with each Under Construction sign.

Some place brightly colored counters on every page as a badge of honor.

The truth is most everyone knows counters can be set to whatever number you like. If you don’t want to start your counter at zero, you can easily start it at 10,000. It raises a red flag of questions. Therefore, it may repel your visitors faster than it attracts them. Why raise the red flag of questions, if you don’t have to.

Look at your in-depth statistics instead if you need to analyze your traffic.

Some websites do not use copyright statements.

Some uniformed site owners don’t know that their copyright is effective the moment their creative work is set in a fixed form. So they fail to put their stamp of ownership on their work.

If you truly own your work, claim it. Post your copyright information at the bottom of every page.

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Basic Web Structure

Posted on September 20, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

The chances of search engines successfully locating and indexing your web site all lies within optimizing its basic structure. Search engine ranking algorithms, such as Google and Yahoo, analyze several on-site elements when trying to determine where a web page ranks for certain search terms and phrases. These factors normally include:

Web site content
Domain name
Browser capability
Web site structure
Navigational linking structure
Page accessibility
Credibility

There are several ways to efficiently optimize for the factors listed above. These things include: choosing reliable web hosting, choosing an appropriate domain name, optimizing your web site for all web browsers, creating logical site structure and navigational menus, generating a sitemap, and creating an About Us page and a privacy policy page.

A well laid out design and structure helps to improve any businesses or entrepreneur’s performance of their web site and also helps users to navigate it, allowing search engines to better find and index all of the written content which is included on the web site.

You should ask yourself the following questions during the web design process:

Is my site appealing to visitors?
Is my web site search engine friendly?

Web Site Structure Basics to Consider During Your SEO Process

Find a web host
Establish a domain name
Plan and design a web site structure
Optimize within multiple browsers
Design a sitemap
Create a contact us page
Create a privacy policy
Link within subject matter themes

About CODANK Charlotte Web Design

CODANK is a top Charlotte Web Design and Internet Marketing Company located in Charlotte, NC. The company is dedicated to providing a broad range of web design services. CODANK specializes in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Graphic Design, Online Marketing, and Web Design and Development.

For more information, visit CODANK Charlotte Web Design and Internet Marketing Company at www.codank.com

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Four Principles Of Basic Web Design

Posted on August 22, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

In this day and age where anyone, including a five year old, can use software tools to write a basic web page it is more important than ever to be aware of and follow some of the principles of basic web design. This list of web design basics is by no means definitive, there are many other issues that come into play when publishing web pages on the Internet. However, following these simple rules will keep your pages looking clean and provide a good first impression to your viewers.

1. Conserve bandwidth wherever possible and start with your photographs and images. Broadband Internet access is still not universal, and even though current estimates point to nearly 80 percent of US households having Broadband we must still optimize our web pages simply as a matter of courtesy. Always use an image editor to reduce the size of images down to the exact size you want them to display on your web page. Never use HTML comments to make a large image squeeze down into a smaller package. Also, make certain that all images are down-sampled to only 72dpi in resolution. Computer monitors can only display images at 72dpi so anything higher is wasted bandwidth. Another great rule of thumb is to attempt to keep the total page size (including all images and scripts) to under 50k. This is very difficult to do, but small web pages load incredibly fast and get your information to the reader much more efficiently.

2. Think about the way you align text and images on each page. Centered alignments are very weak visually. They are difficult to read, and simply don’t use the space well. Left justified or right justified texts create smooth, clean lines that give the viewers eyes something to lock on to and focus their attention. You can further accentuate the alignment of the elements on your page by carefully using the edges of your images as guides for these alignments. Have your image be the left or right hand border of a text block. The image captures the attention of the viewer and the neatly aligned text makes the viewer want to read the information on the web page.

3. Pick a graphic or logo and design your web page’s color scheme based on that graphic. At the same time don’t be afraid to break with the color scheme of your company, school, or organization. Some colors look great on paper but look lousy on a computer screen.

4. Don’t create it if you are not going to update it! Nothing says “WE DON’T CARE!” as much as an organization’s web site that has old, stale, and outdated information on the home page. If you know that you will not have the time to update regularly then create a web page that will not go stale after a certain date. Present your information in present tense without any reference to dates or times. For more detailed and time critical web sites consider using a content management system (CMS) such as Joomla in place of writing raw HTML web pages.

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Basic Web Design Principles

Posted on August 21, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

Home Page

An effective Home page should give a clear and easy view of what the your website is about. It should have a provision of top level navigation on the first page, your logo, and information to tell the visitors on what all he can find in your website. It’s the Home page where a visitor decides his next step, either to click on some of your links or just leave the site. So it is important that your Homepage should be informative and easily readable by your visitor. For instance, if you have a discount to offer free service, and to attract your potential customers, make sure to provide a link for that service in your home page itself.

If you are thinking of implementing flash intro in your first page, make sure to give the user an option to skip the flash intro as well.

Options such as: link, skip intro, should be placed outside the flash, or else you will force the visitor to wait until the Flash movie is loaded. And this could eventually dissuade visitor to browse your website further.

Following are some of the points you need to take care of while designing a website.

Navigation structure

Place the navigation on the place where the people would normally look for it and find it easy. Do not experiment with the navigation! Keeping the navigation system same on ALL pages is important as well. A Visitor to your site wouldn’t be interested in learning about your site navigation system. So make it simple and effective. Consistency is the key here. You should focus your effort on building consistent rhythm across all the pages of your site.

Font size

Your font size should be big enough so that your text can be read without effort. There are many people who would not like to read very small texts. Using very small fonts can lose you your visitors. For proper fonts, an optimal size can be from 12 to13 points. If this is taken care of, then visitors will find it easy to read your text and if the content is interesting then they might foray in, much further.

Line Length

The length of a line in your contents should be comfortable and make the reading part and easy task. The optimal line length for printed materials can be about 10 to 12 words, or 60 to 70 characters. Shorter lines of about 40 to 50 characters may be more appropriate for larger displays. In case, if the line is too long the reader might miss the important points or the beginning. And if it is too short it will break up words or phrase up awkwardly.

Creating emphasis

Creating emphasis is an important and integral part of designing and typesetting. Handled with proper taste and good judgment it can help direct and inform the reader. Emphasis creation must be done whenever it is appropriate or required. Unnecessary emphasis generation can devalue the whole content.

Graphics

It’s a well known fact that one picture is worth more than million words. This rule applies on Internet as well. Do your best to show clear, attractive photo of your products. If you are offering a service, find a photo which will best describe it. However, be careful about file sizes. Don’t compress your photo to that level which would make the picture unclear, but also don’t leave the photo on full quality. That will make file size too big, and will increase the download time.

Gif vs. JPEG

Less experienced web designers makes this mistake many times of using wrong format to store their picture. Here are few guidelines which will help to avoid such mistakes. If your photo has less number of colors (less then 64) GIF will be better choice. However make sure to reduce the palette size too. That is, if your image has 10-15 colors then reduce your palette for 16 or 32 colors.

Also, if your image contains text, GIF format should be your choice. JPEG uses lossy compression method and can cause text and edges to become more blurry. If you are saving a photograph always save it as JPEG. JPEG images can contain over 32 million different colors.

If you want to incorporate large text into a photographic image, JPEG may be a good format to use. While the edges may still get blurred, chances of the same becoming unreadable is however, slim. If you think your image is more important than the text, then you should save it in JPEG format.

Speed

Do what all you can, to reduce the download time. Its a busy world and people wont prefer to wait for long. Try to reduce size of your graphics as much as possible without damaging the image. Image quality must be maintained and size (in KB) should be as kept as small as possible.

Test before publishing

Do your homework, and do it well. Your visitors will not bother to send you an E-Mail that some of your links does not work or that some of your images does not appear. Even if someone does so, it would be quite embarrassing. Perform spell and grammar checking.

Remember that in many cases visitor will build his opinion about you or your company based on the content’s quality of your web site.

Once published, site should not contain any under construction or coming soon messages. This might deter the potential customer to come back again.

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A Few Basic Facts on Web Design That You Should Know

Posted on August 21, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

So, the sagging economy has left you with more time off work and at home in recent months. There you were, watching the TV and on came a story about young business people half your age that were making good money off of websites online. The news story went on to further explain that the sagging economy was not having the same negative effects on these online businesses as it was on standard “parking lot” businesses like the one that you “used to” work at.

Get Your Web Site Up Sooner Rather than Later

So where do you begin? Obviously you need at least one website to get started, but can it be just that easy? The truth of the matter, is that some things that you will have to do are easy and other tasks will be somewhat more difficult. The first easy decision that you will have to make, is whether or not to throw your hat into the ring.

Dare to Dream Big

Remember the guys that decided to invest their meager savings into a crackpot plan to manufacture personal computers in their garage? No doubt, all of their neighbors had a good laugh out of that stupid plan. They all must have really fell out of their chairs laughing when they came up with the name “Apple” to put on every computer that no one was going to buy.

Basic Web Design Concepts

Your web site is going to represent you and your business interests online, so you are going to want to come up with some basic design features before you hand the concept over to a web designer to get started. A good reputable web design company will work with you on  design decisions and wouldn’t have laughed at the computer geeks that named their compute company Apple.

Think Long Term

You must bear in mind, that your web site is going to have to be periodically upgraded and maintained to remain competitive. This means that you may be better served by doing business with a web design company that has a long standing, well established track record, rather than a “rip and run” freelancer that is here today and gone tomorrow.

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Basic Considerations For Web Design

Posted on August 13, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

Successful web design centers around the principle of always considering the experience of the audience first and foremost. Thus, before creating a website or webpage and uploading it to the Internet, the webpage designer must consider the website’s anticipated audience and/or targeted market. What will their experience be? Doing so aids the web designer in defining the purpose of the website or webpage under construction and helps determine what content and features should be included in the design.

Who Is Your Audience?

Consider who the people are that are expected to visit the website under construction? Consider the purpose for which the audience will seek out this specific website or webpage. What exactly will they be looking for? Why? In doing so, the designer will be well served to examine the key words that describe sister pages on the same web domain, as well as competitive sites that show up for these same key words in a general search query.

Experienced web designers recommend drawing up a profile of who a website’s visitors are likely to be, taking into consideration the following variables:

* Audience Characteristics
* Information Preferences
* Computer Specifications, and
* Web Experience

Designing the layout and content of a webpage with these factors in mind, rather than tailoring its focus and function afterwards, is more likely to deliver the desired content to the targeted audience or market demographic.

What Is the Purpose?

Writing out a “purpose statement” that sets out the website’s principle objectives will help keep the focus on what the website will accomplish for its targeted audience. Is the principle purpose of the site informational, or is the website or webpage marketing a product or service to its targeted audience? What are the short-term and long-term goals for the webpage or website? Do . . . or will . . . these goals change over time? How?

The short and long term purposes of the particular webpage will determine the features and scope of the content that initially needs to be provided for the targeted audience, as well as the links and functions that need to be built in to allow users to navigate around the web domain the page sits in. As the “purpose statement” is developed, the content that needs to be provided for users will become more or less self-evident. As construction of the webpage nears completion, checking the content you have included to the page’s purpose statement will be an important check to ensure the webpage functions as it should, not only in the HTML behind the page but, equally important, from the user’s perspective.

What Content Will Users Need or Expect?

Listing and organizing the content and features that users will expect or require should be done with reference to the purpose statement for the webpage or website. Organizing the features and content of the page or site with an eye both to the audience and purpose statement will help focus the theme of the page or site. Content and features that are superfluous to the main purpose of the site should be removed. Each page should have its own focus, segregating individual purposes to separate pages will help enhance the user’s experience – provided well-defined links and navigation tools are included in the overall website design.

Now What?

Once you have set up the webpage or website, it is time to move to the beta phase. Test the site’s effectiveness and usability with a focus group that has the same characteristics as your targeted audience. If this is not feasible, at a minimum invite one or more persons who have not been involved in the planning and layout process to give it a test drive, so to speak. Feedback regarding user experience is the optimal way to tune up a page’s or site’s functionality before it is uploaded. Once your focus group has given the site or page a thorough testing ask these individuals to compare their experience to the goals and objectives that were listed in the purpose statement.

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Basic Mistakes To Be Avoided In Web Designing

Posted on August 11, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

Some of the web designing mistakes which you need to avoid has been listed below:

Bad navigation

While web designing you need to absolutely sure that the web site should be apt in finding information ad navigation. It is a good practice to have the set of links in the top as well as bottom, it is often more convenient for the users to just go to the required links incase the are at the bottom of the page rather than the case wherein they have to scroll up to the page. It is important that you create good amount of drop down menus so that they don’t have to search much regarding the content that they are intending to search. It is important to consider the fact that the users should not get frustrated and just leave the website, hence it is important to consider the fact that they should find it user friendly.

Long time to load the pages

The most annoying thing which people find is the long time which takes to load the pages. A survey analysis proves that the most frustrating thing which people find in browsing is the slow loading pages. Visitors never like to wait for the information they are looking for rather they will easily skip the page and move on to the next search result. These days people look for fast retrieval pages rather than pages which make them wait. High quality graphics and the interactive media clips is one of the causes of slow retrieval of pages. It is known fact that the website will look more attractive with these graphics but what is the use of the graphics which make the people frustrated and make the people skip the sites rather than having a glance at it. Otherwise it is important to note that exporting the images at a lower quality will enable to achieve greater retrieval speed.

Bad color scheme

This is an important area but often an under rated area in the web design. Our primary focus is to make the visitors feel comfortable and not annoy them by the frustrating color combinations. The website should be designed in such a way that it does not cause any strain on their eyes. It will be good if you have warm and mild colors that compliment each other. Having dark and bright colors like red, yellow or green can drive them move away from the topic and it is important to note that you do not use dark colored text on a dark background; this will reduce the clarity in the website. Ensure that the text is prominent to read than the background.

Page layout

Consistency is important to note, trying to make each and every page in a different manner can make the navigation difficult. Ensure that all of them have a same and consistent look; it is important to remember that you have a common theme throughout the website and have the important text displayed in the sections that are easy to locate.

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