Essentials Of Good Web Design

1. General Impression : Your web site is like a window display of your business. If the impression that it creates is not good enough visitors will simply leave.

Your site must be:

Neat Organized Attractive Professional

It is better if your site shows less than too much. Over crowded websites, with too many flashy elements, create a negative effect on your visitors.

2. Message : The first question that visitors ask themselves when coming to your site is "What can I gain from here?" Visitors are not impressed that much by promotional offers of free goods and services. They are looking for ways in which your site can be useful to them. If your site should offer one or more of the following:

Entertainment Information Advice Helpful tips

Contact with people who share same interests, links to other interesting sites. Your corporate site should provide information about your business and products and services. A business site should be simple to navigate and offer products and services that located in a simple way and ordered quickly.

3. Fast download : Your site should load as quickly as possible. Market research shows that the average surfer leaves a site that fails to load in 7 seconds. For a dial-up modem that means a maximum of 56 kilobytes. So avoid large graphics and flash animations. The opening page of your site should not overwhelm your visitors with too much information or you risk loosing them. Many Internet sites offer advice on how to increase the download speed of your site. Look for such articles read them and follow the suggested advice.

4. Graphics and Design : The graphical design of a website is crucial for a positive first impression. Every graphic element should help present the main idea of your site. Funny images are not appropriate for a business site, but they can be a good choice for an entertainment one. Graphics load slowly so use them sparingly and efficiently. Try to keep the overall size of your web pages around 30k. Individual pictures should be about 6-8k. Additional 2k adds about one second to download time. Right-click on an image and check its properties to find out its size. The choice of colors is also significant since different colors provoke different feelings. The warm colors like orange and red increase the pulse rate and stimulate the senses. Cold colors like blue and green have the opposite effect. Yellow is considered a happy color because it reminds us of the sun. Select the right colors for the emotion that you want to create. People read a text from top left down to bottom right. Place your images accordingly. Images that have a directional aspect should point to the most important part of your page. If you use the image of a bird its beak should point to inside the page and not outside. This is valid for all images: Faces should be turned to the center of the page. Cars should face the center of the page. Neckties, roads and other prolonged objects should point from left to the right and from top to bottom. You should put your navigation bars down the left side of your page, as well. This will keep them visible for your visitors.

5. Readable texts : Here we do not consider choice of words (we will deal with this later on), but rather the appearance of words on a page. To impress word should be surrounded by sufficient white space. Use dark texts on light backgrounds (preferably white). Dark backgrounds make visitors feel confined and depressed. Bright backgrounds make texts difficult to read and red, orange and purple backgrounds can be dazzling. The text color you choose is equally important, different browsers interpret colors in different ways. A text that looks fine on your browser may be illegible on a different one. Divide your text in columns to make it simpler and faster to read. It is easier to follow a column than a large chunk of text that stretches across the whole page. Choose fonts that are available on all computers and that are easy to read like Arial, Times New Roman, Garamond and Courier. Exotic fonts like Gothic, Script, Westminster, or Cloister look attractive in headings, but not all users have them installed on their computers. In this case, your visitor's browser will render the missing font with a system one and ruin the effect that you are aiming at.

6. Easy Page Flow : Most people do not handle well large pieces of information. We have already suggested that you divide your page into columns that would separate the text vertically but you should also use headings and sub-headings that separate it horizontally. Write short statements for the key facts on your page and use the statements for headings. Examine each section to check if you can break it into smaller pieces. Write a short statement for each of these pieces and use these statements as sub-headings. Use the same font for all your headings and subheadings. Make them bold and increase the font size for headings. It will make simple to spot the large and bold headings and subheadings that are the same size with the text but bold. If you follow this advice, your visitors will be able to see the key points of your page at a glance. Write your headings carefully, because if you grab your visitors' attention with them they will stay and read on. If you want to attract your visitors' attention to other parts of the text you can make some sentences bold or change their color. Use this approach carefully, because some colors are difficult to read even on a white background.

7. Navigation : There are two reasons why you should put your navigation bar on the left side of your page -

People read from left to right and from top to bottom. Web surfers expect to find navigation bars on the left of web pages. It is a good idea to put a button at the bottom of a long text that would allow the visitor to return to the beginning of the text. When you create a page design that you like use it on every page of your web site, it will make your web site predictable and will help your visitors find the information they need. Save a blank page with the layout, columns, logos, standardized graphics, alt tags and navigation bars built in. Use this page as a template for all pages that you create for your web site and just fill in the content that you like.

8. Privacy and Customer Opinions : It is invaluable to get prospective customers to trust you, if you run a corporate site. Tell your visitors how you are protecting their private information. Set a privacy page that explicitly lists how and what information you collect from your visitors, how you keep their e-mail address, how you accept and process their orders, who has access to this information and what precautions you take with information collected from minors. People like to know what your customers think of your products and services. Invite your customers to share their opinion, they would love to know that it is appreciated. Make a dedicated page with the opinions of your customers. Offer links to their web sites in exchange of their opinion. This can be beneficial for both parties involved.

9. Spelling, Grammar and Word Choice : These are of crucial importance. If you are not careful here, all your efforts are in vain. Poor spelling and careless grammar and punctuation are the easiest way to lose visitors. Spelling and grammar mistakes tell that the site owner is lazy, careless, and unprofessional. Your visitors would not like to do business with you. What can you do? Take steps to polish your own writing. Hire somebody to check and edit your writing. Hire somebody to write the text of your pages for you.

Ref : http://www.designersplayground.com/articles/109/1/Essentials-Of-Good-Web-Design/Page1.html by Arnab Ghosh published on 01/26/2006.

Guide To Search Engine Optimization In Nutshell

SEO is a way of analyzing your site and modifying it to allow Search Engines to read and index it more easily. SEO is all about maintaining and building websites that get ranked highly on the major Search Engines. Whether your site is profitable or not with PPC advertising, Search Engine rankings are an important factor to consider in improving profitability. The higher you are on a variety of Search Engines, the better off your profitability. When used properly in combination with other basic Search Engine tactics, these tips can help to dramatically improve your placement with the Search Engines and increase the traffic to your web site.

1. Use Keyword File Names : By naming your html file relevant to your keywords, you can gain a slight advantage. This is a relatively minor aid so don't go overboard with it.
   

2. Avoid Robotic - Automated Submission : When submitting your web page to one of the top 8 search engines, try to post your page manually rather than using any automated software or sites that post for you to get into the prime search engines. Many people believe that over 70% of your hits will come from Google and Yahoo! It's probably worth spending a considerable amount of time trying to get a good ranking from theses search engines. (Actually Yahoo is more like a directory than a search engine and requires that you read their help pages about their listing method)
   

3. Use Keywords In Page Title : Many search engines will look to see what words you have used in your page title tag. It is VERY important that you include the keywords you want to be found under in this title tag. Practical and live example is our site and our page urls.
   

4. Get Your Pages Linked From Other Sites : Some Search Engines will increase your relevancy if your site is linked to from other sites. Try to establish as many links as possible from other locations before you submit your web page for placement. But please keep it in your mind that links to your site should be coming from similar type of website to yours. Link from an entertainment site to a webdesign company's site and vice - versa - doesn't help both of the two sites. Make sure that you don't have a lot of irrelevant links on your site. The more closely the links on your site are related to your site, the better the chances of being ranked well in search engines. Please stay away from sites which are made only for link exchange.
   

5. Avoid Java & Frames & Flash: Search Engine robots face difficulties with pages containing Java and frames (not the Java Script which is ignored by search engines) and flash elements. In order to establish a high relevancy and therefore a high rank do not use these methods in the pages you submit to the search engines.
   

6. The First 250 Words : Search Engine robots scrutinize the first 250 word of text in your page for relevancy and keyword count. You must use your keywords in the appropriate proportions in this part of your page. Some say a 10% - 40% keyword count in this section of text is ideal. Always start this text with the page title you used in the title tag. Avoid keyword repetition (i.e. repeating keywords one after the other).
   

7. Don't Use Meta Refresh Command : This command is used to automatically transfer a page to another without requiring reader input.
   

8. Don't Use Text That Is The Same Color As The Background : Search Engines look for text that is the same color as the background which is being used to increase the keyword count without the reader seeing the text. This has become a definite no no and you may be penalized for such tactics.
   

9. Use Links Containing Keywords : One way to increase a keyword count is to use a series of working or non-working links containing a description and link that incorporate your keywords. This also has the advantage of providing links to other web sites from your page which the Search Engines also look for.
   

10. Use Image Alt Tag : Every image allows you to include a text description of that image in the alt tag. Use these tags to incorporate keywords or phrases to increase your keyword count. Search engines do consider alt tags in their relevancy rankings.
    

11. Use Link Title Tag : Every link allows you to include a text description of that link in the title tag. Use these tags to incorporate keywords or phrases to increase your keyword count. Search engines do consider alt tags in their relevancy rankings. We maintain both of the rules pointed in guidelines no. 10 and 11.
    

12. Use Plural Keywords : Try to use your keywords in the plural form. Such as, CLOCKS instead of CLOCK. A user search on the keyword CLOCK will find both CLOCK and CLOCKS but a user search for CLOCKS will usually not turn up pages using the keyword CLOCK in singular form.
    

13. Short Meta Tag Description : Most search engines will truncate your description if it is too long deleting possible key points you are trying to convey. Keep your meta description to 25 words or less to avoid having posted an incomplete message to readers.
    

14. Keep Meta Tag Keyword Lists Under 1000 Characters : Keep your meta tag keyword list to under 1000 characters. Anything more and you may have your relevancy rank penalized by search engines. Additionally, do not repeat any one keyword in the keyword meta tag more than three times.
    
15. Try Different Description & Categories : When you submit your site to different link directories, take care that you are not writing the same description of your site in all cases. Also try to submit your site in different categories in different link directories. If Google & other major Search Engines find same text (Assume that you have submitted your site under the category - 'Webdesign Company Asia' with description saying 'This is a media design company' in different directories. It is like that you have gone through an automated submission software ), your site may be penalized and can be thrown away from their database forever.
    

16. Different Description & Keywords For Different Pages : Don't use same keywords and description for all of your pages. Your contact us page's keywords and description shouldn't be same as your homepage.
    

17. No Broken Link & No Broken Image & No Under Construction Page : Never have broken images or links. Search Engines hate these things. If your site has broken links, don't even start submission. Google won't care about you if you don't care about your visitors.
    

18. Have Unique Content : Always have unique contents. You can put content from Open Directory but that doesn't uplift your rank. Again it may help you if the site from where you are lending articles or texts - is not counted by any search engines. But the probability of such happenings is 00.000000001%. Note that Search Engines penalize sites without own content.
    

19. Update Your Site : You need to periodically update the content of your website, even if it's only a slight change. Add 2-3 pages in 1-3 days. Search Engines love growing sites. Spiders give better rankings to sites that update content often.
    

20. Use Sitemap : Prepare your sitemap and submit it to Google. It is better if you prepare it in XML. An XML sitemap is a search engine friendly sitemap of your site. This isn't written for your visitors though. It's written for the Search Engines so that they can find all of the pages on your website. Submit your sitemap to Google at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login.
    

21. ROR Generator & Robots Text Generator : ROR is similar to a robots.txt file in that it gives information about your site. The difference is that an ROR file is in XML format. You can use this generator to create an ROR file for your site, and then paste a button to the main page of your website. When the Search Engines spider your site, they'll spider this file and have a better description of what your site is about. Also create a robots.txt file because this will tell the search engines what not to spider on your site.
    

22. Use of Dynamic Pages : Many websites use Content Managment System (CMS) to generate their webpages. As generation of dynamic pages are easier for website development, CMS generally use dynamic pages. However, Search Engines have difficulties to spider and understand them. To solve the problem, you can consider using Mod Rewrite in case you use Apache server or finding a CMS that can generate static HTML pages.
    

23. DMOZ Plays : Manually register your site with DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project.The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors and feeds other leading web directories.
    

24. Yahoo Listing : Purchase a listing with Yahoo! Directory Submit.Yahoo! like Google provides many search products.However, Directory Submit is essential for any business on the web. For a fee of $299 Yahoo! will include your web site in their directory that fuels websites like Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista.
    

25. Site Maturity : Ranking mostly depends upon the maturity of the site. Older sites will have better rankings and will have more indexed pages.
    

26. Keep Patience : Once you follow these suggestions, allow search engines time to re-index your site.In the Internet age, we're looking for instant results.However, it does take some time for all of your search engine optimization techniques to take hold.

Ref : http://www.wmtips.com/seo/guide-search-engine-optimization-nutshell.htm by Arnab Ghosh, Jul 2, 2006