Category: Web Design

Internet has become so popular that almost everyone in the world is using it for different purposes. Corporate businesses and companies have not been left behind. They are having their own website to encourage people to visit them through the internet. If you would like to create a corporate website, you have to ensure that it meets some of the basic guidelines.

The first thing to do to end up with a unique corporate website is looking for a qualified web developer. You can browse through the internet to look for good web developers. There are many forums and discussion sites that talk about the different web developers. Previous clients always comment on their experience with the web developer and comment on whether their objectives and goals were met or not. If you get a web developer with many positive reviews and no negative reviews, try them out.

The site should be well organized and informative. It is important to ensure that you have a good site layout that will not confuse users.  Most clients are used to sites that have header on the top, footer on the bottom, a small navigation frame to the left and a relatively large content frame to the right of the navigation. Using any other layout may present challenges in accessing some of the site elements. The site should be appealing to the users from the beginning. Ensure that the contrast of the site is good by using complementary colors in the text and the background. When one has dark color, the other should have a bright color. The colors used should be readable by all people including those who may have eye problems. Users should be able to navigate through the site without a problem.

Content of the site should be well written with good spacing, paragraphs and page breaks. Use of images is also advocated. You can use images that are in line with your corporate products and services provided. However, images and other graphics should not be used excessively as they may increase the bandwidth of the site thus having slow loading speeds. If you need to use many graphics and media, you can use Cascading Styles Sheets to ensure that the bandwidth is reduced significantly in spite of using the graphics and clients are happy and content hence traffic increases considerably.

It is important to include contact information on your corporate site. Users may need to contact you to clarify on something. At the same time, they may want to get more information on the products and services you are selling. If they are unable to contact you, chances are that they will look for alternative sites offering the same goods and services. Whenever you change contacts, you should update them accordingly to ensure that clients can reach you at any time. Another important factor is updating the site. Ensure that you corporate site is updated regularly to enhance accessibility. You can use a Content Management System that automatically updates the site.

The web design world is dynamic and it keeps changing and being updated constantly. It is also one of the most sought after professions in the current times. In most cases web design is a hobby turned career and it thrills most starters to be able to make money out of an interesting activity. Web design is artistic in nature and works well with people who are naturally creative but in the current world, artistic talent is not enough to curb the cut throat competition that is now evident in this sector. While formal training is not a must for you to be successful in web design, it is important in order to convince your clients that you are qualified enough for them to put their trust on you. However, it still does not mean that you cannot cut out a successful career in web design just because you lack formal education; after all in web design, it is the quality of the design that really sells not the qualifications of the designer.

If you feel like you have the technical knowhow to build a professional site, you can get into web design as a career. However, people in this filed will tell you that it takes some time to gain footing in the market and win the clients’ confidence. Good returns might not be instant so you can consider taking on web design as a part time job and keep your current job until your web design career is stable enough.

What do you need to do to make yourself marketable? Well, the current market needs the designer to be up to date with the latest tends so that is the first thing you need to do. Web design is a very wide discipline and it involves creation of visual layouts using graphics software such as Adobe Photoshop, programming or adding functionality for example using HTML and server side scripting respectively and Flash development. Basic web design skills require you to be able to combine different design elements to create a visually appealing website. This is usually done using Adobe Photoshop but there are other programs that can effectively carry out this task. Once you are able to do this, you can consider learning programming. This can make you marketable in addition to increasing your profit margins because you will not need to hire and pay a programmer to do the programming work for you. Another outlet would be to learn how to build templates for the many content management systems that are being developed such as WordPress and Drupal.

Web design has many outlets and once you start off, you will be able to tell which aspects of web design interest you and which ones you can specialize more on. However, web design will keep changing and new trends being developed. Despite the changes, the professional experience will teach you how to satisfy your customers and their audience and that is a lesson only learnt through experience, as long as you are patient enough.

Web design basically means the art of arranging elements that appear in any given website in a logical manner. It is important to plan carefully before you sit down to create the website. One of the factors you have to consider when planning is the target audience. Different audiences have varying tastes and preferences mostly depending on their age. Young people like to have a lot entertainment while the old people do not care about it.

If your target audience is the youth, you may consider including a lot of graphics in your web design. You can also use calligraphy and other interesting writing letters. When using such elements, you need to have the knowledge of using tools like HTML and CSS which improve the site in general. A lot of graphics may affect the loading speed of the entire site and can frustrate clients if care is not taken. CSS allows the use of small files and greatly enhances the loading speed of the site. In such a case, you need to have these tools at hand when planning to design the site. On the other hand, old people prefer professionalism and it would not be of any value to include a lot of entertainment graphics.

The general structure of the website has to be considered when planning the look of the website. If need be, you can sketch the structure of the website in a rough paper. Please make use of important tools like CSS if your site will have tables, images and graphics. CSS allows you to position these elements where you want them to be. This tool also allows you to take control of the entire site at once making it easy to add and modify content in all pages at once. Decide on the colour you will use and make sure that the colour of the background, text and images complement each other for easy readability by the clients.

Ensure that you have access to the right tags and templates which determine the functionality of the entire site. Write down the key words you will use depending on the content you are planning to write on. Keywords are very important because they will determine the ranking by major search engines. Include the right content size because a lot of information may confuse the readers affecting traffic to your site. There is need to ensure that the content on your site meets the need of the target audience.

Also, make sure that your site will be available at all times and compatible with all major browsers. Availability simply means that the site loads fast enough for the clients to access all the information they would like to access. As stated above, tools like CSS will enhance loading speeds of your site. Compatibility on the other hand allows clients to access the website from all available browsers. Some web designers make the mistake of not ensuring this which hinders clients from accessing the site from some browsers. This may make potential clients look for alternative site thereby losing the important traffic.

Web design has long moved from those days when only few people knew how to operate websites to a time when owning a website especially for online and offline marketers is essential. Many people are designing their own websites whether they have attended a web design class or not. Even though the world of web design has moved to a whole new level with this development, there are still a lot of mistakes that some web designers are making: mistakes that are costing them a significant amount of money without their knowledge. Whether you are new or experienced in the world of web design, here are some mistakes you will need to avoid.

Publishing very long articles could have the opposite effect of what you desire. You may think that your content is quality and that viewers will want to keep scrolling to read through the whole content but the opposite is true. The fact is that viewers rarely read content that is beyond the fold. When you are publishing your articles, try as much as possible to include all the necessary and captivating information above the fold and then offer a link to the rest of the information.

Using sound or overusing flash is so 90s and it is also a mistake that will cost you dearly. It not only increases your loading time but it is also purely annoying. Most customers will not actually wait for the page to load and the few that do will be turned away by the irritating overuse of flash and sounds. Do not also clutter your website with excess badges and network communities. This could make you come across as not confident and trying too hard. If your website specializes on this, incorporate the badges and network communities in the main content.

Opening new browser windows from sites is another common mistake made by designers. Most designers think that by doing this, they leave the site accessible to the visitor in case they would want to return. However, this takes the control away from the user something that does not go well with them. Another mistake that attempt to take control form the user is resizing your browser window to match up to your display requirements and it just displays plain laziness. Also, avoid launching the content pages of your website through the use of a home page. It is more favorable for your link to lead directly to the information being searched by the customer.

Some web designers are also notorious for blending advertisements with the real content. While this may yield a few through clicks, it is annoying and likely to chase away your long term readers. Also, limit the number of internal links that you use in your side. Instead, focus on explaining the concept within the content instead of redirecting the customer to another site within the current site. Finally, do not make it compulsory for users to register in order to use your site or register them without their consent. Allow your users to sample your site first and let them decide on their own.

Websites are the most important tools to their respective owners. Sites are used to market, advertise and to attract traffic thereby making profits. Making a mistake in your website can lead to adverse consequences which can get you out of the business. If you are advertising and marketing through a website that has mistakes, you may not get visitors because they would be discouraged by the mistakes in the site. Human is to error and mistakes are somehow inevitable. However, you cannot afford to make some mistakes because the consequences would not be bearable.

Traffic is very important to website owners because their lives are dependent on it one way or the other. In fact, some website owners do not have any other source of livelihood except website traffic. Owners of the website are constantly introducing varying contents depending on the target group and the season. Contents to be introduced may also be dictated by events to take place in the near future. The right content at the right time will surely attract huge traffics to the site. On the other hand, it is imperative to determine what people want at what time to ensure consistency in traffic to your site.

Site owners and content developers should be aware that it is not all the content published that is embraced by the general public. This can be the case if you have not been able to identify what your target clients want. Of course this may create a problem in traffic statistics affecting your earnings and rank. It is your responsibility to identify whether there is a problem or not. If there is any problem, try to solve it fast enough. Problems that are not solved on time will make your clients to look for other options and you may end up losing traffic. You can research on your site and determine which topics have significant searches and which have fewer searches. You can also investigate whether there is a problem and strategize on how to solve the problem at hand.

Websites use different principles depending on the content and the target group. Some websites have database linked to the site and the particular item searched is retrieved from the database. At this juncture, database parameters have to be considered for such sites. These sites are database driven and every search is retrieved from the database. Such cases are common with sites that provide listing services for instance houses, land and vehicles for sale and jobs on offer. Such a website calls for careful control of your sub domains. Session Ids should indicate dynamic pages; pages with unique titles and not anything else.

Despite being preferred by most web developers, dynamic model of URLs has one major disadvantage; such sites are not liked by major search engines. This adversely affects site ranking in the search engines affecting traffic to your site. In fact, you receive fewer robots which are indicative of indexing by major search engines. This is because robots cannot be able to determine the content of the page. Considering these factors will assist you circumvent mistakes that would make you retire from the business.

Simplicity in web design should never be equated with minimalist design aesthetic. It also does not imply in any way mean the lowering of the quality but doing away with all the unnecessary components of a website that would otherwise clutter the site making it difficult for prospects to locate what they are looking for. Simple website designs have a myriad of advantages. This article denotes the benefits of having a simple website and methods which you can employ to create a simple website.

One of the major advantages that simplicity offers in a website design is the ease of navigation. Simple websites do not have irrelevant information and they aid navigation in that there are fewer pages and also the site is less cluttered so fining information or a link of interest is relatively easy. Simple designs also have reduced loading times making them popular with visitors. This is because the less clutter you have, the smaller your files and hence the faster your loading speed.

The content of a simple web design is also more scannable. A study indicated that about 79% of web users were in the habit of scanning the pages they visit online. When a site reduces the use of decorative elements in the website design it makes the page more scannable and hence the site is able to tap from this wide group of scanning visitors.

Simple web designs also offer the advantage of being quicker to build and design. When using a simple design for your website, it is likely that the codes are also simple. Of course it is much easier to design a simple layout site with a few pages and templates than many complex pages with many sections. You just need to make sure that your design is as simple as it looks. The simple codes used in simple designs have the advantage of being easier to debug. It is much easier to find bugs for a simplified code than for multiple pages of a site with many different style sheets.

Lastly, the small files on simple websites will take up less server space and bandwidth than the complex large files. This may not make a big difference in a site that does not have many visitors but for a site with many visitors, it can save a lot of money but catering for more traffic at a lower price.

There are several ways in which you can simplify your website design. The first thing you can do is get rid of all the unnecessary decorative elements. These are elements that are just taking up space on your site without being useful in any way. When designing the website, make sure everything you include in the design, content or code is absolutely necessary in order to minimize clutter. Also ensure that your backend is as simple as the front end. Use a simple markup and limit the use of styles and JavaScript to achieve a simple website. However, simple does not imply low quality so be sure to retain the important visual elements.

Web developers are busy people working for many people who are in the process of setting up websites. These experts are sometimes forced to travel long distances especially if they produce good and desirable results. It is not a wonder to get a web developer who has transverse the whole country to take of development projects in other parts of the country. They are not always required to travel but there are some clients who insist on it. In such a case the web developer will have no choice. A web developer cannot go to a place without his essential tools for web development. Until recently, web developers had to carry for instance their laptops and other equipments having their essential tools.
John T. Haller, the Apache Friends, evolt.org, winPenPack.com and others came up with revolutionary ways of easing the work of web developers especially when they are needed to travel. These companies created portable programs that can be carried by the developed in a memory stick. A small memory stick of 512 megabytes can carry most of these portable applications without a problem. XAMPP: All-in-one server created by Apache fiends is a good example. This application can is surprisingly small; it has a total size of 128 megabytes and can run on most windows applications including Windows 98, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and windows Vista. Amazingly, this application has most of the web developer tools for example Apache server, Ming, PHP (4 and 5), Perl, MySQL and SQLite, Webalizer, Mercury Mail Transport System, OpenSSL, FileZilla FTP Server php MyAdmin, WEB-DAV and many other programs. This means that the web developer can be able to perform almost any function he needs to when developing the website.
There are many other programs that can be included in the portable web development kit. Editors are very important to web developers. Sometimes they find that they need to change something for the website they are developing to look better. They therefore need a variety of editors for different purposes. Nvu Portable which branded “What You See Is What You Get” is one of the most widely used editors. The portable version has a size of 10 megabytes and is used for editing HTML. It runs on all major windows including Linux. Another important tool is the notepad. There are many version of notepad but some do not have the portable version. Notepad++ is an all program editor with functions like code collapsing, auto completion, macros; syntax highlighting is portable and is widely used by web developers. The portable version is only 3 megabytes in size and can be used on many other web applications.
Web developers cannot finalize their work if they are not certain that the website developed can work on the four main browsers; Mozilla Firefox, Opera, IE6 and IE7. They therefore need the portable Firefox Portable and Opera@USB for Cross platform testing. This application is 25 megabytes in size and can be used on most windows applications. This tool kit has allowed web developers to overcome many challenges as they can work from anywhere anytime.

Many theories are usually put across regarding good web designing and every online marketer has their idea about what good web designing is. The web is also full of tips on how a website should be designed and how a good website should look like. For some people, complexity says it all yet for others an expensive website is just about it. Still many more go for cute or cryptic websites in a bid to cut their niche in the world of web designing, yet the basics of a good website are just that: basic. Good web designing is not about complexity but about simple rules that seek to bring quality.

The first major rule is to avoid welcome pages. These are bright pages with big photos that open first when you are trying to access a website. Sometimes they will have welcome words in large prints offering you an opportunity to visit the website. Not only are these pages annoying but they also portray lack of confidence on the webmaster’s side. The pages also block many potential clients from visiting your site as no one wants to be kept guessing while they have options. Your website should portray what you are offering at a glance. You should also keep away from big and annoying ads such as banners. Instead, specialize on posting quality content in which you can incorporate some ads. Visitors are more likely to ignore the big banners but they will view other ads as they scan through the quality information.

For quality websites, make the navigation process easy for the visitor. A visitor should be able to tell what page they are viewing in the website and how they can get to another page. Make sure the navigation menus are familiar and understandable for any visitor to get acquainted to the website. Avoid using flashy and dropdown menus and instead stick to simple and clear menus. These should help your visitors to access information quickly and with minimal difficulties. Difficulties in navigation are likely to drive visitors away from your site in search of a friendlier one.

Search engine optimization is an important aspect of any website that aspires to get traffic. Use of java scripts and CSS can assist you in this aspect. CSS and java scripts arrange information in such a way that the search engine accesses the important information such as headings and keywords first giving your website a good ranking in the search engine index.

Ensuring your website is updated also goes a long way in web design. Your website should be compatible with most browsers and meet web standards. It would be vain to have a website that looks great in one browser yet does not open in another. Make your text legible and try to organize your content in paragraphs or short blocks. Also, avoid sound effects as these can be annoying. If you decide to include them, make sure there is a provision for the customer to turn them off if they like. When designing a website, settle for quality and not complexity.

 

Perl Hypertext Pre-processor (PHP) is a general scripting language that was developed with the main objective of developing dynamic web pages in web development. PHP is codes are implanted in to the HTML source document after which it is interpreted by a web server containing PHP processor module responsible for generating the web document. This application is available to most modern servers as a processor and to most operating systems as a standalone interpreter. This makes it important for web development services and has several tools that are utilized to accomplish web development.

Yii framework is a PHP application that is used for the development of large scale web applications. This application can allow web development maximum usability extensively accelerating the web development process. It is easy, extendable and efficient compared to other applications. In fact, the word yii stands for these three words. If you need a PHP framework with very small footprint, you may consider using PHP codeigniter. This program allows that can be used for web developers looking for simple and stylish full featured web applications. This application is idea for webmasters with shared hosting accounts and dealing with clients with deadlines.

Cake PHP application is used in PHP for extensive architecture for the purpose of developing programs as well as maintaining and deploying them. The most common design styles used in this application include MVC and ORM. The major advantage of this application is that it requires less coding reducing development costs significantly especially when MVC ad ORM design patterns are used. PHP devshell application allows flexibility in development of general web applications. While using this application, you can start with development tools that matter most and finalize with those that least matter in the development procedure. The application provides many uses including user registration, control panels, management, access rights, security, menu management, group management, system settings, templates and many more.

Websites deal with requests and responses to the requests searched from different places. Programs like PHP Akelos provides a platform that allow you to control requests and responses easily. This application also allows you to distinguish your clients depending on their locations. It makes it easy to manage internationalized applications, communication models as well as using database. You can also write views using Ajax. Depending on what your target group is and what your content is, you may find that you need complex applications fast enough to serve your clients better. At such a point, you can consider symfony application which is also written in PHP and provides architecture, component and tools necessary for achieving this target on time. This application permits early release of your web applications and scale them without a problem.

While using newer PHP applications like PHP 5, you can use application like pradosoft which is very important for component based and event driven programming framework. The application allows separation of HTML from server processes. Depending on what you intend to put on your website; you can use different PHP applications to accomplish what you are looking for. There are many other applications for art oriented content and many more.

With advancement in technology, websites have become very important in availing information to interested parties. As a webmaster, you may consider availing information to only a few people or to the general public. Very few websites are restricted to the public unless they are for instance banks, government or other special organization website. Websites that are available to the public are called open source.

Open source web designing is the most popular type of design that is used by most webmasters. This kind of design allow people to share and exchange information. Clients have access to all the information they need at all times and from anywhere. Unlike other websites that restrict information to some people, open source web design allows people to access information they need at all times. Interested parties can copy information they need from a website made through open source design. This design will always ensure flow of traffic to your site especially if you have daily content that can be downloaded or copied by the clients.

Open source designed websites do not only ensure flow of traffic to your site but they are also very cheap to setup and maintain. Webmasters interested in using great but cheap design have access to a wide range of tools that can assist them greatly in achieving this for example: Kompozer which is a program which has a featured authorization and integrated FTP client supported by all the major operating systems. Bluefish editor is a light program that can be used by webmasters to design an open source design for a website. This program has immense management operations as well as HTML document wizards. Another important open source tool is the Quanta plus. This is a robust web development tool which has the ability to run and custom scripts.

If you would like to include graphics in your open source website, you can always use the GIMP tool. This is tool that has great manipulation techniques. You can be able to add, edit and remove graphics on your site the way you like using this amazing tool. However, other graphic and tabular data may require use of other programs. Dia is a graphical program that can be used for tabular and chart information to be included in your website.   For creative webmasters who like creative graphics, krita graphics application is used to input creative images. Other graphics and images can also be added to the website.

Open source designed websites require applications that allow clients to copy, share or download information. Therefore, having an open source website cannot be complete with such applications. Applications that will allow your clients to download and get information from your site should be used. Customers can access information they need with ease. Editing programs should always be included. These programs assist in ensuring smooth running of the open source designed website. An example is the firebug application used in Mozilla Firefox to edit, debug and monitor CSS, JavaScript and HTML files. Such applications for other browsers have to be out in place; after all, different people use various websites.