Ways To Improve your Website Design

Halt then and there if you intend to do a blunder with your web design !!! 

You must be aware of the fact that a website is a mirror to your identity. It is the determining factor to the fact of your standing in the endless list of websites. 

Get ready to attract more and more customers to your website by improving your web design. Don't forget that your customer is one click away from 'EXIT'. 

Therefore, it becomes really important to keep in mind a few simple steps to make way for an improved web design, which are as follows: 

1.Transparency: 

Provide enough transparent information so that your visitor is not confused about the purpose. It should not be obscure and difficult to understand, even if unintentionally. 

2.Style: 

Just make sure that the typography that is, the font size, font style, spacing, and other such details match the theme of your website. 

3.Subtle: 

Try and follow a subtle approach to your web design. If you tend to load your web design's background with loads of colours, graphics and texture, it ultimately results in the diminished overall effect of the main purpose of the site. The visitor would loose the focus. 

4.Keep it Light: 

Try to intact your heavy visual graphics, large images because they tend to slow down the loading tome. The more it takes to load a page, the more it increases the chances of a visitor to leave your site. 

5.Graphics: 

You logo, which is a brand recognition; title bars, images, navigation menus are often anticipated by the visitors. They tend to enhance the value of your site. Unnecessary overuse of such graphics would tend to take away your potential customers. 

6.Easy Navigation: 

It becomes very important in a web design to generate easy and simple navigation menus. Just keep in mind the familiarity people tend to follow. 

7.Vertical is your call: 

Don't think that visitors would like your so-called use of horizontal scroll bar. People just hate it and it becomes very annoying when they are not able to find the whole set of information on a single screen in front of their eyes. 

Last but not the least, it is by far the most important aspect of the advice that try and think with the eyes of the visitor. Put yourself into their shoes and then, get started with your web designing. I hope, it would help a lot.

19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website

I’ve compiled a small list (or rant) of some very basic and fundamental rules that all webmasters must learn and respect when developing a website that needs to make actual money. This list can also be used by companies looking to hire a web development firm or to evaluate an already deployed website project.
I’ll start off slow and easy…

 1. DO NOT resize the user’s browser window, EVER. I know you can, I know you feel really coolwhen you put that little Javacrap on your page and like a little miracle the browser window resizes to your wishes, but NO. You see this atrocious web technique mostly with spam sites and when “designers” design websites. That is, someone in the photo/video/art industry who “also makes websites” (see #6 for more on that), but in reality has no idea how to make a successful ecommerce website.

 2. If your website requires the visitor to load your home page, and then “launch” your real website in a pop up, YOU LOSE. Pack it up, send it home, start over. If your website doesn’t load immediately on your home page and deliver your message within a couple of seconds it’s pretty damn hard to keep people along for the show (not matter how cool and Flashtacular it is). I see this technique mostly with Flash web developers, who for some reason think all flash websites must load in a pop up window (assuming it can get past pop up blockers), and have 30 second loading sequences and look curiously like 2advanced.net
3. If your website asks the user which version they’d like, high bandwidth or low, HTML or Flash, you ALSO LOSE. See above for the explanation on this one as they’re related. It’s like asking your customer if they’d like to enter your crappy store or your better store (but the ‘better’ store requires special glasses and a little 30 second wait…um NO THANKS), what you’re really asking them is “do you want to leave and buy from my competitor because I’ve put up a crappy roadblock before you even know what I sell?”.

4. If your website is ALL Flash, FIRE your web development company, and if you made it, add it to your portfolio under “Useless web projects I’ve done” and start over. Flash it just a tool, a wonderful powerful tool for delivering animation, video, interfaces, shopping carts, functionality etc. the list goes on, it kicks ass. This DOES NOT MEAN you need to create your entire website in Flash, and if you do you will be at a severe disadvantage to your wiser competitors. Look at it this way, evenMacromedia/Adobe, the maker of Flash doesn’t have an all Flash website, do you think there’s a reason why? Oh yeah, they want to make actual money and don’t listen to ‘designers’.
5. DO NOT try to reinvent the website navigation. Put it on the top, the left, hell even the right will work but do not try to reinvent the way people interact with digital interfaces while trying to actually sell your product or service. People will get confused, then annoyed, then pissed, then gone.
6. This one is going to get me in trouble. If you are a print designer, and “do websites on the side”, STOP DOING websites and providing “advice” to your print clients about web design. Print design to web design is like designing an ad for a race car, and actually building and racing that race car. Don’t get me wrong, print is great and all, you make pretty pictures and wonderful messages crafted with great copy, but when it comes down to it, it’s still just a picture. People cannot buy the product with a print ad (yet), they can’t communicate with your business through a print ad. I can already hear the grumbling coming from the print world, and look, it’s not that I don’t see a purpose for print advertising, just stick to print and don’t nose you’re way into a medium which you do not know and wouldn’t understand (same goes for general “geeks” who do websites ‘on the side’)
7. If you do not have sufficient copy, or any REAL TEXT on your home page (not in an image), and to a lesser extent your whole site, hire a copywriter and fire your webmaster NOW.Content is King, repeat after me CONTENT IS KING. Search engines don’t index fancy graphics and Flash, they index text. Good ol’ reliable text. If you don’t know how much text, or how to write good text, hire somebody who does (it’s essential to your ranking and to selling your product or service).
8. If your website does not work in Firefox, welcome to 2007 DUMBASS. Yes in most markets Firefox only commands at most a 10-15% market share, but for some sites it’s much higher (my other site Oomny.com has 80% Firefox users). Furthermore, if the morons you hired didn’t make your site and functionality compatible with Firefox they obviously have no idea what they’re doing, and aren’t up on their game. I have no idea why you would need a website, or functionality system that is so dependent on IE that it simply can’t work in Firefox, and frankly it doesn’t matter because there is no good reason. The lack of Firefox knowledge by a webmaster shows they aren’t of the Internet culture, and that’s a bad sign if you’re a business owner.
9. Commandment 9 is a collection of small issues that have been beaten to death other places, and are quote common principles, but bear repeating. No blinking text, no Frontpage, no pop-ups (even requested), no scrolling text, no font downloads, and no Flash intros. If your product or service needs a flash intro to sell, it probably sucks.
10. If you use music on your site make sure the user can stop it, and it BETTER NOT start on page load without the user requesting it. Same goes for video with audio (*cough ESPN *cough), many web users surf from work and don’t enjoy their speakers lighting up with your horrible and intrusive taste in music while their boss roams the halls looking for some ass to bust.
11. Text navigations are better than images, this isn’t a big deal but it’s better to use text for your nav with some clever CSS, than to export a large and bloated mouseover image navigation. I know Dreamweaver makes it so super simple, but you’ll benefit in a lot of other ways without it. Images wisely used, just like Flash are excellent, but don’t rely always on mouseover graphics to deliver your image, design is more about content than designing the interface (do you know any of your friends that raves about the iPods elegant interface? No, and that’s the point, it just works)
12. A well thought out site map with logical sub sections is better than using “drop downs”.Simply put, drops downs never work quite right, and only a few of the ones I have seen actually are usable. Furthermore, the use of drop downs usually means that the person organizing the content did a piss poor job of it. If you have the mother of all sites and need people to access hundreds of pages, you’re probably Microsoft or CNET and you’re ignoring me anyways.
13. If your site needs a search engine for users to find information, it’s time to start over and fire the guy who came up with the site map (and those slick drop downs on your nav). Search engines are wonderful, and play a great role on some great sites, but if you lean on it for users to find content you’re pissing 50%+ of your customers off. Some people like to browse, they also like to search if they NEED to. Give them a logical browse option and they won’t need to search, but leave search there for the advanced users really digging into your vast amount of content (and you do have LOTS of content to be indexed right? If not see #7)

14. Load time is still a factor for over 50% of American web surfers. Even though you live in the wonderful world of Cable and DSL, half of America does not and hates you for it. If you design your site for only broadband users you’re sending a message, “Every other customer can bite me�?. Bloat is simply NOT ALLOWED on the home page, but it can be used deeper in when users request it specifically.
15. This one seems obvious but isn’t to some people *cough Designers *cough. Do not HIDE your message, and don’t OBSCURE what you want the user to do. Home page design is like a billboard, hit them with a message and a desired path (buy now) in 1-2 seconds, but provide information for people who want to dig deeper and research.
16. If you lead the user through a pre-determined path in order to deliver a message or demo, it’s time to get an ANT farm and take your controlling wills out on some species that will actually like it. The web is about modular content, it’s not an “experience” or a “wonder tour of magical enchantment”. If you have to have a slideshow, put thumbnails there too so people can get the content they want when they want it. If you’re demo has 20 pages, give them a table of contents or at least some next/previous buttons so they can fast forward (they’d be wathcing broadcast TV if they wanted content shoved down their throats at a pace decided by the man). Pushing people through a demo, no matter how complex 1 step at a time is a mistake and will lead to the inevitable; annoyance. And if you’re purpose of reloading the page to deliver the next slide in a slide show is to increase your ad impressions, you should DIE (see SI.com, Time.com and CNN)
17. If you’re delivering video, it better not ask the user which bandwidth or version of video they’d like. Real Player, 100K, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, WMV, 300K, AVI, Cable, DSL, Dial-Up? NO THANK YOU. Deliver your video in an embedded player in Flash. I’m sorry, Flash won this battle a long time ago (see YouTube), it has the install base, the lean interface and isn’t trying to get you to join “their world” of media player fantasy where they place system tray icons and launch helpers and pop up every time you pop in a CD or DVD. Flash is cross platform and cross browser compatible, something none of the other providers can say.
18. This is a small one, but if the user has to mouse over your graphic or small image to know what it is, or where it will take them if its a link, quit your job and be a magician or a blackjack dealer, making web interfaces is not for you.
19. This final commandment is related to many of the above ideas, and is a good guiding principle for web geeks that are excited about new tech and want to use it. Just because a technology is new, or you just discovered it does not make it suitable to put on a business website, JUST BECAUSE you can. This happened with Flash, Java, and is now happening with AJAX. Yes new technology is cool, but only integrate it on a business site if it improves the customers experience or sells more product/service. Technology for the sake of technology is silly and only belongs on your personal show-off site, or your own computer where not one will be exposed to its horrid creativity except you.
–
One might say that if you followed all of my commandments, the web would be a boring, dry and conformist web of sites only engineered for 1 thing; selling. And you’re right, but thankfully the world is full of plenty so called “creative” people and they keep it interesting for the rest of us.

Make Your Website Design Work For Your Buisness

Having a great website design is good. But until and unless it works to boost your business it cannot be termed as a success. The essential purpose of a website is to portray an online face of the business concerned and generate new channels for the same.

Here are some tips about how you can make your website work for your business and fuel its success:

Consistency

It is one of the critical elements in website design and development. Your website should well be consistent with your brand and business. Make sure the website reflects your brand identity and reflect the corporate image of your business. All your marketing communications should well be in tandem with the website look so as to maintain a consistency in all your business endeavors.

A consistent look and feel goes a long way in establishing a strong presence in the audiences' mind and reaffirms your brand identity time and again.

Usability

It is another element that holds vital importance in website design. Your visitors should be able to find your website on the internet with as much ease as they should be able to navigate within. Good usability means visitors would be able to make the most of their time on the website.

Make sure the navigation is simple and logical and all links work properly. Set right any broken links or the ones that lead to wrong pages or show a 404 error message. The information on all the web pages should be correct and the forms should be working correctly.

Text Legibility

The fonts on your website should be of the right size so that they function well on different browsers andplatforms. Also, allow your visitors to resize the text according to their preferences so that they can read through at ease. Make sure the text on the site is a tint darker than the background shade to promote easy readability. On the whole the text should be easy to read and laid out in logical format so as to break the monotony. Moreover, it shouldn't interfere with any images or graphics on the site.

Design Style

The website design should put forth your message to the audience. The design should well be in tandem with your brand identity and reflect your business objectives. It is advisable to hire the services of a professional web development company to formulate great looking and functioning websites.

Speed

As important is it for your audience to find your website easily, so important is the website to load quickly. In addition the navigation pathway should also be well defined and quick to function. Make sure the graphics and images on your website are optimized properly so that they don't take much time to load. Always remember that visitors find it easier to leave the website altogether than wait for it to unleash at snail's pace.

Search Engine Friendly

No website is good enough until there is good traffic inflow. And to guarantee steady traffic to your website you need to make sure that it figures in the top slots of search engine results. Here are some tips to make your website search engine friendly:. Code your website in HTML rather than embedding images and graphic elements. Use ALT tags for all images and graphics in addition to Meta tags and description tags. Submit your website to online directories. Get relevant links from others on the internet.

About the Author:

Maneet Puri leads LeXolution IT Services, a reputed India web design firm that provides powerful web solutions and KPO services to its client base. He leads his team of custom website designers to create customized designs for their corporate clients. For more information about the author and his company visit www.lexolutionit.com

Why Do Visitors Leave Your Website?

Visitor traffic is one of the most important factors that determine the success of a website on the Internet. However, something more important that attracting visitors is to retain them on the website. By keeping your visitors on the site for longer times, you can increase the number of page views as well your chances of them performing a desired action. Often you may notice that though your website gets a huge number of visitors, they tend to leave abruptly. This may be because there is something on your website that they don't like. By knowing the reason why visitors leave your website, you can seek to make adjustments and thus improve the website. Here are some common reasons why people exit websites.

Poor Accessibility

No matter how great the website is, it is completely useless if the visitors are unable to access it. They have no option but to leave. Browser incompatibility is one of the prime reasons why website fail to be accessible. Make sure you check for compliance at the design and development stage itself so as to avoid any future issues.

Unintuitive Navigation

Navigation is a determining factor of how visitors browse through the website to find information. However, poor navigation can frustrate them and cause them to leave abruptly. Therefore, devote plenty of time and attention to design your navigation system. It should be logical as well as intuitive. If your website is fairly large, you should include a sitemap.

Over Advertising

Advertisements are an essential revenue generating source for websites. But some businesses take it overboard and paste their websites with ads all over. This highly irritates the visitors and makes them leave out off frustration. Therefore, try to limit the advertisements on your website. Avoid using overtly flashy ads that tend to distract the visitors.

Inadequate Information

Visitors come to a website looking for some or the other information and when they don't find what they are looking for, they just choose to leave. It is very important to understand your industry audience and know their needs and requirements. Armed with this knowledge, you can cater to them more effectively and provide them with what they need.

Slow Loading Pages

This is probably one of the most common reasons why visitors leave a website. Internet users are an impatient lot. They like to find instant information and would not wait till the website loads completely. A much easier way for them is to look for information on another website. The connection speed of users also influence this. Therefore, it is important that you design pages that load easily even on slow Internet connections. Use Google Analytics to determine the percentage of users who have slow or fast Internet connections.

Automatic Audio and Video Play

Audio and video features are fast becoming popular. However, even though they are effective means of communication, leave the option for the users to decide. Don't start music automatically and even if you do, provide an option to turn it off. Visitors can often get irritated with the uncontrolled music and videos and leave the website altogether even if the website was good enough.

About the Author:

Kabir Bedi is a senior web consultant at LeXolution IT Services, a professioanal web development companythat has a team of skilled Web developers India. The company offers a plethora of web services includingweb development services & web design services.

Custom Banner Design vs. Template

There are a lot of websites that allow you to create a free banner by providing you with several free templates. All you have to do is to select a template, add your text and literally create your banner design in a matter of seconds only. However, the down side is that the company (that provides you with free templates) also uses their URL or company name on your banner. Now, I wonder why people wonder why their banner designs are not giving them the results they are striving for. Well, if your market is thinking of you as a cheap business that can’t even afford a banner, then why will they buy your products or show interest in acquiring your services.

Now, it is very clear that the best practice should be to create a custom banner design instead of using a template. However, to ensure that people truly understand the power of customized banners and why they should avoid using templates, we need to explore this subject in great detail and take a look at some important factors that can totally break your banner and ruin you marketing campaigns. So, let’s take a look at these important factors now.

Personal Touch:

To make your marketing campaigns successful, you have to give them a personal touch. Copying and using someone else’s ideas will never help you succeed in the world of marketing and you will end up ruining your credibility. Hence, it is crucial that you give a personal touch to your banner to help you correctly represent your business model. If your banner is unable to tell your market that what your business is about, you will have trouble winning their trust. Therefore, people will avoid clicking your banner and your CTR or click thru rate will go down. No clicks mean zero visitors to your site.

Don’t Look Cheap:

If you are selling expensive products but are using a free template to create your banner design, then know this, you will soon end up ruining your business image. Your market will think of you as unprofessional and amateur. If you can’t spend a few bucks to create a custom banner design, then will you spend to provide quality products to your customers? Well, this is the question that your market will want to know. Of course, they won’t contact you to find out. They will simply ignore you and go elsewhere.

Don’t Look Like a Copycat:

The problem with templates is that they are widely available and anyone can use them. If you consider your business to be unique in its own way then your banner design should be unique as well. Using a template will make you look like a copycat without any creativity at all. So, ensure that your banner is always customized.

See, using a customized banner will allow you to give it a personal and unique touch. It will allow you to convey your message in a powerful way because your designer will even change the colors and layout according to your message.

So, the best thing is to go for a custom banner design instead of a template.

eCommerce Website Design

eCommerce websites have their own unique character that is designed to lead the visitor to one simple task – make an online purchase. A web designer needs to consider a variety of online selling principles while designing an eCommerce website. In this article we will try to take a look at some of the major design aspects that you must have in an eCommerce website. 

Many of you are probably already asking why eCommerce website design is different from any other website design. They all need to be attractive, well organized and use the right colors that fits the website spirit and so on. Your instincts are good. However a close look at some successful eCommerce websites will reveal the conceptual differences that are typical in a successful eCommerce website. 

An eCommerce website needs to follow certain selling principles:

1.     Give the user a pleasant experience during his online shopping.

2.     Make certain you provide sufficient information on who owns the website and why they should be trusted.

3.     The website must be easy to use. If it isn’t, the visitor will go to your competitor.

Those principles are not new. We all know those basics from our day to day experiences in the mall, shopping center and every other market place that is waiting for us to open up our wallets. The big challenge for a web designer is how to translate those conventional marketing techniques to the virtual world of the internet. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that in most supermarkets the bread stand is placed at the far end of the building, yet you can smell the fresh bread at the entrance (sometimes they even use a special air duct to carry the smells). That has been done deliberately. Marketers use our sense of smell to draw us through the store where we are exposed to all sorts of tempting goodies as we go to get our loaf of bread. 

How do you draw an imaginarily path in a web page? A path designed to lead the visitor to do what you want him to do…make an online purchase. Unlike the supermarket our website has no smell. In a website the distance from one point to the other is pretty much the same, so the exit is always right there. In a website you can try to order the “shelf” in the way you think will best expose the visitor to many of your products, but there is always a chance that he will find a short cut to another page that can also be the way off your site. 

As can be see, although putting your products on the web is much easier then renting space and opening a supermarket. However, selling your products on the web can be difficult. 

A good eCommerce website design will lead the visitor to the right page in one click or two at the most. Sometime web designers will use techniques that would never be considered for non-eCommerce websites. Everyone has seen at least one sales letter website. On these web pages the only link is to the order form. Sales letters are not the most typical eCommerce website because they usually sell only one product. That allows the web designer the ability to exaggerate the one click principle and make it an advantage. All the facts about the product have been presented to the user is a smart way while every few lines he has the option to click on the order form. If he is not yet convinced he will have the option to continue to read more facts and testimonials about the products. Believe it or not, those sales letter websites are actually selling. 

“What about online shops?” Online shops have to deal with more then one product. Of course, the greater number of products increases the complexity of the website. Sophisticated eCommerce websites use a variety of personalization technologies in an effort to determine the best selection of products to offer to the visitor. Personalization technologies are a major part of advanced eCommerce websites. However this topic is beyond the scope of this article. The cleverness of an eCommerce website’s personalization technology has a major influence on its design. The first to use such technology was Amazon.com who decided to push their client’s books to a visitor based on that visitor’s past orders combined with the statistics they had collected on all visitors used to predict what someone looking at a specific book might also be interested in reading. Today the goal is to try to predict what to offer the user on his first visit as well. 

An eCommerce web design is also about the layout. One important aspect is where the user’s eyes look first when accessing a web page. Lots of research has been done on this topic. Most research showed that the middle left side area will attract the most attention followed by the center of the page. By using these techniques web designers try to draw the “walking path” for the visitor’s eye, much like what was done at the supermarket. An experienced eCommerce web designer will know how to create designs to meets those demands. 

If you are about to open an eCommerce website or you are already own one, make sure you understand the web design principles for online selling. Consider consulting with an experienced website designer preferably someone who has experience with eCommerce websites.

Casino Affiliate Program: Building Your Websites

If you have been struggling to work out why so many people are making money from the Internet and wonder how you can do likewise, you could do no better than joining an affiliate program. Unlike the so called 'get-rich-quick' schemes you may have read about or even signed up to affiliate marketing is one of the few to be proven to be successful time after time. There are no gimmicks, no risks and best of all no money to part with. All that is needed is a website, a subject and a good affiliate program. There are no details to work out, no difficult customers to deal with and all the accounts are managed automatically so there is no need to even keep a track of any of the customers.

The affiliate programs are usually based on a click and sign-up basis. The most successful affiliates choose to combine their sites with the largest online businesses and industries. Few of these online sectors can match that of the new virtual casinos. These online gaming forums have been hugely popular since they were first launched and their popularity has never wavered. In fact for the most part participation and the monetary revenues have been increasing year after year. So backing such a huge industry is a great way to make sure that your site earns money and attracts right number and type of clientele that you are looking for.

Once you have decided on your industry as a website owner you must then go about the content of your site. Making it as relevant to the subject of online casinos, or gaming of some kind, can guarantee that you are attracting the right people. If you have a site about music or flowers, the likelihood of visitors being interested in joining an online casino are far smaller than if it is about a group of casinos or even just the online industry that has made the businesses possible. The way in which you present your information can also be a tool in making people decide to try one of your links and join up to a site. If you make an offer sound too good to be true or make the online casinos appear to be hugely exciting and potentially lucrative you can hope to lure in a few extra clients. If you simply churn out the boring facts without any enthusiasm or interest it will show and readers are going to be far less motivated to click on your links and make you money.

Converting hits into money may be as simple as using professional graphics and emotive language, but the problem really lies in attracting people to your site in the first place. To make money in the casino affiliate program you really have to have a large foundation of customers. Some may win, some may quit early but others will lose and play over a long period of time. Therefore the more people you have on your books the higher the possibility of striking affiliate gold. But attracting people is a problem that all websites face, including the very same sites that the affiliates represent. It is for this reason that any successful affiliate makes sure that they are as visible as possible, utilising every trick to make sure that they are top of search engine lists. SEO documents, forum postings and even emailing with special links with an embedded URL unique to your site. All these are options and widely available utilities at even the smallest website owner's disposal. With marketing tools and imagination anybody can master their own online business in the casino affiliate program.