Showing posts with label website tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label website tips. Show all posts

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Top Website Design Tips On How To Fine Tune Your Website Into A Money Making Machine

Webmasters who incorporate top website design tactics into their website strategies will never disappoint you. Whenever you type specific keywords into a search engine, these top websites will always appear first.

Far too many websites lack the necessary ingredients that illustrate to visitors that they have landed on a homepage that incorporates top website design strategies. Many do not qualify their visitors, nor do they understand their own role in satisfying the needs of their visitors. This article will explore what it takes for your website homepage to fulfill the specific needs of your visitors.

Top website design strategies demand that as soon as the link to your homepage is clicked, your visitor should have no doubts concerning the reason for the existence of your site.

A clear and concise statement must immediately grasp their attention. If you are selling Egyptian earrings, then say so. If you only provide a cleaning service for Egyptian earrings, then say that. Engage and encourage your visitor to rummage through your website. Remember that you invited them. Try and understand who it is that has accepted your invitation to visit your website.

In many instances, correct frequently asked questions are very helpful. But they are only helpful if they assist in qualifying the needs of your visitor. Do not waste time trying to sell cleaning services for those beautiful Egyptian earrings. That is not the reason your visitor typed Egyptian earrings into the search engine. You can provide a link somewhere else on your site to accommodate that.

In the center of your homepage should be your tightly woven packages highlighting your Egyptian earrings. When you employ top website design guidelines for these focused packages you help qualify your visitor needs.

When you place your uniquely focused packages front and center on the computer screen, it allows your visitor to quickly decide if what you have is what they are looking for. For instance, a visitor purposefully lands on your homepage.

She in fact loves hanging Egyptian earrings that hit the shoulder. Lo and behold, you have already done your homework. You have a package that qualifies the needs of this type of visitor. She clicks your stunning shoulder length Egyptian earring package. She is then drawn deeper into the selling process that a top website design such as yours incorporates.

Qualifying the needs of your website visitors falls in your lap. It is an integral part of the planning process for your website. Failure to plan for qualification does not automatically mean the failure of your website. However, should you incorporate these techniques into your top website design strategy, your chances at success increase.

When you invite people to your site, the top website design strategies that you employ should allow for simple, quick navigation by your visitors. If your visitor types in Egyptian earrings please ensure that your site has Egyptian earrings. In addition, your homepage must clearly communicate the focal point of your website.

Friday, June 8, 2007

Top 12 Benefits of Using CSS for Web Pages

If you are still designing with tables then you are missing out on a lot of the benefits of cascading style sheets (CSS). Tables were not supposed to be used for designing but unfortunately it has been the standard for a long time.

Not any more.

1. Separate content from presentation. An external style sheet can contain all the styles for your web site, then if you want to change the content you only have to edit one style sheet. This is great for a web site that contains hundreds or thousands of pages.

Imagine if you had to edit each page..it would take you forever.

2. Google benefits. Google gives more weight to content closer to the top of your HTML document. Search engines spider the content that comes first in your source code. With CSS you can easily structure the content to appear first with the rest of the source code following it. This will help outrank your competitors who may have their navigation appear first and their content last..

3. Fast loading pages. Tables slow down the loading of your pages because the spider has to crawl through each table. If your tables are nested inside each other your page will load even more slowly. Designing CSS-based web pages will speed up the loading of your pages considerably because the styles are all contained in one style sheet.

4. Small file size. CSS will reduce the file size of your html document. If you look at a web page that is designed with CSS you will notice that the size is very small compared to one designed with lots of tables. This also helps reduce load times.

5. Reduce clutter. CSS allows you to get rid of a lot of extraneous html code therefore making your site code neater and cleaner. This makes it easy to alter the code if you need to make edits.

6. Eliminate javascript. Many people surf the web with javascript turned off because they don't want to be vulnerable to viruses or allow pop-ups. This means that the beautiful javascript navigation you produced will not be seen. You can often achieve the same affect with CSS navigation. These allow for rollovers and other pretty affects and are much more user friendly.

7. Accessibility. If you use CSS2's aural properties it provides information to non-sighted users and voice-browser users. The CSS2 "media types" (used with @media rules) allow authors and users to design style sheets that will cause documents to render more appropriately for certain devices such as braille devices, speech synthesizers, or tty (text telephone) devices.

Learn more about Accessibility Features of CSS http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS-access

8. Save time. CSS will allow you to design your site much faster than tables because there are some styles you can use for every site. I store "often used" CSS snippets in a special file where I can easily access them for any site I design.

9. Save money. CSS will shorten the project development process and eliminate design obstacles that occur from using tables. If designing many web sites you will be able to use the same style sheets or just make a few modifications to them. You will still charge for the design project but it won't take as long as when using tables thus making you more money in a shorter time period.

10. Flexibility of design. You can use pixel precision in your web site designs. By adjusting the margins and padding of the CSS you can easily adjust the position of your content. You can also create very modern designs that can't be duplicated with tables. For example you can use a background image for a header then place your content over it using the H1 tag for better page optimization.

11. Way of the future. The future of the web is moving towards better accessibility with web sites so they can be viewed by as many people as possible. This may be enforced in future web standards therefore if your web site is still using tables or deprecated tags it may become obsolete or disappear from the search engines. This could really hurt your business.

12. Print friendly. When a user chooses to print a web page an alternative CSS document can be called up. This document can specify that formatting, images and navigation disappear and just the page content appear on the printed version.

See creating print style sheets

http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/articles/webrev/200001.html

Thursday, June 7, 2007

The Most Important Web Hosting Tips and Tricks

The investments in a website might often involve large amounts of money, often reaching 5 figures. However, regardless if you have a highly complex website or a personal web site, there are a few things that you want to know for sure. The hosting provider should guarantee a server up-time of over 99% and you should also have a backup server in case the main server has problems - these are essential requirements for any web hosting services company. FTP and email access should also be discussed and there are a few other details that you want to be certain of before you make a commitment.

A little shopping around can pay off for you in cheap web hosting and design services, especially if you're building a business web site. There are several web hosting services that offer all-in-one design and hosting services starting at $9.95 a month for a one page business card site to $50 a month for a 9-10 page full service catalog. Some require a commitment of 12-24 months, though they'll only bill you the monthly fee up front, and all require that if you leave their web hosting service, the site design belongs to them. If the web hosting company is otherwise dependable, reliable and offers all the bells and whistles that you need, an all-in-one package can be a great way to get a professional design at cheap rates.

As a novice who doesn't understand all the web hosting jargon this can pose a problem. Are you an individual, small business, blog, or a big time corporation? What do you need and how do you get it. You know you are a customer and a person, not just a number on a sales receipt. I believe the hosting companies are the same. A smaller hosting company will probably treat its users with more honest integrity as well as having more flexibility in dealing with your individual situation. They can often tailor web site packages to accommodate exactly what you are looking for as well as the ability to update them quickly when your needs change. My advice is to contact a few of the smaller companies. Look for ones with good reputations or just arbitrarily email them and compare results from different places. Which one do you feel most comfortable with? Go for it; ask as many questions as you can, see how the different hosts differ in their answers. Try one; if it doesn't work out try another, it's really easy to move around. Don't be afraid, you've got nothing to lose except the fear itself!

Web Design Tips for Gift Websites

Gift websites can do very well during the holidays and even during the rest of the year if they simply follow the following tips on how to design their website. It really is quite intuitive because people who visit your site want to be able to find what they are looking for easily and buy it with no problems. If your site makes it difficult to do either of these two things then you will lose customers. So, when you are focusing on web design your concern should be how easy it is for customers and then everything else secondary.

Easy Interface
First of all, you want to make sure the interface is easy to interact with. Don’t use any fonts or colors that are difficult to read and make sure everything is spelled out in a very clear way. Use a traditional design so customers will arrive at your website and know what to do. Don’t get creative and place icons in places where customers won’t anticipate them. It’s ok to use a traditional interface your customers will be familiar and comfortable with because that means they will be able to make purchases easier. Going for creative interfaces will in many cases lose you customers. Keep that in mind.

Gift Groupings
Now, when people are searching for Christmas gifts or even Christmas gift ideas they want to be able to differentiate between the people they are buying gifts for. So, have an icon that is specifically for Christmas gifts for boys, another that is specifically for Christmas gifts for girls, and so on and so forth. This will make it easy for anyone looking for specific Christmas gifts and they will love that your website makes it so easy. Christmas is a stressful time for many and if your website reduces the stress then all the better.

Fast and Secure Checkout
If you finalize your website with a fast and secure checkout that does not ask for any unnecessary information or make customers go through unnecessary steps then you will have some lifelong customers as a result. People love shopping online because it is easy and fast, in most cases, and if your website design makes it even easier and faster then you are guaranteed to get a lot of sales this season. Keep in mind as well that if you offer free shipping or reduced rate shipping on the gifts you sell that customers will love your site even more and be more willing to shop with you!

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Top Tips for Getting Free Websites

Use free web templates or build your own website from scratch - there are many professional web designers and companies that offer free web site templates. Use them and build a web site online for free - you need to download the free template (Web2earn also offers some excellent downloadable free website templates) and then customize it to suit your needs.

If you want to build a free business web site, try a more serious and corporate color scheme and layout, or go with a lively and dynamic web template if you are building a site to sell teenage apparel. You can also build a site from scratch. In this case, you need to have some serious web design and development knowledge, especially if you want to use your website as a way to make money online.

Don't venture out to build a Yahoo web site, or any other large site clone, as that will probably take more than one person to complete. After you build a web site online for free, it's also time to find some free or cheap hosting for it. There are hundreds of services offering free hosting, but the disadvantage is that they place ads on your website, which will take away some of your visitors.

If you want to build a free business web site, we recommend that you consider buying your own domain, as a free hosting domain will look extremely unprofessional.

How to build a dating web site - Romance is a powerful force that can also provide you, as an online business entrepreneur, with considerable profit. Online dating is a huge industry and, of course, many are wondering how to build a dating web site. A well created website for online dating is built with cutting edge technology that offers a rich and deep user experience.

This may often include multimedia features such as Live Video Chat, Video recorder to post video profiles or advanced search capabilities. When you want to build a dating web site you should try to go a step beyond what the current industry is offering, in the hopes of attracting a new segment of users. You may often notice that building an online dating website can become very complex, and it often takes more than one individual to complete it.

Here is what a client who developed a dating website says about the process of building a dating website: "Using an on-line dating service that incorporates the latest digital and voice technology saves you time, allows more quality interaction during your dates, and takes the guesswork out of your conversations. Facial expressions, voice tone, and posture are important elements of our attraction to others.

When left to our imaginations the expectations can be higher than most people could live up to in person. Face-to-face interaction, whether in person or over a computer screen or through your videophone, gives you the intimacy you need to build a better relationship foundation while maintaining your online autonomy.