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Useful Tips for Effective Web Design
  Using Color to create the right impression is an important part of Website   Design?

  Using Titles and Headlines to direct attention and Get up Search Engines?

   

 

    

 

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Useful Tips for Effective Web Design

  1. Fast Loading web site designs (optimizing  web, let it not take more than 15 seconds to load) - You might have a great design or looks fantastic, but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load.
  2. Clear Navigation - Once a visitor has come to your site you need to make them go through your site. Make sure all your important links are at prominent places. Preferably right on top - that's usually where a visitor first looks. Make use of menus on the right and the left. Try to link to as many pages of your site. Let your information be accessible from all parts of the site. You never know what a visitor may be interested in. Try to also use the footer for your important links.
  3. All Resolutions - Today, there are computers with all kinds of resolution. They range from 640 x 480 to 1024 x 768 and go even higher. Your job is to design your site for all these resolutions. The best way to do this is to design your site in terms of percentage and not pixels.
  4. Browser Compatibility - Make sure your site is browser compatible. Your web site should look good in Netscape as well as in Internet Explorer. Don't stop designing your site as soon as you find that it looks great on IE. Usually Netscape gives some problems, especially when you try doing complicated HTML designs. But don't give up too soon, usually with patience these problems can be easily fixed.
  5. Readable and professional looking fonts - Don't ask me how many times I've clicked out of a site just because the font is in Comic Sans and the color is a bright pink or green. Just by looking at the font you feel that the site is not a professional site. Don't use Comic Sans and other fancy fonts that may not be available on most computers. If the font you use is not available in a visitors computer the web site will use the default font of your computer which is much worse. So try to keep to common and professional web fonts. The fonts that I always stick to are Arial and Verdana.
  6. Minimize the use of images - I believe that sometimes simple designs are the most effective for the web. Keep your site simple but neat. Don't clutter your page with big, bulky images that take ages to load. Instead use tables creatively and design eye - catching icons that will draw a visitor's attention to a particular section of your site. Tip - Visitors are usually more interested in content than in design.
  7. Use of white space - Try not to clutter up your page with too many images, backgrounds and colorful fonts. Again use the Keep It Simple principle by minimizing the use of graphics and using a lot of white space. White space gives a sense of spaciousness and overall neatness to a site. Notice the white space in our site.
  8. Check for broken links - Always check for broken links within a site before uploading it to your web server. In Dreamweaver you can check for broken links by right clicking on any file in the Site Files Window and then clicking on Check links - Entire Site. If you don't have this facility you need to upload your site and then check it using online tools like Net Mechanic

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Using Color to create the right impression is an important part of Website Design

We can't really only use White and Black any more but going too far can be overbearing. What rules can we try to follow.

12 part color wheel

Background: The eyes find it easiest to have a white background with black text. As you can see we have that here but then have other backgrounds away from the text areas. For many sites the choice of background color is the most important design decision. Picture backgrounds are also an option but can cause many problems. Especially with clashes with text colors. The Clever Websites service is avoiding picture backgrounds at the moment and again it may be more trouble than it's worth.

Other Colors: The combination of colors you choose around the background affect can affect your image. Using a combination of blues to give a corporate image. red, yellow and orange and more attention seeking, Green is supposed to be hopefully and renewable, relaxing etc and so on. How much you can read in to this is questionable but worth considering.

Using an effective blend of colors is important to give you a professional but appealing image. What that combination is depends on your audience, brand, product etc.

Here are four formulas for success:

1. Convert images to the correct file format.
This not only delivers the best colors and the best images possible but it also lowers file sizes and shortens the download time.
2. Select the most appropriate colors by analyzing the store’s products or services and the target market. It is essential that colors bear some relationship — either symbolic or literal — to the product or service. Don’t try to reinvent the color wheel by using unusual colors.
3. Use color to create the most functional user-interface design. For example, use color to direct the eye to the most important areas on the page. The web designer must identify what ideal and normal sequences might entail: what the viewer should see first, where the eye should move next, and how much time the viewer's attention should be held by each area. Keep colors to minimum. "Signal detection" theory means that the brain is able to understand and organize information when a minimum of colors and shapes exists within the visual field. Too many colors and shapes make it impossible to focus and find anything.
4. Use color harmony principles to create a pleasant visual experience. In other words, all the colors of the components — the navigation system, banners, buttons, and text — as well as the images of the merchandise (if they exist), must all work well together. Some common attribute must unify them.
In conclusion, consider this: Just as a store is constructed of solid matter, color is the basic building material of two-dimensional images and visual experiences. In the final analysis, color plays a pivotal role in the customer’s critical decision — to buy or not buy.
 

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Using Titles and Headlines to direct attention and Get up Search Engines

People will often only read the whole page once they have assessed whether doing so will be worth their while. Convincing headlines can help with that. Titles are also very important, especially with Search Engines.

Headlines are one of the best ways of letting people know what you're offering and quickly. If people are impatient they may well only read the headlines on a page and any highlighted words. Even simple bold text at the start of a paragraph lets people scanning a page know what that particular paragraph is about to help the viewer navigate around the page.

Search engines often value titles and headlines with more 'weight' or importance than normal text. Putting words or phrases that you want to be successful on search engines in your titles and headlines is very important for the visibility of your website.

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