Webaholics

You may be on with your first website or you are redesigning a existing website, which is not functioning well. When you begin a website, your purpose should be very clear. For example: If you are a web design firm, you want to show off your high tech services keeping a particular kind of customers / visitors in mind. Keep it as simple and as direct as the functionality and purpose of the site allows you to.

A web designer has very little control on the page display since it depends mainly on the browser. However, making a webpage look similar on various browsers is challenging as well as rewarding. While creating a site, a web designer has to keep certain things in mind such as:

1. Various browsers
2. various versions of browsers
3. Operating system used by the customer
4. screen display area
5. Availability of plugin

One thing you must remember that a website is designed keeping visitors and customers in mind. Good designers look at their website through the eyes of their visitors. For example- if you run a site, which sells a product for elderly, you should make the layout easy, the font size large and design simple.

Optimizing web pages is the most important aspect of web design. An optimized web page loads quickly on the client’s system and your web visitor can quickly get the information they had come for.

Your website should reflect what your company is all about. That is why, the color is an important aspect in portraying your company. Blues and greys are considered as good colors for professional websites. The color used in your website should complement your company website’s logo.

While thinking of font size on your web page, write only in browser compatible fonts, because what looks good in your browser may not look the same in your customer’s browser.

Simple and clean website with little color and lots of white space can be a good site. Graphics should be few. The navigation system should consist of -

1. Left-side menu
2. Site search in the top corner
3. Major categories in the dark color bar
4. Services, shopping in grey blocks
5. Recent releases.

Photos can be effective on business websites. Well-composed photos can add a touch of class to your web pages. Commercial web sites are built from templates. You should build a template that constructs each part of typical webpage with a hole at the centre for content. You can create page after page from the template. For each page, you have to insert a page title, meta tag content, a headline and text content.

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What actually makes a good website? Well, some of you might say a good website must be function-riched; others might think different and says that a good website must be nicely design, or fresh contents, or info-riched, the list goes on. Apparently, we can never have clear guidelines on a good website as different people have different preferences.

Nevertheless, regardless of people’s preferences, there are five essential elements that you cannot afford to miss if you wish to server a good website to your users.

Firstly a good website should always have a consistent style of content and design. Changing font colors and tone of writing from page to page will give weird feelings to your web users. Inconsistent stance on certain and change of tone in your writing style will definitely confuse your web users and harm the site creditability.

Secondly, a good website needs a proper navigation. Imagine your website as your garden; you do not want your users to lost middle in the way unless you’re planning to build a maze. Good site navigation will assure pleasant user experience and smooth information flow from the web publisher to the users. As a common standard (but not a must) of web designs, main navigations are often placed on top or on the side of website first fold for user convenience.

Also, on top of proper designed site navigation, an on-site search function will be a huge plus. A search function allows your users to get his/her desired page faster; a search function allows your buried deep content to get on top of the surface; a search function allows web owners to keep track on what he wrote previously easily. There are tons of ways to place a search bar on your website without knowing any programming skills. Google on-site search bar is a very good tool where very webmaster should use.

Thirdly, a reliable web hosting is a must for all websites. Fast response time, reliable server uptime – all these are must have for a good website. Your website must be accessible all the time and users should not be waiting too long for the website to response. Picking up a reliable web hosting is crucial for starter websites, upgrading your hosting plans or improving your own server resources are some of the instant step you can take to improve.

Accuracy is the fourth important element for a good website. You might not have too much time organizing your website but the info served should be accurate and up to date always. Your users are there to obtain information and its no good at all if you’re serving incorrect info to them.

Last but not least, give your web visitors a chance to contact you. Unless you are trying to con your web users, else your website contacts should be displayed with extra care and attention. Make sure that you placed your contacts, such as emails and phone number, are properly displayed. This is very important so that you web visitors can contact you if they feel the need to.

Listed above are the top five elements that a good website must have. Does your website have it all? You better start working on them if the answer is no.

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