Web Design

What makes a good website? The reason a website exists is to serve the person who has chosen to visit it. A website should provide a productive, memorable and frustration free visit every time. One that enables a user to get to the information that they want as quickly and easily as possible.

How is this done? By allowing the user to get to each piece of information that they may want as simply and quickly as possible. This is done by removing diversions, trivialities and by honing in on the core message. The client knows their business far better than any web design agency. They know their customers and their motivations, Out job is to listen to the clients brief and deliver to their objectives. To ask questions; lots of them, so the brief and the objectives are understood so that real business growth can be delivered. And through the design process, the communication lines should be used regularly. Updates, chats, phone calls, a cup of tea and a biscuit. Keeping the design simple is important. Web users have short attention spans. If the website does not immediately attract your customer and tell them what they want, they will move on in frustration. Simplicity is key. Provide room to breathe; make room for white space on the page through a combination of imaginative layout and typography. Distractions on the page should be avoided. A home page that takes time to load and then has no information except a clever graphic, is time wasted. A website should be simple to navigate, easy to understand and above all, intuitive. People scan for the main points and then move on. Therefore, content must be clear, concise and to the point. Try to reduce your content by half, and then reduce it by half again. You need to be ruthless. The final piece in the jigsaw. A live website that makes it easy for users to use it. That focuses on getting a clear message across and, most importantly, delivers growth for your business.  (Source: eberlin Web Design) 

Web Pages

Top Ten Tips to a Great Web Page; There aren't any magic pills to create a great web page that everyone will visit again and again, but there are things you can do to help. Some key things to focus on are making the site as easy to use and user-friendly as possible. It should also load quickly and provide what the readers want right up front. 

1. Keep your focus on fast pages. Speedy pages are always important. No matter how fast the average connection if for your readers, there is always more data more content, more images, more everything for them to download. The thing about speed is that people only notice it when it's absent. So creating fast web pages often feels unappreciated, but if you follow the tips in this article, your pages won't be slow, and so your readers will stay longer.

2. Keep your pages short, but not too short. Writing for the web is different from writing for print. PEople skim online, especially when they first get to a page. You want the contents of your page to give them what they want quickly, but provide enough detail for those who want expansion on the basics.

3. Good navigation on your website is critical. Navigation on your websites is what gets readers around on the page and the site. Long web pages can benefit from tables of contents using anchor links to help readers get around. But you should also have good site-wide navigation.

4. Keep images small and use sprites whenever possible. Small images are about the download speed more than the physical size. Beginning web designers often create web pages that would be wonderful if their images weren't so large. It's not okay to take a photograph and upload it to your website without resizing it and optimising it to be as small as possible. CSS sprites are also a very important way to speed up your site images. IF you have several images that are used across several pages on your site, you can use sprites to cache the images so that they do not need to be re-downloaded on the second page your customers visit. Plus, with the images stored as one larger image, that reduces the HTTP requests for your page, which is a huge speed enhancement.

5. Use appropriate colours. Remember that web pages are, by their very mature, international. Even if you intend your page for a specific country or locality it will be seen by other people. And so you should be aware of what the colour choices you use on your wen page are saying to people around the world. When you create your wen colour scheme keep in mind colour symbolism.

6. Write as globally as you can. As mentioned above, websites are global. So great websites acknowledge that. You should make sure that things like currencies, measurements, dates, and times are clear so that all your readers will know exactly what you mean.

7. Check your spelling and grammar. Many people are not tolerant of spelling errors. You can write a completely error free topic for years, and then have one simple "teh" instead of "the" and you will get irate emails from some customers, and many will give up in disgust without contacting you at all. It may seem unfair, but people judge websites by the quality of the writing, and spelling and grammar errors are an obvious indicator of quality for many people.

8. Keep links current. Broken links are another sign for many readers that a site is not maintained. And why would anyone want to stick around on a site that even the owner doesn't care for? Unfortunately, link rot is something that happens without even noticing. So it's important to use an HTML validator and link checked to help you check older pages for broken links.

9. Annotate your links. Annotating your links means that you should write links that explain where the readers is going to go, and what they are going to find there. By creating links that are clear and explanatory, you help your readers and make them want to click. While I don't recommend writing "click here" for a link, you may discover that adding that type of directive right before a link can help some readers understand that the underlined, different coloured text is intended to be clicked on. You shouldn't use "click here" as the text of any link, but that direction can be useful for sites that cater to an older audience who might not understand how links work.

10. Put contact information on your pages. Many web designers are uncomfortable with contact information on their website. It feels like a violation of privacy. You may be thinking "but what if they actually contact me?" It's true, it could happen. But most contacts you receive are going to be related to your site or useful in some fashion. I'm not advocating you place information on your site that you aren't comfortable with, but providing some way to contact you is important for a website. Contact information reminds people that the site is maintained by another person. (Source: WebDesign Basics)