Designing your own successful web page can seem difficult and nearly impossible if you do not do a little research first. The reason you need to know the basics of web page design is because the design of your website will actually influence whether or not people continue to visit your site and ultimately, whether they will buy from you or not. Obviously, a lot is riding on your web page design so it is worthwhile to take this seriously and put some effort into doing it right the first time.
Design #1 Color
Any important aspect of your web page design process should include the use of color. Color affects people psychologically and different colors have positive and negative attributes or feelings they can evoke and men and women respond to different colors more positively than others. So, figure out your target audience, what you are selling, and what colors will best help you persuade your target audience to stay on your web page and to buy from you.
Design #2 Organization
A web page design flaw many beginners run into is organization. Your website must be well organized, and not just to you, but to the average person who has never visited your site before. It should be obvious where the information is and how visitors can get to it without wading through a lot of other links and information they are not interested in. Check out some larger, more successful sites to see how they deal with organization and just follow their lead.
Design #3 Too Much Text
Be careful about writing too much text and loading it to your website. Different types of writing is more appropriate for the Internet and in general bullet points, bold words, short paragraphs, and the like help break up a lot of text and make it easier to read. If you have a huge block of text on your web page design content creation method, it is unlikely people will actually put forth the effort to sit down and read it. Make it easy for people to get the information.
Design #4 Too Many Graphics
Too many graphics is another web page design mistake by beginners. Graphics can be very useful, however if you use too many graphics you cut out the text you can use which is how search engines find your website and rank you in search results. Don’t handicap yourself with the search engines by using too many graphics.
Design #5 Focus
Beginners often times do not have a clear focus of their website before they start designing it and it appears unorganized, unfocused, and the point of the web page is a bit vague. Come up with a plan on your web page design and outline the major points and focus of your website design before you start.
About The Author
Michael Turner reveals step-by-step how you can increase search engine traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/
info@powertraffictactics.com
Friday, July 27, 2007
A Beginners Guide to Web Page Design
Web Page Design Tips
This may be your first web page design, or perhaps you are an old hand. Either way, you will need to address a number of important issues to ensure that your web page design caters uniformly to all viewing needs. Here is a primer of essentials:
Web Page Navigation
Ever wonder why you let in viewers to your website in the first place? Well, the answer must be 'to explore your website'. If so indeed, your web page design ought to go easy on navigation. Proceed with a menu of links across the page at the top or down the left. Text links are always better. And yes, for a good web page design, the link pattern has to be consistent in all pages, no matter what the pages are about.
The Colors
If you are in for color background for your web page design, help yourself to some serious thinking. Not that color background is bad per se. Pastel shades do look nice, but if you consider that human eyes are more accustomed to white background (as in case of books), it will be all the more reason to do just that for your web page design.
The Links
Even if your main navigation links are trendy, ensure that other text links sport an easy look. In many a web page design, one fails to mark out text links from other content. This happens if you choose near-similar colors for both. The least you want in your web page design is to confuse your visitor with link anomaly. Another point worth attending to is denoting visited links with a distinct color. Nothing is more frustrating than visiting same page again and again.
Easy Reading
For any web page design, content is considered as bread-and-butter. Controlling text-size of content with styles is in vogue these days in many web page designs. Yet a common refrain among serious viewers is to allow them to decide the text size. This calls for ability to resize text as required.
Next on your list of good web page design must be to arrange your texts for easy reading. Let us remember that reading the screen is different from reading print. Attention on screen is brief. Opt therefore for a decent web page design that attends to specificities like bulleted lists, short paragraphs, subheads, highlighted keywords and suchlike.
Coming to fonts, numerous online tests have been conducted by usability experts. The ones that emerge as most legible and generally preferred are Verdana and Comic though other types such as Arial, Courier and Georgia also find acceptance in web page design.
Screen Resolution
Time now to explore screen resolution you would opt for your web page design. Despite perceptible shift to high screen resolutions, there are many viewers who still feel comfortable with lower resolution. 640x480 pixels may be passé, but not so are 800x600 pixels. If you are alive to this scenario, you will do well to span your web page design on percentage of screen size instead of fixing width in pixels.
If your preferred web page design is for high resolutions, you will find the headlines getting cluttered in small screens and the texts overlapping. The best option would be to work out a parity among various screen resolutions so that your web page design does not loose harmony.
Browser Compatibility
Not all browsers display your web page design in the same way. As of now, Internet Explorer 6 stands tall with about 60% of all users. Firefox comes next but lags IE6 by a wide margin at 25%. Since between them, the two manage an overwhelming 85% of acceptance, it may just be that your web page design compulsorily conforms to both, if not for others like Mozilla, Netscape and Opera, who collectively commands just about 5% of browser-reach.
Summing Up
Whatever your web page design be, remember a viewer takes only one-twentieth of a second to form an impression of a website [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10895934/]. Juxtapose that with F-shaped reading pattern of viewers [http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html], and you know your job is cut up to make a suitable web page design.
About The Author
Joshua Mabilia - admin @ hostingfrenzy.com
Josh is the webmaster of http://www.hostingfrenzy.com/
Visit his site for a comprehensive web hosting directory, articles, tools, and much more.
