Web designing has become the in thing today. There are hordes of web designers and web designing companies across the globe ready to flaunt their designing skills and innovations with latest techniques of designing. But all said and done web designing is not as easy and simple as it seems. There is much thought process to be done before the actual web designing commences. The following are the questions are to be considered before designing your web site:
- What is the purpose of your business?
- What is the market situation for your product or service?
- What is the problem area that you need to address?
- What is your overall marketing strategy?
- What is your marketing plan?
- Who are your competitors and what is their strategy?
- What are your priority markets?
- Whom do you wish to target?
- What budget do you allocate to promotions and advertising?
- What would be the role of Internet advertising?
- What are the goals you wish to accomplish through your web site?
- Do you wish to have the web site just for the sake of having it?
- Or do you have a clear vision and purpose to have the web site?
- Do you take the web designing seriously?
Ideally one should have the clarity of thoughts and action on all the above areas to come to the decision of designing a web site. The web design should be such that it serves the basic purpose of your business and it appeals to your target audience wherever they are there across the globe. You need to know your target audience, and keep them in mind throughout the web development process. Say clearly what you want to convey, concisely and focused on what they want and plan to give them all the information they need.
Your web site content is the most powerful aspect of your website’s presentation — more than anything else. Creating effective text will bring you the response you expect from your visitors. If your website is well written, it’s guaranteed to be more successful than sites that rely on mediocre writing, no matter how amazing their graphics may look. It takes some work! Please note one thing — if you expect success, your text needs to be clear by each and every word!
Presentation Of web site: When you start to develop graphical concepts for your site, remember the benefits of simplicity. It’s easy to get carried away with web graphics, but having too many flashy visuals can be very distracting — and they can take ages for browsers to load. You are developing website to give information about your company not to show the designing skills of your web designers. Even limited use of images and graphics can create a wonderful site if used smartly.
Smooth Surfing: Avoid links that makes the visitor to leave your site. Make the links for only those pages that are very important for you to promote your business or visitor must know. Good web navigation helps people to orient themselves in your website and find what they’re looking for. Each page should also give your visitor easy access to all of the features of your site. There are many options for laying out your menus for the web site design but it’s vital to keep your navigation simple, clear and consistent throughout your site. The visitor should be very comfortable with your web site whether he reads or navigates through your site.
No page counters: Page counters do nothing except make you look like an amateur, mess with your design and tell competitors about your site you probably don’t want them to know! If you want to know how many people are visiting your site, just ask your web hosting company for the server stats.
Focus on result orientation: You are more concerned with the result, regardless of the technology used by your designer. Avoid using back ground music on web page as music file is pretty heavy and takes time to down load. You should focus more on content on web pages to generate inquires rather than entertaining visitor by placing undesired flash, music, marquee, animation etc.
Avoid using framesets in website: It is very easy to design frame based website for any web design company. This takes less time to design and does not require any type of extra designing skills but it will make site very complicated and at times cause listing problem with search engines. This shall also help your site to become search engine friendly site.
Maintain consistency in web pages structure throughout the website: do not take web site as your company or product brochure. Some designers recommend creating a different structure of their web pages within same web site. People always enjoy consistency of a stream of water continuously flowing with the same speed and flow! The same is the case with your web site visitor. Let him experience the same flow and design pattern of all your pages throughout the site. That’s why all successful and famous sites have the same look and feel.
Create site map page:
A site map is a simple web page with text links to all the websites sub-pages organized in proper categories; a lot of people will use a site map if they can find one. Site map is very useful to guide visitors to make them reach to the destination page. Site map for web site will also be helpful if you wish to optimize your web pages for the search engines.
Make your titles on your web page: One of the core attributes of a web page is its title. In between the tags you can specify the page’s title as it appears in the browsers top title bar and in the search engine results. Visitor pay attention to the TITLE of the web page when that page is listed in the search engines. This indeed is a very crucial and sensitive issue while you write the title for that web page. If it is not written improperly you might end up losing many visitors because they could not judge whether you site would be carrying the information they want!
Under construction pages: If your page is not ready do not put it up and promote. It is indeed a very irritating experience when the surfer gets to your site after searching from the search engine and gets frustrated on seeing a dead page or the instruction that your site is under process. Don’t lose your visitor even before he has seen your site! If you have links that are pointing to the pages which are not ready, disable them until your page is ready. Or you can link that page to the contact us page till pages are ready so that visitor may contact you for the information about that particular product or services in future when he needs them.
Color: Avoid using too many colors in your web site: Color is a way the visitor of the web site identifies things. Keep the color scheme of your web site limited to a couple of colors and keep it consistent across your site unless you want to demonstrate some colorful presentation. Reading a text with too many colors will create strain to the eyes and visitor will try to skip that text rater than reading thoroughly.
Do provide alternate text (using the ‘alt’ attribute of the image tag) for all important images of the website:
Alternate text is text that you insert in your image tags that is used by text only browsers. You should put meaningful information in the alternative text that will benefit those who can’t see and it will also help you with the search engine optimization process as search engine spider can not read images. It can only read text which is being incorporated in your web design.
Watch the video related to web designers
www.beyourownit.com learn how to create and manipulate blocks in drupal customize your website … drupal blocks web design install enable customize side bars block cms joomla
Help answer the question about web designers
Are IT Recruiters a good way for freelance web designers to find work?Hi. When I put my resume on online i began hear from a lot of IT Recruiters. I guess conventional wisdom is that its better to make direct contact with an employer rather than go through a third party. Web designers, what are your thoughts on recruiters? In the end does it work out well for freelancers looking for work?
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I just made a new website n I’m still workin on da design n I havent uploaded it on2 da site yet since i havent finished it yet… n im havnin prob with it alredi… wat do u do wit da member thin?? da way u can sign in n register? but how do u make it funtion ? n how do u make dat sign in n register thin change 2 lik inbox or sign out or somethin??
thanks for the nice video , its help me out a lot . Also at eZdia you got online experts in web designing/developers which can solne your queries online . Just try at ezdia
Yeah I do …go for it !
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Office of
Occupational Statistics and Employment a web designer is also called a
web developer.
“…Web developers, also called Web designers, are responsible for
day-to-day site creation and design.”
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos042.htm
United States: 600,000
“There are more than 600,000 Web designers and developers across the
country and we are prepared to host every single one of them free of
charge,” said Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host. “It gives us a
ready-made marketing channel and puts more money in their pockets.”
C I Host
http://cidial.com/?zone=press/2004/FreeForAll-20040604&print_ver=1
Worldwide: 13 million
“There are 13 million Web designers and developers worldwide who need
to learn about the latest and greatest publishing tools, said Al
Ramadan, executive vice president of marketing for Macromedia.”
Wired
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60325,00.html?tw=wn_story_related
is der any programme other dan da 1s dat r only available 4 free in free trial ?? cos wat if i wanna change how my website look after lik a month or somethin?? or can u just sign up again n dl all over again wud it still work??
go to the remote info part of your site and double check the ftp settings. also check if the “use passive ftp” box is checked
I've always been a PC guy since I grew up learning on Windows, but you hear it all the time, MAC is better for design work. Also, when I attended the Art Institute for graphic design, the majority of computers were MAC in the computer labs.
Here is an interesting article that argues both points:
http://www.allgraphicdesign.com/graphicsblog/2007/04/08/2-discussions-on-pcs-vs-macs-for-graphic-design/
All in all, I suppose its all about what you are comfortable with where you can put out your work efficiently.
Hope that helps.
My mother is a web designer. End of story
since they are usually paid by the employer, you should always have a few recruiters that know you. there is no risk for you. plus, if you give recruiters a referral, they sometimes give you a piece of their commission. freelancers can always find little projects through websites like guru.com
what about windows 7
I use the adobe cs4 web premium suite. It includes photoshop, illustrator, flash, and dreamweaver to name a few.
Being versatile is a huge step in becoming more desirable to employers. A lot of people go to school and find a niche. That is to say, they become a graphic designer, or a web designer, or an animator, an so on. And that's where they stay. They are content to define themselves in that role. But the people who truly thrive in this industry and are fiercely sot after are the people who graduate in whatever and then say, "and now I'm gonna learn a little web design…..then in my spare time I'm gonna study up on digital photography….then when I know a little about that I'm gonna learn some illustration.
The point is that these people have a specialty, but they also continue their education to learn a little bit about everything. Employers love hiring these folks because it saves them money. If you hire a graphic designer that also knows web design or illustration, then you don't have to hire out for someone else to do those things. They have someone who can do a little bit of everything, and paying one person a huge salary is less expensive than paying three people an average salary. Not saying you need to be a one man army never sleeping and handling everything that comes through the door, but your versatility is extra insurance to employers should the sh!t hit the fan and they need someone who can say "I know how to do that" in an emergency.
So, you compete by continuing you education while in the work force. No need to go back to school and triple major. Read some magazines, buy some books, and teach yourself something new everyday. Gradually your resume will start fleshing out with all the new stuff you can do which is sure to get you noticed.
Yes they add it to every page a lot of the time. Other times the navigation is an image map which is then pointed to in each file. On some sites the same index page reloads and brings up articles dynamically without every leaving the main page.
this video helped me out alot
Sorry if this is too complicated, but here goes.
There are many kinds of web design and many aspects to each kind. Many, indeed most sites are commercial, and so a web designer needs to understand data management, security, and user experience. For these things a good grasp of XML, mySQL or any number of other data base disciplines will be what you need.
Of course the underlying code is html and any web designer should have a working knowledge of this and other similar mark-up languages.
Currently however there are many code editors that simplify the process of design, and the best of these would be Dreamweaver… and an understanding of Flash and Photoshop, even Illustrator will be useful to the designerin the management of web graphics.
These days the web is carrying more multi media, and an understanding of digital audio, video and various kinds of animation is necessary for the well rounded designer.
Now listen carefully to this next bit, it's important. In the corporate world everybody's job is broken into many people's jobs. No one person
does all these things. Some people then choose to specialize, but this is a mistake. YYour specialty may become either obsolete or the job market in it saturated. It is important to approach this field from an unlazy position. Learn all of it… then you will always have a job. Overspecialize, and you will lose one way or another.
I can't begin to tell you how important this is for you to understand if you are interested in this field.
i’ve just watched this and it seems very helpful & genuine (i.e not trying to lead to a commercial site). i’m gonna watch the next vid as recomended and furhter form an opinion.
it says it connecting but then an error thing pops up help for the dreamweaver thing
thanks. i have the best idea for a website. And when it becomes popular i will remember you showing me how to make it in the first place. /”’)(-…-)/”’)