How to design a great Website?
Designing a website that looks good and is also search engine friendly not only requires web designing skills but knowledge about search engines as well. Ranking on search engine depends greatly on the design of your wesbite. As a webmaster, you might feel tempted by the flashy colors, various buttons and graphics of all kind. While these things can render a cool look to your website, they can also prove hazardous for generating profits through your website.
Here are few tips that can help you ceate a great website.
Do your Homework First -
This refers to the basic study and research before designing your website. Find out about your taget audience. These are the people who will be benefitted most by your website. They are the basic users of your website. For eg. A career oriented website should be designed keeping in mind the needs of students.
Next, decide about the content to be included in the site. A search engine is always on a look out for good and informative content. Thus, focus on keyword rich and nicely written content.
Select a Layout -
Do not get carried away by the wide range of layouts and templates available. Select a simple layout. Make sure your site is user friendly and accessible. Place the things that are most important at the forefront i.e. on the HomePage.
Overstuffing of images or content distracts the user. Try keeping grphics at the basic level.
Navigation bars -
Navigation or movability is one of the determining factors to ensure traffic to the website. Make sure each page is easily accessible. This will make the users keep coming back to your site.
Place the navigation menus on top or left of the home page because almost all the sites on the world wide web follow this pattern. This is where net surfers are used to look for menus. Main menu should be placed on all the pages. Avoid horizontal scrolling.
All websites should include a sitemap. This is done to attract better scrawling by the Search engines.
External Links -
Provide external links in your website. this helps in attracting more traffic and improving search engine rankings. Make sure that all links open in new windows. This ensures that users are not driven away from your website, while checking other links.
Selecting a Color Scheme -
Always use colors that are visullay appealing and eye-pleasing. Gaudy and harsh colors create an unprofessional image in the minds of the user. Unless your website is about entertainment or art, refrain from using very bright color schemes.
Keep the color scheme suttle. This will not overload a uses eyes and he will spend more time going through your website. Use a lot of white space to emphasize various points.
Readability -
The users should be able to clearly read your content. Font that work best on web pages are Verdana and Arial. Use optimal font size of 12-13 pts. Always use dark colors for Text to ensure visibility. Light colored text is hard to read and has a blinding effect.
Download Time -
This is another important aspect while creating a website. The download time for your web pages shouls be very less. Quicker the downlaod time, better will be your site performance.
There is a still a large population that uses dial-up internet connections. Unike broadband, a dial-up takes too much time for all big downloads. Minimize the size of your pages by using minimum amount of graphics and images. Keep the average page size less than 30 KB.
Functionality Testing -
Different users of your website will have different combination of software and hardware available on their system. Therefore it is important that you check the functionality of your website on various computers.
Avoid using browser specific functions, as all users may not have the same browser installed on their machine.
A good website will boost your profits and enhance your online business success.
--------------------------------------------
For information on Web Development courses, visit www.careerchoicewizard.com
Here are few tips that can help you ceate a great website.
Do your Homework First -
This refers to the basic study and research before designing your website. Find out about your taget audience. These are the people who will be benefitted most by your website. They are the basic users of your website. For eg. A career oriented website should be designed keeping in mind the needs of students.
Next, decide about the content to be included in the site. A search engine is always on a look out for good and informative content. Thus, focus on keyword rich and nicely written content.
Select a Layout -
Do not get carried away by the wide range of layouts and templates available. Select a simple layout. Make sure your site is user friendly and accessible. Place the things that are most important at the forefront i.e. on the HomePage.
Overstuffing of images or content distracts the user. Try keeping grphics at the basic level.
Navigation bars -
Navigation or movability is one of the determining factors to ensure traffic to the website. Make sure each page is easily accessible. This will make the users keep coming back to your site.
Place the navigation menus on top or left of the home page because almost all the sites on the world wide web follow this pattern. This is where net surfers are used to look for menus. Main menu should be placed on all the pages. Avoid horizontal scrolling.
All websites should include a sitemap. This is done to attract better scrawling by the Search engines.
External Links -
Provide external links in your website. this helps in attracting more traffic and improving search engine rankings. Make sure that all links open in new windows. This ensures that users are not driven away from your website, while checking other links.
Selecting a Color Scheme -
Always use colors that are visullay appealing and eye-pleasing. Gaudy and harsh colors create an unprofessional image in the minds of the user. Unless your website is about entertainment or art, refrain from using very bright color schemes.
Keep the color scheme suttle. This will not overload a uses eyes and he will spend more time going through your website. Use a lot of white space to emphasize various points.
Readability -
The users should be able to clearly read your content. Font that work best on web pages are Verdana and Arial. Use optimal font size of 12-13 pts. Always use dark colors for Text to ensure visibility. Light colored text is hard to read and has a blinding effect.
Download Time -
This is another important aspect while creating a website. The download time for your web pages shouls be very less. Quicker the downlaod time, better will be your site performance.
There is a still a large population that uses dial-up internet connections. Unike broadband, a dial-up takes too much time for all big downloads. Minimize the size of your pages by using minimum amount of graphics and images. Keep the average page size less than 30 KB.
Functionality Testing -
Different users of your website will have different combination of software and hardware available on their system. Therefore it is important that you check the functionality of your website on various computers.
Avoid using browser specific functions, as all users may not have the same browser installed on their machine.
A good website will boost your profits and enhance your online business success.
--------------------------------------------
For information on Web Development courses, visit www.careerchoicewizard.com
posted by Mahima Kini @ 12:11 AM
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