December 2006

Search engines don’t care about Web Design. People do. While search engines will not index a website for its great layout, but for the content, people will forget the website that has nothing distinctive about it. No visual impact, no interest! Now, if you are a serious online entrepreneur and want to have a website that sends the right message to the visitors, you must know that there are some web design techniques simply inappropriate for a business website.

Many Web Design companies promise websites that respect the web standards, are usable and search engine friendly. Yes, that’s how any website should be. But these are simple tools. A professional company will mention them, but it will also let you know how a website will increase revenue, reduce expenses, bring more customers and so on. A professional web design firm will not fashion a website “out of the blue”, but conceive a design after understanding your corporate values, after analyzing the target market and respecting your brand image. That’s what you should care about when you choose a web design company.

There are many elements of web design that screw up a business website. Many are simple bad practices, other purely ugly and useless. For an unknown reason business websites with really bad web design are still fashioned every day. One of the worst Web Design techniques is to use Flash instead of text. Web designers have fallen in love with Flash, but that will do a website no good: it increases the size of the page and it is not search engine friendly. Flash is great for music bands, movie sites and other sites that need to make a “cool” impression. Business websites need to send other messages: reliability, customer support, experience and so on. There are some astonishing Flash creations on the web, but the most are simply annoying, useless and visitors just hate them. Flash is exceptionally bad when the designer forgets to put a “Skip Intro” button. On a second thought, a “Skip Intro” button will suggest that the content on that page is insignificant. So far is clear: Flash pages send out mixed messages. However, if you are really in love with flash and simply must have it on your website, create a non-Flash version. Small text could also be really annoying. If people can’t see your message, they’ll just go away, eventually to your competitors. Another bad web design practice is using too many images and animated buttons. There’s nothing worse than a website that twinkles and gets you dizzy while you try to find your way to the information through a bunch of flashy banners, buttons and useless pictures. Many web designers still use background images.

Seriously, have you ever see a global business website that has employed such a Web Design technique? Most of them have a standard, classic design, with simple navigation and plain text on a white background. The graphics are in perfect harmony with the content, they are not misleading and do have proper ALT attributes. There is a reason for simplicity in web design: creating websites that are simple, logical and easy to use, creating websites that sell.

It takes a real web designer to develop simple web pages that are both appealing and simple. Simplicity in Web Design should not by synonym with ugliness. Simple websites could be well-designed, elegant and bring other important benefits: they load faster, they are easier to scan and easier to navigate, they are quicker to design, build, redesign, maintain and they require less server space and bandwidth. Best of all: a simple Web Design will cost less and bring more!

About the Author
The author is a Writer working with a leading software development company, which deals with software outsourcing, offshore outsourcing and offshore software development. Get more valuable information at http://www.a1technology.com.

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1. Gain a larger clientele base Everyday more people turn to the internet for their business solutions. Whether it is to research potential contractors, lawyers, or a new product, the internet introduces consumers to businesses they never would have heard of. Now people in Europe can learn about services a company in Seattle offers by the click of a mouse. Having a website introduces a business to new consumers and helps retain them as a client.

2. Educate consumers about your business Many consumers research services and products online before purchasing. By having a website, you can inform potential customers of your services or products and what separates your business from your competitors. A website will familiarize consumers with your business and make them feel comfortable doing business with you.

3. Increase customer confidence Customers can tell a lot about a company from the design of their website. An unorganized, unappealing website is a major turnoff to consumers. On the other hand, a professional looking website lets consumers know your business is serious and dedicated to their needs.

4. Cost effective promotion and marketing A website is a lowcost, effective way to market your business. Television and magazine ads are great ways to publicize, but are often too expensive and do not always provide enough information. A website does not have a page or time constraint, so there is no rush to get the required information across.

Search engines allow businesses to target a marketing group more effectively than any other advertising strategy. Consumers that utilize search engines know what they are in need of and show a stronger desire in that product or service. Having high ranking search engine results, your business’ web traffic will dramatically increase and provide you with more customers than any other source of marketing.

5. 24 hour global presence Consumers need information 24 hours a day. The internet is always active, and consumers around the world can look up information and conduct business at their convenience. A website allows a business to always be there for their customers regardless of the time of day.

6. Keep your clients updated Consumers feel more comfortable doing business with companies of which they are familiar. It is important for a business to keep clients updated with their latest news, services and products. A website is the best way to inform clients of specials or sales that a business is offering. This will help increase a business’ revenue.

7. Improve communication with customers A website enhances communication between consumers and businesses. A lot of the time consumers are interested in something on a website, but feel awkward or are too lazy to call for more information. Websites that are equipped with email forms allows consumers to ask their question in a moments notice. That is just one feature websites utilize to make communication easy. Other features are message boards, blogs, contact information and other web forms.

8. Keep the edge on competitors The popularity of the internet and understanding of the value of a website increases everyday. Businesses that have a website are already at a huge advantage over their competitors. In addition to having a wider clientele base, their business looks more professional and established. That also goes for the design of the website. When a consumer visits a clean well structured website and an average website that offers the same services, it is a nobrainer which business they will choose.
9. Provide convenient support for your customers 24hour phone support is great, but many companies do not have the funding to provide such a service. A website is a way to help support a customer’s needs when phone support is unavailable. Many websites have a frequently asked questions page that answers many customer concerns. Businesses can also provide common lessons and tutorials on their website that will help customers accomplish their goals. If customers still have support issues, a website can allow them to submit their problem via web form which will allow a business to provide an appropriate solution in a timely manner.

10. Improve businesstocustomer relationships Websites can improve businesstocustomer relationships in more ways than just via communication, support and uptodate general information. A website can also inform a user of their project’s status, account information or balance.

The convenience of a website helps increase productivity, performance and speed. Producing a reliable product or completing a particular service in less time than expected always makes a customer satisfied. It takes months to gain a good customer, but seconds to lose one, and it is hard to lose a satisfied customer.

About the Author
Mike Creati is the owner of Lunico Design LLC. He has his bachelor degree in computer science and is a member of Tau Alpha Pi.http://www.lunicodesign.com/

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CSS means “Cascading Style Sheets“. CSS is a system of rules that directly effect the display properties of your web pages such as colors, fonts, colors, and layouts. CSS style blocks are also commonly referred to as rules. These rules can be embedded into an individual HTML page or placed in an external file that will control many individual pages on your website. Thus changing a property in one place in the linked style sheet will immediately make that change on every web page that is linked to it.

“CSS Web Template” is a website design created using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology. Cascading stylesheets provide web developers an easy way to format and to style web pages. CSS will be used even more because it is seen the same way by all browsers, making it the best option during the browser wars.

CSS templates allow enhanced browser and platform compatibility (CSS supporting browsers are used by 99,98% of existent web surfers). Your website will look perfect in Windows, Unix and Mac browsers. The template is primarily tested on multiple platforms to ensure better requirements compliance.

Style Sheets are the easiest way to provide a default font styling for HTML. So you can modify the whole text and link colors on every page by editing just a single CSS file! CSS also makes your coding much easier because you don’t have to repeat the many formatting tags. This streamlined code equals faster download time and reduced bandwidth usage.

CSS templates show 100% compatibility with Macromedia Dreamweaver and MS Frontpage. Other web editors also handle this technology easier than the usual HTML code.

Good news - now you don’t need to fight with complicated HTML tables trying to modify the layout of your site. Our CSS templates use blocks instead of tables. So you can move content blocks by simply dragging ‘n’ dropping them in your HTML editor. Moreover, these tags are better understood by JavaScript and other web programming languages.

CSS technology is a great step forward in web development. Separated content and presentation adds more flexibility to your website. And, you’ll have no problems with future modification of your website. All templates are based on w3c.org technologies and standards that make your website much more user-friendly.

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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to create fast loading pages, increase your search engine rankings, and modify your whole site with one style sheet. So why don’t more people use them? This is because they got so used to html design and are afraid or too lazy to upgrade their skills. Some will also use ready made templates that contain flashy graphics, bloated code and sometimes even contains hidden code embedded in the page. In this series of articles I will show you how to create a simple web site using CSS, so you will have no excuse to begin incorporating them into your future designs.

What are Cascading Style Sheets?

Cascading Style Sheets is the name of a simple language that allows you to add any style (font, colors, graphics, links, layouts) to your web pages.

Benefits of Cascading Style Sheets

1. Separate content from presentation - you can separate your HTML markup, text, graphics and multimedia from presentation.

2. Consistent site wide look and feel consistency - you can apply one style for 100s of web pages all at once. So if you had to change the color of all pages on your site, you only have to edit one style sheet. This saves you a huge amount of time, especially if you had to edit each page separately.

3. Web site maintenance - apart from being able to make site wide changes easily through one CSS file, the clean code it generates makes it easier to update. Properly marked up web pages permit them to be maintained by more than one person. It will also work in more browsers. Web site redesigns will take much less time.

4. Improve search engine rankings - search engines generally spider the code at the top of your web page first. For most sites that means the navigation bar will be spidered first (resides at top of page code). CSS enables you to position the code for your content at the top making your page search engine friendly. Properly marked up HTML pages can easily found and properly categorized by search engines

5. Fast loading - CSS reduces the amount of tags used therefore producing clean code. Tableless design can reduce your load time by 25% to 50%.

6. Reduce bandwidth - compacting the amount of code used will reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to host your web pages. Therefore you won’t have to pay higher fees when adding more web documents to your site.

7. Accessibility - increasing accessibility with CSS means being able to serve web content to a larger audience, increasing web site usability, even for non-disabled people. Content can easily be formatted for projection as well as screen display. Tableless layouts display well on hand-helds.

8. Improve the printing of web pages - most printers will only allow you to print a portion of the web page. With CSS your whole document can be printed.

When you use CSS it becomes quick and easy to apply new styles that can not only effect all styles on your web page but even your whole site.

In the next article I will explain how to layout a web page using CSS.

About the Author
Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com. Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original articles. mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com. You can read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/article

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