Determine the Chief Purpose of Your Website

When you begin a website it’s obvious that you have some sort of purpose in mind. By clearly defining the main purpose of your website early on you can avoid creating a web page design with conflicting purposes.

Look around and see what other websites have as their common purpose and how they execute accordingly.

If you don’t already have one now is the time to build a brand.

Compare With Your Competitors

Take a good look at what your competition is doing and make sure your web page design sets you apart. Think about ways you can differentiate yourself, to get another spin on the same concept may be challenging but if you try to think out of the box, creatively and uniquely you might just get a break.

Look at other industries not in your market and identify what kind of style you like. After going through a few web page design concepts you will soon enough know if you want classic lines, hip and urban or fresh and clean.

Look through magazines and scan the ads for anything relevant that catches your eye. Then try seeing how you can make it work in your webpage design.

Once you’ve identified your style and gotten some inspiration you can go a bit deeper. Look for 6 key phrases you think is most important at this stage. Think about using word describing the style you prefer as well as what you are offering. Google each in separate tabs and selects the first ten sites that catch your eye.

Browse and Learn

Once you’ve clicked one of your sites pay attention to your first reaction to the site. Take time to get to know the site and look around. Sometimes the best way to develop ideas about web page design is to simply pay attention. Design is practically everywhere! On product packaging, in every newspaper and magazine as well as in every TV commercial. Stripped down the bare basics stay the same, they all incorporate designs meant to attract and attain.

Copy all ideas you find interesting and document things you like. Be sure to write everything down once inspiration strikes and also pay close attention to what kind of writing/communicating style talk to you. This will help you set the tone of your web page design. Is it informal and low key, professional, modern etc.

Look at the information you gathered and concentrate your efforts on how to improve on it. Think about what you can do to make navigation easier, or to make it more compelling. Learn from their mistakes…trust me it’s cheaper, easier and much less painful than making your own mistakes. (Even though this is inevitable) .

Look around and see what other websites have as their common purpose and how they execute accordingly.

Decide Whether You Are Going To D.I.Y

After your purposes are clear you now have to decide whether or not this will be your personal project and if you are going to outsource. Each have their own set of pros and cons and should be considered not as a fixed decision but as something flexible that changes according to what stage you and your business are in. for initial website design it would be a good idea to outsource, but if you have enough confidence in you abilities, knowledge and endurance you should go ahead and do your best.

Website design is complex and requires a number of different skill sets that aren’t commonly found in any one person.

The Skills You Need For Web Designing Are:

HTML savvy ; good web design software can help but fine tuning your design requires you to  get up close and personal with the raw HTML code
Good artistic taste
Graphic design and color experience
Knowledge of website navigation design and implementationcgi and data base programming
JavaScript and flash programming
Marketing and business experience
Your Website Should Be:
Convenient to read
Quick to ‘get’
Easy to navigate
Simple to understand
Logically layer out
Well organized
Listed as high as possible in search engine result pages
Noticeable
Fast to find
Directly downloadable
Continuously consistent

How to Make Your Web Page Easy To Read

Take time when choosing your text     - this includes font, size, color as well as actual content. Never have the text size too small as this is hard to read. Be careful of going too large though as this will seem to visitors that you are demanding and shouting at them
Choose your colors very carefully    -  you don’t want your background to obscure your text or use colors that are stressful on the eyes.

A Few Extra Tips Just Because

If you don’t already have one, now is the time to build a brand.
Sell your products directly over the internet. What you want to do is conduct e-commerce and sells to not only the national but also the international market. If you’re not working with products you can offer your services online wich then can be done over the internet or initiated online.

Create an online brochure that makes thing easier for the potential customer. You want people to know who you are, what you do, where to find you and how to contact you. Including a product land price list won’t hurt.

Objectives, Goals and Purposes

Be clear and focused about your site’s objectives and purposes. Number them, ranking in importance and explain what you want your website to achieve in no more than two sentences.

Your Website Should Have Web presence

People should be able to find your site easily, whether by direct input or using a search engine. Ensure your webpage has high rankings by using some of the practices available out there like PPC, S.E.O. and many more.

Not only should your website be visible your contact information should also be clearly set out and easy to find. People like the reassurance that someone can be contacted and feel more secure in your website if you are not shrouded in mystery.

People will want to contact you in case like:

People have questions and  want answers that are not available on your website
Some element on your webpage is malfunctioning.
They are unsatisfied and want to complain about something.
Looking at above statements you probably understand how important it is that your visitors know where and how to contact you if need be.

You’re Text

It’s something that people easily tend to oversee while it actually is extremely important.
The Text Font

If you want to emphasize text use bold instead of italic face.
The Text Size

Never have the text size too small as this is hard to read.
The Text Color

Lighter text reads better in front of dark text than the other way around.

The text alignment

Try to keep your main text aligned to the left centre aligned texts are best used in headings.

Completely Consistent Content

Just as in any newspaper, brochure or formatted document for that material images and elements, typefaces, headings and footers should remain consistent throughout the site
This projects a professional image that’s pulled together.

After considering all these facts you can start to consider some of the more personal preferences you may have for your web page design. Function should always be that bit more important that what it looks like (the image of your webpage is not far behind though).

The trick is to strike a balance between creative expression and the corporate side of running a successful business.

Your Website Should Be Easy To Navigate

Your visitors should be clear as to all your hyperlinks. Graphic images should be clearly labeled and easy to read.

Select the colors, backgrounds, textures and special effects carefully; keeping in mind that it’s more important to have a clearly visible navigation button than flashy effects.

Text Links Should:

Text links should be unique and look somewhat different than the other text found in your web pages. People shouldn’t click headings thinking they are links.
Enable your visitor to find what he or she is looking for in no more than three clicks
Link colors in your text should be familiar to your visitor.
If this is not possible make sure your text links are emphasized in some way or another.

Emphasize Links By

Using bold face
Using a larger font size
Set between small vertical lines or any combination of these.

Opening New Browser Windows

Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer’s carpet. People don’t want you to pollute their screens with any more windows, particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management.

Not Supplying Enough Info or Answering Users’ Questions

Users on the web are highly goal-driven. They don’t tend to play around and they visit sites because there’s something they want to accomplish — it could be using your service or buying your product.

The ultimate failure of a website is to fail to provide the information users are looking for when they are there looking for it.

Sometimes the answer is simply not there and you lose the sale because users have to assume that your product or service doesn’t meet their needs if you don’t tell them the specifics.

Other times the specifics are buried under a thick layer of market jargon and bland slogans. The thing is nobody has the time to read pages and pages of information on something they are not looking for and in the end this info might as well have not been there to begin with.

Never leave out or forget a pricing list. It’s endlessly frustrating to see something you want and it takes intense effort just to see if you can afford it.

Knowing the price is key; it lets users differentiate among products and click through to the most relevant ones.

Using Non-Scannable Text

A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. It’s not only boring and intimidating, it also very painful to read. Always try to write for online, not printing uses. Use These Well-Documented Tricks:

Use subheads
Use bulleted lists
Use highlighted keywords
Use short paragraphs
Try the inverted pyramid
Implement a simple writing style
Use de-fluffed language devoid of jargon.
Page Titles with Low Search Engine Visibility

Search is the most important way users discover websites. Search is also one of the most important ways users find their way around individual websites. The humble page title is your main tool to attract new visitors from search listings and to help your existing users to locate the specific pages that they need.

Improving your WebPages Visibility

There are many factors to consider in implementing S.E.O as well as a few tactics and tips. If you follow the advice given you can optimize your page, making it more relevant to your target audience. I will be focusing mainly on Google and how they decide on site ranking in search results although the information is relevant for many other search engines as well

Not Changing the Colour of Visited Links Is Not Good

A good grasp of past navigation helps you understand your current location, since it’s the culmination of your journey. Knowing your past and present locations in turn makes it easier to decide where to go next. Links are a key factor in this navigation process. Users can exclude links that proved fruitless in their earlier visits. Conversely, they might revisit links they found helpful in the past.

Most important, knowing which pages they’ve already visited frees users from unintentionally revisiting the same pages over and over again.

Using PDF Files for Online Reading Is Worse

Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.
Worst of all, PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that’s hard to navigate.
PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.

Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement Is Bad

Selective attention is very powerful, and Web users have learned to stop paying attention to any ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation. (The main exception being text-only search-engine ads.)

Unfortunately, users also ignore legitimate design elements that look like prevalent forms of advertising. After all, when you ignore something, you don’t study it in detail to find out what it is.

Therefore, it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements.

Violating Design Conventions Is Disastrous

Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. Every time you release an apple over Sir Isaac Newton, it will drop on his head. That’s good.

The more users’ expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users’ expectations, the more they will feel insecure. Oops, maybe if I let go of this apple, it will turn into a tomato and jump a mile into the sky. Jacob’s Law of the Web User Experience states that “users spend most of their time on other websites.”

This means that they form their expectations for your site based on what’s commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave.

Offer What People Are Interested In – Not What You Want To Push

Good websites will be found by most search engines – don’t pay for regular submissions services unless you have a very complicated and extensive internet and website strategy.

Stay Current

Keep information up-to-date – many search engines take account of update frequency, so update your website frequently (i.e., weekly at least) even if it’s just small changes. Be creative when choosing topics but ensure they are relevant, intelligent and interesting. Keep up with the news, the times and the ever expanding World Wide Web.

Search Result Ranking

The big three search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google remains by some considerable margin the most popular search engine, accounting for a sizeable majority of all searches. Google’s listings are based on Google’s very clever ranking algorithms, basic details of which freely available at Google’s own website. If you only focus on one, under all normal circumstances this should be Google.

Other sites linking to yours will certainly improve your search engine rankings, so reciprocal links are okay, but building a site those other sites will want to link to be far more beneficial than directing all that effort instead into a reciprocal ink campaign. Reciprocal linking is much over-rated as a website optimisation tactic. Relevant high quality links matter. Having hundreds of irrelevant links on tiny unpopular websites counts for very little.

Search engines downgrade or de-list sites that cheat, so don’t cheat. If you want to know what constitutes cheating look on the web for the very many highly complicated website marketing and promotion websites. www.deadlock.com is a good one, and they also have lots of really detailed advice far beyond these basic principles when and if you’re ready for it.

Measure Your Traffic

There are lots of trackers and systems to use – www.extreme-dm.com is a good example of a system that is either free (their ‘public’ version) or paid-for (multiple pages ‘private’ version). Aside from these separate trackers most website hosting solutions and providers now include traffic statistics packages. Google Analytics now offers an extremely sophisticated free website tracking and analysis tool.

Read website optimisation blogs and newsletters, and learn about the tools you can use to design and measure your website’s performance in relation to the web as a whole – especially what people are searching for, how they find websites, and what you can do to optimise your own website. For example, Google Trends is very useful tool for assessing the relative popularity of website search terms. Overture’s keyword search inventory tool is also very useful, when you can actually get on the site – it is inconsistently available, perhaps due to high demand.

If you engage a website designer or agency follow the principles for engaging with any creative agency – develop your specification first (i.e., especially all text, spelling and grammar checked, structure and process implications) and then let them get on with it – don’t waste a designer’s time finalising and correcting these fundamental content and material issues once they’ve begun the design stage.

There Is Power in Common Sense, Experience and Knowledge

Websites and the internet can seem extremely complex, and on certain levels they most certainly are, but in the end the fundamentals are simple. Don’t let ‘experts’ baffle you with science and high tech jargon. Have faith in common-sense principles and your own experience when using websites as well as using research and information gathered to your advantage. Here are some basic rules for good internet and website marketing, and particularly for creating effective business-to-business websites:

Keep Things as Simple As Possible Without Becoming Ridiculous

One thing you should always remember is that people want information quickly, clearly and accompanied with absolutely no-nonsense. You must have had your own fair share of frustrations when using unnecessarily complex websites that make you feel like an idiot and soon the tab ends up closed and forgotten.

What you should do is to make your own website easy to use and to convey your important messages. Always Aim for simplicity and ease of use in all functionality as far as possible Use a clear layout, clear fonts and clear language.

Do not distract the reader from the text by overlaying images or using fancy fonts. Use simple language, avoid complicated words, and keep enough space around the text to attract attention to it. Use simple traditional typestyles: serif fonts are quicker to read than sans serif. Use ten, eleven or twelve point-size for the main text; smaller or larger are actually more difficult to read and therefore less likely to be read. Look at newspapers and library books, which are almost always serif fonts of ten to twelve point sizes.

There Is Some Sense in Specializing

Since the internet and the website medium are ideally suited to specialised providers, suppliers, companies, etc., it a rational decision to go ahead and try to specialise. Aim to be the best in what you offer within that specialisation on the web and offer products or services only found at your website.

There is a variety of reasons for which Specialization occurs in such fields. Often specialized media or media uses are involved that require knowledge and expertise not ordinarily found in a general-line agency.

The Internet Was Ultimately Built On the Concept Of Free

Does your website give anything away for free or pay affiliates to sell your product or service In fact, websites like MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook that on paper are worth millions or billions of dollars have yet to work out how to charge for their products and services to recoup the money spent on them. Their websites are built on the notion of free web space and free tools… Many websites give away free tools, free information, and give away free postage or run free entry competitions to encourage sales.

Give as much as you can free online from your website – material that can be printed or downloaded, or information that can be read from the web page are all good worthy free things to offer.

Take Things Easy

You should always make sure your website is easy to use, simple to grasp, easy to understand and clearly conveys your important messages correctly. Always Aim for ease of use in all functionality and simplicity as far as possible examples of doing this is by Using a clear layout, clear fonts and clear language.(to name only a few.

Let Me Explain

A website should be like a shop and if you think about it in the same way you may understand the entire concept a bit better. Like a shop a website should offer ease of access to what you want, it should make browsing easy and the layout should be clear and clean. In the end it is of vital importance that a customer/client/visitor should have a warm and welcoming, memorable experience.

Banish Barriers

Make a point of Removing or just not adding obstacles like registrations and password requirements as far as possible. These are seen as barriers to visitors and they often would then look you over for another, more accusable site. Think about it shops don’t have barriers and registration requirements do them? You walk in, you pay, you buy, and you leave. Shouldn’t your webpage design make it this easy for prospective clientele?

Less Is More

While Fancy graphics and visual effects may please designers it might not sit that all too good with your customers. While your website should have a feel of professionalism and should of course be pleasant to view and visit it shouldn’t be overstuffed with froufrou unnecessary. It’s a fact that a too fancy and overly complicated web page design puts people off and this is definitely not what you want.

Also while Lots of text is good it shouldn’t be a load of nonsense. Don’t overstuff with key words, non-sencsecally repeating important phrase without offering any real information just to try and improve your search result rankings. This is not only tacky it’s just plain bad internet behaviour.

Rather go the organic route and try Optimize your content as much as possible. If you write good, liable content that specifically talks about the relevant product or service you provide you are sure to have a successful website and therefore a successful general webpage design. You should have lots of pages with the message you wish to convey as well as loads of information about what you are offering.

Bad Search Result Ranking

Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines not only hurt everybody on line but can create undeniable problem for elderly users as well as making it more difficult to use for the novice web user.

A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document’s importance. Much better if your search engine calls out “best bets” at the top of the list — especially for important queries, such as the names of your products. Organic SEO is a sure way to ensure a high listing on search results pages if done correctly.
How to Achieve Organic S.E.O

1. Optimize your content. Don’t over stuff your webpage with unimportant keyword or key phrases, rather give up to date, relevant content and make sure you supply a lot of it. It is not important how many times you use a certain key expression what is important is how you use it.  Write good, liable content that specifically talks about the relevant product or service you provide. Have lots of pages with the message you wish to convey as well as loads of information about what you are offering. Be creative when choosing topics but ensure they are relevant.

2. Exchange links with other websites.  There are various link exchange programs but if your content is good enough other websites will want to link to you and to your specific pages if they think that their own visitors will benefit from your pages they will automatically link to your webpage. Avoid simply exchanging links with other webmasters because this will not simply solve your problem. It defeats the whole purpose of relevancy and search engines won’t rank you well.

3. Meta tag and other tag attributes. Remember that the titles of your website as well as its description are considered by search engines when ranking.  Ensure the correct use of the keyword used in root or sub domain name as well as domain name length and uniqueness of content across the site.

The Importance of Intelligent Keyword Research for Webpage Design

Search phrase research is not only considered the first step in webpage design it is also an extremely important one. You are going to need to discover key phrases that happen to be appropriate yet not competitive and which should get results in the audience you are concentrating on.

Your entire search should start with the website in question. This is the best and easiest way to identify the most important words and core phrases that you can use to describe your business, service and product. If you look at the big picture you will find keyword themes present in the website layout.

The process of web design is not for sissies and includes planning, post-production; research, advertising, as well as media control .this is then applied to the pages within the site by the designer to reach certain results.

The Site Itself Can Be Divided Into

Its main page, also known as the home page, which cites the main objective as well as highlights of the site’s daily updates; which also contains hyperlinks that functions to direct viewers to a designated page within the site’s domain.

Design

Originally, static ads known as banners and skyboxes dominated the tops and sides of websites, where site owners and advertisers hoped they would gain the most attention. Up until around 1996, most online ads had no motion; they were fixed images that linked to the advertiser’s website.

With advances in JavaScript and Macromedia’s Flash animation software, designers started adding movement to ads. “Averages” — small games inside online ads — were the first successful interactive online ads. Today, Web advertising frequently includes sound and animation. Ads can expand when clicked or “fly” are The concepts behind search engine ranking and methodology are not complex, and can be explained using mathematical set theory and permutations and combinations, but it is the execution of those concepts to building a website that ranks well on search engines that is time consuming and expensive.

A website should be like a shop and if you think about it in the same way you may understand the entire concept a bit better. Like a shop a website should offer ease of access to what you want, it should make browsing easy and the layout should be clear and clean. In the end it is of vital importance that a customer/client/visitor should have a warm and welcoming, memorable experience.

Less Is More

While Fancy graphics and visual effects may please designers it might not sit that all too good with your customers. While your website should have a feel of professionalism and should of course be pleasant to view and visit it shouldn’t be overstuffed with froufrou unnecessary. It’s a fact that a too fancy and overly complicated web page design puts people off and this is definitely not what you want.

Also while Lots of text is good it shouldn’t be a load of nonsense. Don’t overstuff with key words, non-sencsecally repeating important phrase without offering any real information just to try and improve your search result rankings. This is not only tacky it’s just plain bad internet behaviour.

There Is Power in Common Sense, Experience and Knowledge

Websites and the internet can seem extremely complex, and on certain levels they most certainly are, but in the end the fundamentals are simple.
There Is Some Sense in Specializing and remember, The Internet Was Ultimately built On the Concept of Free.