Monthly Archives: August 2011
Business Website Design: Tips to Design a Business Website
Almost all businesses nowadays prefer to have a website of their own as these provide a lot of visibility and accessibility to the business. However, the design of the website plays a crucial role in determining how effectively it meets the purpose. If you go wrong in choosing a design which is incapable of catching the visitors then the purpose of creating the website will be defeated. A Business Website is meant to attract prospective buyers and facilitate them in making purchases. The design of the website as well its presentation and content should effectively coincide with the goal of the company.
Another important thing to keep in mind is focusing on the needs of the user while creating the website. By following the below mentioned tips, one can create a design for a Business Website which is most adept and brings a lot of business by generating leads.
- It must be remembered that the website is created for the users and should facilitate them in each and every way.
- One should always go for a professional web design. Since the website is a Business Website, its look should be extremely professional and not like a website meant for recreational purposes.
- The design of a Business Website should have the most legible font and tiny fonts or fancy fonts should not be used just to enhance the look of the webpage as they may give a bad impression.
- Try not to cloak the links and also make sure that the visitor is able to recognize easily which link is clickable and which is not. For this, the links can have a contrasting color.
- Always keep the scope of growth in your web design so that when your business expands the website can also be customized to accommodate all the advancements you have made and the changes thus required in the design.
- Make use of interface elements like site maps, contact details, phone numbers, enquiry forms etc. so that the users can contact you easily and also know the answers to all their queries easily.
- Present your products and other offerings very clearly on the website, with their images so that the user knows immediately about all your products within a few seconds of visiting the website. Also, try to incorporate details about the owners and facts about the company to increase the credibility of your business through the website to win the trust of the customers.
The above mentioned points can greatly help in effectively designing a Business Website. Keeping it simple and professional will do the trick and take your business to new heights.
Mobile Web Design Tips for Web Designers
The role of Web Designers has expanded from, just designing websites to designing websites that are compatible with mobile phones and other devices. Mobile Web Design has gained prominence with the increasing popularity of mobile phones that have emerged as convergence devices for all technologies. It has therefore become crucial that while designing for the web, the Designers should ensure the compatibility of the design with the mobile phone. Discussed here are some Mobile Web Design tips for Web Designers:
- Keep it simple- The layout of a mobile website should be kept as simple as possible because the display size and space available on a mobile screen is quite less. Moreover, the mobile users want everything that they are searching for to be readily available so everything presented on a screen should be accessible, usable, and readable. The important content should be more prominently placed so that it is easily visible on the mobile screen.
- Do not overuse graphics- Keeping in mind the limited rendering capabilities of cell phones, the designers should not use too many graphics in the web design; otherwise the page becomes heavy and does not open easily on the mobile.
- Break up the web page- Breaking up the web pages into smaller portions is a good option because lengthy sections of text can be hard to read so placing them on several pages limits the scrolling to one direction. A mobile user prefers smaller sections of text due to easy readability as well as navigation.
- Screen Resolution- It is good to keep the screen resolution to a level that can easily fit in the mobile screen. Aim to strike a balance between sufficient screen width and audience size. Ideal screen resolution is the one that can display text and other effects appropriately across a range of screen sizes without having to recreate pages for different platforms.
Such tricks and techniques are adopted by websites of leading companies like Mc Donald’s, Nike, Sony etc. and have added hugely to their popularity. Web Designers can attract large traffic by making their websites mobile friendly. By incorporating features like option to view the full website, effective navigation placement and balanced links they can make the web design more effective.
Top 5 Ecommerce Website Design Tips
Businesses have managed to expand their domains from the conventional physical boundaries to the invisible virtual world of the web. Trade is now carried on through websites and e-commerce has gained a lot of significance. For a successful e-commerce business, a good Web Design is indispensable. Ecommerce websites are designed to increase the sales and attract the prospective buyers towards your products or services. Nowadays Ecommerce websites form a part of the marketing and other business strategies undertaken to promote the business. Mentioned below are ‘Top 5 Ecommerce Website Design Tips’ for an impactful web design:
- Navigation- The first and foremost thing that makes any website a successful one is its easy navigability. If your website is user friendly, it is likely to attract more visitors. Visitors prefer websites where navigation from one page to another is quick and easy. Complexity in showing the product images, description and price may make you loose a valuable customer and should therefore be avoided.
- Optimum Customer Support- While designing an ecommerce website, the designer must keep in mind that the website is being designed for attracting prospective buyers and therefore it should have optimum provision for their queries and questions. Customer Support may also be provided by means of online chat or e-mails etc.
- Short procedure to buy products- The web designer must ensure that it takes the minimum number of clicks for a buyer to reach to the ‘Buy’ option. The procedure of making a purchase should not be complicated and should not involve long steps and formalities because it may lead to the buyer loosing interest.
- Comprehensive description of your offerings- The website design should display each and every product clearly along with its price. The website should be capable of giving a comprehensive view about your business as well as your offerings and the presentation should be simple yet attractive.
- Incorporate an Advanced Search Module in your design- Advanced Search Modules greatly help the customers as they can easily find any product or service by using the search option. This saves time as well as eases the customers thus, attracting more visitors.
The above said steps will surely help you in understanding the essential requirements of Ecommerce web designing effectively to create a good design. Always remember the key is not a complex, heavy design but a user friendly and legible one.
Useful Productivity Tips for Designers
As web designers and developers, productivity and time management are really important elements of our work. Listed below are some productivity techniques that really work. Hopefully, you will find these tips to be useful and they will help you to save time and get more done.
- Planning: Given everyone’s busy schedules, it is certainly the best way to save time and be more productive. You should spend some time on planning your priorities and then decide which work can wait. A lot of wasted hours designing and experimenting just on composition and visual details are saved this way.
- Use To-Do lists: To-Do lists help to stay organized and focused on important things. It is also a great tool to remember things that you usually forget to do. Best examples are post-it notes.
- Get rid of distractions: Sometimes it is really hard to start your work because of a lot of distractions that take your time and attention. If you really want to be productive and focused on work turn off applications, social networking sites, television and practically anything that may distract you.
- Work with discipline: Work in discipline with realistic goals and more importantly, don’t deviate from them.
- Do not work too much: Working less time you’ll be more productive and the quality of your work will be highest class.
- Work in short periods: Just create short work periods like 25 min, 30 min or 40 min and work. Just focus on work and have a break in between.
- Always focus on a single task: If you are doing something, finish it and then switch to something else.
- Think about your goals: Before starting the work, think about goals that excite you and motivate you the most. When you do this you are the most productive.
- Listen to music: If you are the person who likes to listen to music while working, this one’s for you. Music should help you to be more productive or creative. But, it is important that you should choose a genre that doesn’t distract you and doesn’t take your attention from the work.
- Stay organized: Whether you are a designer, developer or an illustrator, you use some or the other resources. Textures, fonts, icons, vectors, photos and all that stuff are somewhere in your hard disk. Every time you’re trying to find where they are you spend a lot of time. Organize all this stuff by creating a few folders.
Most of the listed tips can be applied for any creative person. The question is how effectively these tips can be implemented for high productivity.
Tips on Being a Web Design Graduate
Website designing is such a vast field, requiring continuous studying and honing of knowledge and skills, which is very necessary. Likewise, there are so many excellent web designers in the industry nowadays. When you browse websites, you would be amazed how creative and skilled website designers are. Whether you are an expert or a newbie web designer, it can always help to get useful tips from other fellow web designers. Following are some awesome tips in web designing.
- Never Stop Learning: After you graduate from an institute of web design, you may feel on top of the world; someone who knows everything. But, you may get the shock of your life when you see the work of designers doing really superior work. That is why, always update yourself with the new tricks and latest designs and never think that you know everything
- Ask Around For Tips And Advice: Always listen to the tips and advice of fellow designers. The most important and most common tip given by web designers to their fellow designers is to provide an easy navigation system for a website
- Neat Layout: It is important to have a neat layout. It is the most hated situation when visitors click on a link only to find a cluttered site. White spaces can provide that spacious feel to a website. All the information should not be placed on one page. If the situation warrants it, you can always link the information to another page
- Relevant Font Style: Finally, it is imperative that web designers use a font style found on all computers. A creative font is useless if the site visitor cannot see it or worse still, if it messes up the site
Modern, stylish and innovative web design solutions are the order of the day. Speaking constantly to other designers can teach you a lot and can make you aware of the changing trends in web designing.
Mobile Website Design Best Practices
Nowadays, every business needs to have a website in order to promote itself. It is not possible for any business’s target audience to go visiting its corporate office every now and then. That is why, utilizing the power of the Internet, websites are created which may enable the target audience to quickly glance at the website created and know all about the company. Just like every business absolutely needs to have a website, now every business should also have a mobile version of that website.
According to the Global Mobile Data Forecast update, there was a high mobile data usage in 2010. By the year 2015, there will be nearly one mobile device per person. With the increase in the number of mobile devices, mobile website viewing is growing at an accelerated rate.
Listed below are some of the best tips for mobile website designing.
- Mobile sites should be kept simple: Your mobile site should be much simpler than your standard website. Eliminate many of your slow loading graphics and keep less text on the site. Think of ways to greatly simplify your design, your content and the number of pages. Focus your content on just what your mobile web visitor needs to know.
- Use Valid Markup: A bad code may not work for mobile browsers as desktop browsers. To ensure a high level of mobile-friendliness, validate your mobile web page using the W3C Mobile OK Checker.
- Target Smart phones: Design your mobile site for the Smart Phone. This is the high growth segment in mobile. Even though Smart phones represent only a minor percentage of the cell phones in use today, they represent a major portion of total global handset traffic. Smart phones are much more than just cell phones; they provide instant access to the web.
- Increase display sizes: Today 400×240 screen resolutions are common and are typical for a smart phone web design. For instance, the new Apple iPhone 4 has a display of 960×640 and the Droid X has an 854×480 display.
These are some of the tips whose effective implementation can attract a lot of visitors to your website and can draw a lot of admiration too.
Organize Blog Categories: 5 Practical Tips
Organizing blog categories is not at all an uphill task wh
ich many people make it out to be. Rather, it is a very simple and a straight forward job but too many people seem to get confused when structuring their categories. Below are 5 practical tips which may come in handy while organizing and making your categories more efficient:
- Descriptive category names: Even first time visitors should get familiarized across your blog, through your categories. The categories tell a lot about your blog, and when readers can not figure what is going on around them it is very likely that they will just skip the blog altogether.
- Limited categories: Every blog should have a defined structure and a set of categories to support the topics of the posts. Once you have that basic structure in place just fill the posts inside the existing categories, creating a new category only when it is really necessary.
- Make sure they fit in: Some blogs will work well with few categories, others will need 10 or even 20, just make sure that all the categories fit in one screen. It is very annoying to have to scroll down to see the complete list.
- Try to put posts inside one category: Posts should be placed in one category as placing in multiple categories may create a possibility for the reader reading the same posts over and over again. Exceptions can be made when a certain post really touches more than one category, but those situations are really rare.
- Display the number of posts inside each category: If your blog platform allows you to display the total number of posts inside each category, do it. This feature will make sure that the reader knows what to expect when he clicks a certain category, and it also gives a general orientation about the most discussed topics on your blog.
Thus, by following these five simple, yet effective tricks you can attract a large number of readers to your blogs and become a successful blogger.
Top 15 Usability Factors For Your Website
Usability of the website is the major factor that determines how successful your website is. While designing 
a website one must keep in mind that the website should be user friendly. If the website is designed keeping in mind the needs of the visitors then it is more likely to fetch more visitors. The top 15 usability factors that can assist in improving your website are:
- Simplicity-The more simple the website, the more user friendly it is. Complex websites may create ambiguities and hence drive the user away from the website.
- Write effectively- While writing the content of the website, keep in mind that you are writing for a web viewer and not a newspaper reader. The writing should not be very bulky and should be complemented with attractive images.
- Know your user’s thought process- Web viewers generally do not spend much time on a particular page. They quickly look at each new page, scan some of the text, click on the main heading link, see the pictures, get valuable information and then close the window. So plan your design accordingly.
- Do not make the user think- Putting in a lot of complex stuff in your website might force the user to think. The website architecture should be designed keeping in mind the short attention span of the web users and thus ensuring that the user does not feel the need to navigate from the page to page.
- Easy navigability- Ease in moving from one page to another greatly facilitates the users and makes them like the website.
- Focus user attention- Your website should contain elements that are capable of attracting the attention of the users and making them stay on the suite for the desired time period.
- Don’t try to resize user’s browser window- As it may give the impression of a spam site.
- Do not keep the size of hyperlinks too small or big- Hyperlinks are clickable areas so make them neither too small nor too big as it looks awkward or not clear to the site visitor.
- Avoid duplicate page titles- Distinct page titles help not only the visitors but also the website to get a good ranking on the search engine so avoid using duplicate page titles as they might be confusing.
- Always have a Search tab- A search tab on the web page helps in easily finding the required information on the page and greatly facilitates the user.
- Functionalities that require registration by users should be avoided- This is because they prove to be vey discouraging.
- Pagination used for wrong purposes- Sometimes people use pagination just for getting more web pages which may prove to be an obstacle in promoting the site on search engines.
- Content that is difficult to scan- It should be avoided and the copy should be made more attractive where the user can get the required information just by a quick glance.
- Do not put long registration forms on your website- As these are very time consuming and require the user to remember an ID and password after filling of the form. Try to make the forms shorter.
- Always remember that old Permalinks (a link which is not supposed to be changed once created) become broken links so these need to be regularly updated.
Thus, by following the above mentioned steps, you can create a user friendly and successful website in no time to attract viewers from every corner of the globe.
Web Designing Tips for All Resolutions
With the time charting further and technology becoming highly advanced, more and more designer and high resolution screens are being used. Most of the web sites are created only for one type of resolution but different people use different resolutions. The need of the hour demands that a website that is under construction should be such that it should work in all resolutions. Visitors having higher resolutions have to scroll less and thus can see more content within one page. We provide you with steps to create a web page or site that will fit in all screens.
After the successful testing of your website in all resolutions, it is assured that you have developed an ideal website. This will make your site more accessible and thus in turn lead your business towards new heights.
WeblinkIndia.Net – Blogs Release July 2011
The Ideal Business Logo Design Service
Creating a distinct identity of the company through branding is necessary for assured business development. But, Corporate branding is effectively possible only if an organization has a unique symbol to represent itself. This identification mark, popularly known as the logo of the company, becomes its virtual face.[...]
Web Applications: The Next Generation
The digital era has brought with itself, many revolutions in the field of internet and technologies. Take for example a ‘Web Application’, an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an Intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is hosted in a browser-controlled environment.[...]
How Web Design Trends Change With the Advent Of iPad?
The iPad is a revolutionary device that has changed the way of computing. It has gained tremendous popularity all over the world due to its easy portability and high tech features. An iPad refers to a line of tablet computers designed to be used as platforms for audio-visual media including periodicals, movies, books, games, music, and web content.[...]
5 Strategic Content Tips to Help Your Website Grow
Content of the website is probably the most crucial element which has a considerable impact on its success or failure. Most people make the mistake of giving more importance to the design of the website rather than its content and fail to understand that a great design cannot make up for a substandard content.[...]
Top 6 Things Every Small Business Website Must Have in 2011
Online promotion of the business is the smart thing to do for every small business because it offers great visibility and tremendous opportunities to promote the business. Websites are the easiest and most cost effective way of staying in touch with a large number of customers.[...]
What should you look out in your Website Design?
With the internet gaining prominence each passing day, more and more businesses go for creating their own website. The prime objective behind designing the website is expansion of business and getting more customers. To fulfill this purpose, it is essential that you go for the correct website design as the design largely affects the success or failure of a website.[...]
5 Different Ways to Approach a Redesign
Redesigning a website takes a lot of thinking and creativity. This may sometimes involve more efforts than designing a new website altogether. Almost every web designer is asked to redesign a website at some point of time in his career. Redesigning can be referred to as providing a new shape and structure to an existing website.[...]
Web Design Companies vs. Freelance Designers
Most of the businesses today need business promotion through websites. Websites nowadays have become crucial for all types of business regardless of their size. These provide the most effective way of connecting with your users and make yourself accessible 24×7. Websites have been found to fetch a large number of customers for a business.[...]
