Website Design Tag

10 May

Posted at 18:50h in Business, Websites
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Accessibility is a concept that is intertwined with the concept of usability. It refers to creating the website content available to all people. The Internet has transformed the lives of people during the past decade. People have been able to do things that they were not able to do before, this includes the people with disabilities. People who are impaired do not have as much opportunities compared to people who are well and able. The Internet has provided them avenues for communication, information gathering, social interaction, engaging in cultural activities and it provides them with employment opportunities. However, statistics have shown that the potential of the Internet to provide these certain opportunities is still not maximised because the people with disabilities are hindered by usability issues from using it to the fullest. The benefits of improving accessibility of websites will not only benefit the people who have impairments but will affect the whole web community. Businesses, services, information campaigners, everyone will benefit. Some features include: provision of inter-operability of applications; access for the disabled; localisation and customisation. Recommendations for Improving Website Accessibility Listed below are some of the key recommendations from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which was developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C on how to improve the accessibility of the contents of a website. 1. Provide alternatives to audio-visual content Not all people will be able to use different kinds of content. These people may be disabled or may have a lower version of Internet browsers. Movies, sound clips, animations and other contents should be translated into text alternatives so as to provide information to the broadest range of viewers. 2. Developers should not rely on colour alone Many people are impaired in colour differentiation. Developers should not rely too much on the use of colours to relay information in the websites. Charts that are colour-coded should be modified and the background and foreground colours of the websites should have enough contrast to enable people with colour differentiation impairment to easily navigate the site. 3. Clarification of the use of natural language Content developers usually mark up the changes in natural language in their websites. They should be able to identify the dominant language that is used in the site so as to avoid confusion. 4. Control of content changes that are time-sensitive This issue particularly involves people who have visual or cognitive impairments and those who are not able to read texts that are moving quickly. Movement is seen as an over-all enhancer to the look of the site, but it may pose some problems to people with cognitive impairments. 5. Accessibility of user interfaces that are embedded Objects that have their own interfaces should be made accessible, and alternative solutions must be provided if this is not possible. 6. Provision of orientation and context information The provision of information on how the objects are organised is important to provide people with guidance on how to access information. There are other ways of improving a website’s over-all accessibility to make it more usable. Developers should take into consideration the different people who are going to view their websites and make them focal points in the designing process....

26 Jan

Posted at 13:11h in Business, Marketing, Websites
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Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important factor because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. By knowing your target market, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more. What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on DIY, but a professional builder might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with technical information about a particular subject of interest but a well-educated individual will find that website interesting. Take your audience's emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that. When you consider the design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your target market. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site's general theme. Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your target market is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your target market, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience....

23 Oct

Posted at 13:25h in Business, Websites
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Should You Redesign Your Website? If you run a website, chances are you often wonder whether it is the right time to do a total redesign of the layout of your website. Here are some points to consider: Are you thinking of a redesign just for the sake of it? If you answered yes to that question, it is not yet the right time to do a redesign. Remember, a design serves a specific purpose. If you are not sure whether to do an overhaul of your site, keep in mind that your current design might have a specific purpose that you might not know about. You will lose that function if you do a redesign. On the other hand, if your website has had the same website design since the early ‘90s, perhaps it is high time to do a redesign. The last thing you would ever want to happen to your site is when visitors leave your site without taking a look at your content just because the design is dated. If this is your case, here are some points to ponder before doing a redesign. Redesigning your website means that it loses its current identity (for the better or worse) and your regular visitors might not recognise your new design at first glance. You risk losing them just because they thought they landed on the wrong page. Hence, it is very important that you retain a characteristic feature from your old layout. Perhaps it is the logo of your site; perhaps it is the same text style for the title for your site. To play it safe, put a poll on your site to let your visitors do the talking. If they think it is necessary for the website to have a fresh look, give it to them...

08 Sep

Posted at 06:16h in Business, Websites
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You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimise their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need. Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimisation. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in. But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimisation. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday. So just what is search engine optimisation and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimisation to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating. With search engine optimisation you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let us just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all. Search engine optimisation is utilising tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business. Search engine optimisation requires a lot of work to be fully realised. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimisation. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme. You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimisation. You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites. Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimisation are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimise your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding. If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimisation. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality. Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimisation. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company....

26 Feb

Posted at 19:08h in Business, Websites
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The Internet is home to various artists, web artists, and designers both professional and amateur. It can afford to provide individuals with opportunities to freely explore their artistic capabilities and publish content to a borderless audience. However, unluckily, alongside this freedom of expression afforded to everyone is the capacity to offend sensibilities. Some website provide great utility and aesthetic pleasures, others are bound to get annoying. There are ways and means in order to avoid getting annoying, and its best to start by knowing when web design of a website does get annoying. Using colours that just do not work Colours in good and sensible does are a good means in order to attract attention and communicate ideas and emotions to an audience. They can help add interest to a dull site full of text, and even introduce and maintain a certain mood such as websites using black as a background. However, there is a fine line between too much and just about right. What gets annoying when it comes to colours is when readability is compromised, and combinations are too loud for comfort. When readability is compromised, it can pose great discomfort to the site’s visitors when they try to decipher the text that they want to have access to. Using too many colours and colours that do not complement each other tend to make the website look goofy and awkward, and can make the website lose whatever credibility it can possibly gain. Too many clicks to get to the destination At the end of the day, people who visit websites do so in order to access information and content in a website. Some websites tend to re-route visitors through too many clicks before they get to the content they want to get to assuming that the content is indeed somewhere in the multiple pages they are made to access. Obviously, that gets annoying. Rule of thumb says that a maximum of three clicks, but preferably less, should be enough in order for someone surfing a site to get to the information they want to get to. Excessive graphics that take too long to load Graphics and pictures, when relevant and are the primary content meant for the website, are a welcome part of a website. However, when they just serve the purpose of aesthetic enhancement, graphics and pictures that take too long to load and inevitably, slow the process of accessing primary content become a major reason for discontent and displeasure among visitors. It is also helpful to note that not all visitors of the website are equipped with optimal download or Internet surfing speeds; excessive graphics that are too large and thus, take too long to load are not only unwelcome but also a great inconvenience to a great number of people. Navigation that is over-the-top and difficult to follow Overcomplicating the navigation of the website can greatly hamper the efficacy of the website to communicate its content, and can hurt the accessibility of many pages to its visitors. At any point during their visit to a site, it is important to assure that the visitors have some way in order to trace back their steps and return to content they previously accessed, as well as carry on with accessing other content. For simplicity’s sake, many websites solve this problem by having a constant button present on all pages for visitors to return to their main menu page, or their cover page. Fonts that simply do not work Depending on the browser and fonts installed by the users on their computers, extremely decorative and highly uncommon fonts may not be displayed the way the web designer intended them to appear and may oftentimes even compromise the readability of the text per se. In order to avoid annoying web design, many web designers opt to stay within the bounds of major font families (Helvetica, verdana, and the like). That way, they are assured that most (if not all) of their visitors will be viewing the site as designed, and thus have greater control of the way the page will be displayed in the end. There is never a perfect template for design as it is open to the subjectivity and artistic limitations of designers. However, understanding the behaviour of site visitors can only help make shape design innovation and utility move towards greater heights....

26 Feb

Posted at 18:28h in Business, Websites
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Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you are designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website. Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site. You should also go to a greater length and optimise every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. Use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance. If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size. On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the colour information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely....

26 Feb

Posted at 18:03h in Business, Websites
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A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage "the money is in the list" cannot be true enough - if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects. You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. Let us take a look at a very good example - apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via - guess where - iTunes! In reality, you do not need to offer such a "heavyweight" download such as a full feature software like iTunes. You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it. However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website will not be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you. First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you'll get some of them converted into your prospects! Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the hard disk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie....

26 Feb

Posted at 13:38h in Business
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Why A Good Website Design Is Important Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically as if they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your website presence. This is where a good website design comes in. Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter. Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute quick fix, you are conveying to your audience that you are not professional and you do not care for quality. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organised, focused and you really mean business. Further, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. ...

26 Feb

Posted at 13:32h in Business
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Increase Sales Through Your Website Anyone who has been marketing online knows that the lifeblood of a business is the traffic of a website. More visitors equal more sales. However, here are some ways that you can tweak your sites with to improve sales without the need to get more visitors. The first method is to weave in your personal touch in your sales message. Nobody wants to be sold to by a total stranger, but many people will buy what their close friends recommend to them. If you can convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their best interest at heart, they will be convinced to buy your products. Remember to speak to an individual in your newsletter, not to your whole audience. The second method is to publish testimonials and comments from your customers. A good idea would be to publish both good and bad comments; that way prospects will be really convinced that these testimonials are real. When prospects see testimonials on your website, they will have the confidence to buy from you because human beings follow the herd mentality; when others have bought and proven it authentic, they will jump on the bandwagon and buy too. Use visual representations for the problems and solutions that your product offers. Not everyone will read your text copy from the head to the tail, but most people will pay attention to images on your website. Offer quality bonuses to accompany the product. When you offer bonuses that complement your product, your prospects will feel it's a very good deal and it would be stupid to miss it. Be sure to state the monetary value of your bonuses so that people will be even more compelled to grab your good bargain. Lastly, ask for the sale! Many people entice their prospects with the benefits of their product, sell to them with stories of how it has solved many problems, even offered killer bonuses but forget to ask for the sale. Give a clear instruction on how to buy your product (e.g. "click the button to buy now!"). ...

26 Dec

Posted at 18:36h in Business, Design, Marketing, Websites
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Convincing your prospects to purchase from you is a hard job, but have you ever thought that you are making the process twice as difficult for both parties if your prospects are convinced but do not know how to buy from you? No matter how good you are at convincing your prospective customers, they will not buy if they find the process cumbersome. First, to make it easy to buy, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimise the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site. Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects' desired payment method. After all, it wouldn't make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they will not be able to pay you when they want to. On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing? Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects' confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet. As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximise your profits....