| |
| |
|
Web Design - 7 Key Things to Avoid
A search for "web design" on Google returns more than 325 million results. So how do we start eliminating all these so called designers? Here are a few of the most common shortcomings. Watch out for: 1. Templates Watch out for designers offering you a choice of templates. This not only means that they're doing no new design work for their fee but could also have an affect on your search engine ranking. If the search engine robots see the same layout, background images and styles over and over again they could penalise your site for being a copy of another site. Best avoided. 2. Subdomains Watch out for design services offering you your own domain where the address still includes a reference to another company. You should have a domain in this form - www.yourcompany.com. Watch out for www.yourcompany.hostingcompany.com or www.hostingcompany.com/yourcompany. These forms mean that they are putting your site in a folder of their own site and it doesn't carry as much weight. It's an easy way of them saving money and giving you a lesser sevice. 3. DIY Hosting Watch out for anyone who does their own hosting. If their server goes down it could mean that your site disappears. Servers can be left on for long periods of time but do need to be restarted occasionally. You don't want your site going down - there could be someone in the middle of using it. If they claim to offer hosting find out if they outsource it to a professional company. This is much safer. 4. High Renewal Costs Watch out for hidden costs. It's quite common for design companies to offer you a full all singing all dancing site for a great price only for you to find that it will cost you half of that again the following year. There are always ongoing costs to a website, hosting and domain name renewal. If there are no ongoing costs quoted, monthly or annual, be wary. 5. Poor Coding Watch out for poor coding. HTML, the language of web pages, is developing and changing all the time. In fact, HTML is on its way out to be replaced by an enhanced language called XHTML. Look at a page the designer has done or their own site. View the source code and look at the section between the head tags (the word "head" in between angled brackets). Any mention of "style" or a ".css" file is a good sign. Now look at the section between the body tags. If you see lots of tags in angled brackets like "font" or "td" then the page coding is showing its age. 6. Inaccessible Design Watch out for inaccessible design. This is very similar to the last point. It's important that your site can be used not only by PC users but also by the visually impaired, people using palmtops, PDAs and mobile devices. You can't afford to reduce your audience by having an inaccessible design. 7. Advertising / Self Promotion Watch out for the design company using your website as a means of marketing themselves. Whilst having a discreet link to their company site at the foot of the page is quite fair and reasonable, be wary of any additional links or advertising. They could be making money selling advertising space which you're paying for. Chris Smith works as a web designer, developer and internet marketing consultant. For further information on high quality, good value web design please visit his site - Professional Web Design
MORE RESOURCES:
Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
3 Tips For Writing Content That Will Make You Sales Content is king. Without content your website is an empty shell, a skeleton with no flesh, an empty vessel. Tips on How to Design a Great Site Have you ever walked pass a shop that, for some reason, you just felt that you had to go in? Maybe it was the décor, or the window display, or the pretty girl, or a combination of all those but something in the shop called out to you, "Come in" and you just had to obey.In the online world, won't it be nice to have a site that buyers just had to buy from, despite themselves? Surfers will be drawn to the "Add to Cart" button that squealed, "Click me!" to them. Digitalize It! : (Modification of images with tools such as Adobe CS and Corel) Then it was a choice among crayons, paints and palettes for an artist and designer to create art. It was a box of crayons that make one happy designer during his early years of formation. 404 Error - The Page Cannot be Found A "404 Error" happens when the web server you are on cannot find the page that you requested. This type of error is quite common and is seen all over the place. Should You Bother Learning HTML to Build Webpages? The most popular method to build webpages today is to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software. Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver are prime examples of WYSIWYG software. Tips for Getting More Sales From Your Website (1) Create a Direct Response Website, with the minimum number of pages possible (e.g. Why Content is King of Website Design If there's one thing that most web site developers can agree on, it's this: content is king.That's not, of course, to say that good design doesn't matter. Converting Traffic into Sales Making a successful online business can be a long and tiresome adventure. For most new online business's this can just lead to failure and a website that just isnt making sales despite a high number of visitors. Build A Successful Website For Dummies So you want to build a website here I will explain some simple but also key aspects that are commonly taken in to consideration when a website developer creates a website.1) Website Design - The website design must be neat meaning that everything looks like where it is meant to be (nothing out of place or out of proportion). The Right Trigger Words CNN.com's designers have gone out of their way to make their workdifficult. Give Your Website A Chance I often wonder how serious people are when itcomes to their websites. I thought that mosteveryone knew that the phrase "Build it and they will come" no longer applies on the internetbut I'm not sure how many people really believe it. Make Artistic Graphic Designs Are you a student of graphic design? If you have taken time in extra reviews and put "graphic design" and "drawing" into any search engines, you'll get almost the same result = descriptions of graphic design programs at many design schools. Baffled? Well, it's like this: As a student interested in graphic design, you have to take drawing and not actually a degree in fine art. How To Write An Effective FAQ Page Websites that have multiple pages usually have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. There are several good reasons why you should have one. Website Advertising: 10 Dynamic Tactics To Super-Charge Your Sales Here are 10 dynamic website advertising tactics to super-charge your sales, starting now:1. Test different web site color themes to see whichcombination will sell your product better. Website Design - Choosing Your Colors Wisely Colors convey emotions and emotions heavily influence the decision-making process. Your choice of colors for your website should mirror the message and feeling you to hope to communicate to the viewer. One-Product Sales Sites: Avoid These Top Blunders One product, one long web page: this kind of web site is sometimes called a sales letter site or mini-site, and it focuses on one and only one goal, as many sales of that oneproduct as possible. With a one-product sales site, no distractions, no subsidiary goals, such as newsletter signups, are allowed to interfere with that goal. 10 Nifty Ways to Prolong Your Visitors at Your Website Increasing the length of time a visitor is on your website will dramatically improve your conversion to sales. Use these ten points to check you are prolonging to stay of your visitors. 6 Reasons Why A Website Is Crucial To Your Business Since I'm a web designer, I have a tendency to think everyone understands that having a website is important. Every once in a while, I have to remind myself that some people just haven't heard yet!Why is having a website such a big deal? Here are 6 reasons:A website increases your credibility. 10 Reasons Why You Need A Multilingual Website The internet continues to grow and has become the default point of call for businesses and individuals searching for goods, services or information. For businesses wishing to get that competitive advantage, a multilingual website now presents one of the most high impact means of expanding a client base and securing greater sales volumes. No More Jargon! Pamper Your Audience! When your company built its website, did you think about the content (the text) of your site? Did you write it for your customers? The answer to these questions is often 'No.'The first mistake most companies make when filling their website with content is overlooking who they're writing for.
|
| home | site map |
| Webdesign-box © 2006 |