Archive for May, 2010
How To Organize Your Website
How To Organize Your Website
Organize your website to help both you and your visitor
Your website needs to be organized so you can add content easily and your visitors can spend time absorbing your content rather than trying to figure out the navigation system. Planning and organizing your site in the beginning phases makes the update process easier down the road because you wont have to do as much work when it comes to page linking. The file structure needs to make sense to you since you are most likely going to be the person dealing with adding subtracting and updating pages.
Steps to organizing your website
There are 3 key areas to address when organizing your website. Your first area of concern is how to set up your file structure. This pertains to the main folder directories and sub directories. It is commonly known throughout the web that a page should be no more than 3 clicks from each other. The second area is your content. Organize your content in a way that lends itself to be user friendly. The last area of organization is the overall layout of the site. Make sure the layout compliments the content. Another point to make is consistency. The layout and theme should be the same throughout the site. Do not have your index page set up in one format and then change the sub pages format so the visitor needs to waste time figuring out where the navigation bar is again or scrolling all over to get to the content they are looking for.
Website structure
There are a few ways to set up a site structure. Making a sketch of how you are going to do it is advisable. The first place you want to start with is the parent page. This “home” page has a link to every page on the next level down. This second level will contain the categories for your site. A link to these second tier pages will be on every page of your site. Each page that is accessed from a page above it is considered a child. The other way to word this is defining directories and sub directories. Your main directory could contain sub directories named contact main about us and links. Inside the main directory you could have sub directories of products. Your second tier topics should be titled to the cover content specific to that section. These sub sections are where you will put your content and should be easily navigated to.
Website content
The content of your site is there to convey a message. It should tell a visitor what the site is about who the information is for and what is offered. This content can be delivered in many ways. Displaying text and images are your primary methods along with video and audio to help support your delivery. The content you include should provide a visitor with valuable information and sustenance. Your primary goal should be to create a positive impression in as little time as possible. This method will help retain a person that has come to your site instead of clicking to somewhere else. Be sure your information is relevant concise and clear. It should contain your keywords and help direct a visitor to continue browsing your site. When creating your content get right to the point in sending your message. Don’t beat around the bush with flashy welcome screens or material that is unrelated to what your site is about. Potential visitors want their information quickly or they will go to the next site on the search engine list. Direct your visitor’s eyes to specific areas with the placement and layout of your content. Using bold section descriptions and breaking content into chunks will help get your visitor to what they are looking for in a timely fashion.
Website layout
People are going to be judging both your content and layout when they visit your site. An appealing layout will help keep your visitor and can aid in getting them to come back. Your original layout will continually change as you adapt to the preferences of the people who visit your site. When laying out the site try to keep it as simple as possible. Creating a user friendly navigation system to smoothly move throughout your site should also be considered when developing your layout. During the layout process you are going to determine how to present your content in an optimized and balanced format. It is suggested that you use a pencil and some paper when creating your layout concepts. Make more than one and look for strong and weak points in each sketch. After noting the best qualities from each incorporate them into a finalized layout. Be sure to take into consideration that this layout will be used throughout your entire site.
About the writer: Monique Frecker is Creative Director of Justice Young a Cincinnati marketing and public relations firm.
How To Make Your Website Usable?
How To Make Your Website Usable?
Usability is one of the key terms that are widely used in web design. In many respects it is the most important and vital aspect of any web design.
Why Usability is so important?
Its a very normal tendency that if an online web surfer visit your website but find it difficult to use then he or she may leave and never become customers. In fact its very important to understand that web design must give its visitors freedom and choice to surf it properly. A good web design is not just about a website looking cool and flamboyant. It has more got to do with its role i.e. the website must be able communicate its goal with as little effort as possible on the part of the user. Moreover if the site has wellbuilt usability more online surfers will notice because they won’t be wasting time trying to figure out how the site works.
Looking on the other side a bad or poor design may cause visitors to do any of the following things again and again like
Clicking on back button and keep waiting for a long download.
Wasting time in making a guess as to where and what the navigation is all about.
As a result to make your website more visible you must involve potential customers in its design.
Factors or Steps to Increase your Website Usability
Nowadays every big and small business owners or web development firms and web designers are focusing on different ways to make their site more usable. Usability has turned out to be the important factor in web designing because as long as it remains missing the site can confuse the online web surfer. Besides this it may further detract from whatever the main message product or service you want to convey through website.
Here are few important points that can help you go a long way to provide or develop a more userfriendly site:
Alignment and Spacing Alignment and spacing in web site design are important factors. It helps in creating a proper order organizing the page and groups parts of the website for easy navigation. A proper alignment and spacing of text and image keep visitor stick to your website and read content. You can easily use the guidelines in Photoshop to ensure that all your elements are aligned which can be done by dragging rulers from your rulers tab.
Including a Tagline In terms of web designing a tagline is a statement that represents a companys philosophy and mission. It is the most obvious element on a websites front page and must clearly depict the website purpose in one phrase. As per recent statistics it has been found that a website has just few seconds to confine an online visitors attention. A website without any clear tagline might find it hard to keep its visitors attention long enough to further browse the inner pages.
Title Every Webpage Giving title to every web page can be very beneficial. This small procedure actually ensures your visitors don’t get lost on your website. In simple words if you title every web page you directly help your visitor know what page they are currently viewing.
Avoid Using Extensive Graphics Its very important to understand that too much use of design elements and graphics are always bad for a website. They actually mislead visitors attention. Thus make sure you only design to improve the web page not just to decorate it. From a web usability and navigation point of view simple and less is always more powerful.
Graphical Navigation Try to include a text version of graphical navigation items. When graphics are links try to make it easier by including meaningful alt text for graphical links. If you use an icon next to a text link make sure both items are clickable. Be very cautious about using image maps as navigation because visitors often lose track of where they are and where they have been.
Avoid Designing Graphic Elements like a Button Most of the time visitor see text that is underlined and looks like links but are not clickable. By not having any action that the online web surfer expects actually hampers their interest in website. As a result they would think that the site is broken and eventually leave.
Choose Background Image Color and Text Color very carefully You must require taking this point into serious consideration very seriously. You must understand that if your color scheme ofweb design is unappetizing visitors may leave even if your subject matter content is very good. For optimum usability make sure you always check the color balance sharpness and contrast of each image. Besides this also make certain that web page text color balances with the rest of the page and other images.
Stick to Standards of Hyperlinks Try to make the visited link a duller less saturated color than unvisited so that the links the visitor hasn’t visited or clicked yet stand out more. Make it easy for your visitors and it won’t mess up your web design.
Always Include a Sitemap Including a site map webpage and registering a sitemap XML document in search engines can further increase your web design usability. Though the concept of site maps are a relatively new website feature but it widely improves web page navigation. It is a structural representation of a websites pages and architecture. It can be a document in any form or a web page that lists the pages on a web site typically organized in hierarchical fashion.
Do Not Overuse JavaScript With the advent of JavaScript and the AJAX technique web designers and developers can develop responsive and more transparent websites. However the major drawback of this tool is browser inconsistency. Every online user visiting your website might not have an uptodate web browser. They also might not have JavaScript enabled by default. So by using JavaScript on a website extensively we block out these users.
Today website usability is all about reducing and reorganizing the complexity into small and manageable web navigation process where web designing plays an important part. Ensuring readability and taking care of the above checking points will actually help you move in the right direction of designing userfriendly websites. The bottomline is Making your website more usable is the simply best credit that you can achieve from your visitors.
About the writer: IndiaDesigners.net a leading Web Design Internet marketing company has made remarkable position in the Internet Web Industry. The well skilled experienced professional staff of India Designers provides creative web design web development search engine optimization SEO copywriting pay per click management social media marketing SMO and IT sourcing services.
How Do You Know More About Website And Domain Names?
How Do You Know More About Website And Domain Names?
When you browse for websites on the internet your browser communicates with web servers via their IP address. Methods have been devised to assign human readable names or hostnames to ip addresses. On a local windows or linux computer this translation can be accommodated in what’s called a host file. On most windows systems the hosts file is located in c:windowssystem32driversetc directory; on Linux or Unix servers the hosts file is commonly stored in the /etc directory.
If I asked “Have you ever been to Disney World?” more than likely you would associate Disney World with the theme park in Florida and you would know would quickly be able to respond either yes or no. But if I said “Have you ever been to 3111 World Drive in Orlando Florida?” It would not be as easy for you to identify that I was referring to Disney World. You might be able to figure it out but which is easier to use? In the internet world 3111 World Drive would be the same as an IP address and Disney World would be the hostname. If you were to equate this to how the internet works web hosting would be the equivalent of the real estate that Disney world sits on. When you purchase a website domain name you must have internet real estate website hosting for your website to reside on and conversely if you had website hosting without a domain name then no one would know where to go to access your website.
If you wanted your computer to look for www.npsis.com using the ip address 192.168.20.34 you would make an entry in your hostfile. The hostfile contains entries that look like this: 192.168.20.34 www.npsis.com. When you access the website www.npsis.com using your web browser your computer would look for the ip address 192.168.65.14.
For hostname to IP translation on the internet the DNS Domain Name System is commonly used. When you type www.npsis.com or the name of your website design store or the website name of your company your computer contacts a DNS server to find out what IP address goes with the domain name or URL that you entered. Whether you are setting up website on a webserver or an email server you need a domain name.
It is important when selecting your website address that you pick a name that is easy to remember. The domain name should also reflect what your business does. For example the website address tomsgarage.com gives you a pretty good idea of what tom does for a living and its very easy to remember. You can also reserve multiple related domain names and point them at your website address as well. Have your website design store help you to incorporate several relevant key words into your website design and point all of your relevant website addressees at your website i.e. wefixtires.com bestlocaltireshop.com tomstires.com.
Website domain names are reserved on a first come first serve basis. So if you have an idea for the perfect website address you should reserve it before you’re your good idea is taken by somebody else. There are many companies and individuals who potentially popular domain names and resell them for a profit.
If you are dealing with a website design store or a web designer you will want to absolutely make sure that you own the domain name and not them. When you purchase a domain name yourself you better protect yourself from predators looking to take advantage of you.
About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;www.automaticcontent.com
