While you are carrying out your website design you should put yourself in the position of a visitor to your site and look at it from their point of view. If you are able to do this you will give yourself a good idea of the weak and good points of your website, which will enable you to improve your site in a way that will generate more traffic to it.

Web design is a highly important aspect and has many functions such as giving your website more of a chance to appear in the top spots in the search engine results and as a means of drawing more visitors into your website; however getting people to click on your URL is just the first step, after this you have to get them to stay there long enough for them to use your business. Without good website design no one will stay on your site for longer than a few seconds. You need a website that is visually appealing and functional; you might have the most beautifully designed site ever but if you have poor navigation you are losing out on thousands of customers.

The navigation of your site is so important to its usability. Someone is much more likely to use a website that is easy to navigate but not that pleasing on the eye as oppose to a site that is graphically stunning but impossible to navigate. My point here is that web design comes down to a lot more than just being nice to look at. Your design covers the structure of your site. So when you are designing the navigation of your site remember that you need to ensure that links are consistent throughout your site and that your main navigation bar is present on all of your websites pages. This makes your website user friendly and will mean people are more likely to stick around long enough on your site to buy your products or services.

One thing that you should avoid when you are designing your website is clutter. This is essential when it comes to the layout of your web design. All of the text and pictures that you are using within your website should be placed carefully and any links that you have placed on a page of your website should be highlighted so that people know exactly where to click. If you have a global market, your web design should include buttons where translations for your web pages are available.

Going back to the idea of text and graphics on your site you need to ensure that the text that you have placed on your site is the right amount to get your message across; you need to sum up aspects of your business in a few words. Once you have done this you need to place your text on the site, which should be placed in a separate colour to the background of your site. The graphics on your website should be neatly placed and not overpowering. They should draw your eye into the text that is placed on your site.

Building a website can be a demanding job for beginners, which is why if you are going to create a website for your business that you should enlist the help of a web designer who will be able to design your website with experience, at a faster pace and in a way that will broaden your horizons with the best way of approaching web design. By enlisting the help of a professional you are giving your online business the best possible chance.
Article Source: http://blogticles.com

Information about the Author: Helen is the web master of Discount Domains, who can provide you with specialist Web Design for all of your needs.

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Web Design and Web Designers

Back in the early years of internet it was more than enough just to write a few sentences on your webpage and to upload an image or two in order to receive a massive amount of web traffic. But nowadays things are completely different and, if you want to get the same amount of high traffic, you have to focus on more issues, which are all part of the so called “web design”.

As stipulated in the Google guidelines, these web design issues refer to the relevancy of your website to the visitors’ search query, to the transparency of your website regarding the nature of your business and to the navigability of your website. Taking those issues into consideration when designing your website will improve your visitors’ experience with it, thus you will build trust in your business; and you know what that means from the sales’ point of view.

Knowing those important design guidelines, you are able to design your website yourself. But if you feel you don’t have enough experience to deliver a real competitive “product” on the market you could hire a professional web designer or a company to do it for you. Either way, there are some key elements which will increase your profit when used properly.

First and foremost, it is very important to set your main goal. Whether that would be a sale, an e-mail registration or viewing a specific page on your website, your website must have a goal. After choosing the goal, make sure you entice your visitors to follow the path to that goal; use dynamic words, always refer straight to the visitor using “you” and keep the text short and to the point. Don’t expect the visitor to know what he is supposed to do; use a strong call to action, like “join now” or “learn more”, to pursue his buying, registering or viewing a specific page. Also help the visitors to buy, register or view that specific page and simplify the path to that final objective.

There are more aspects about this topic and if you are interested in it, check out these web design tips.

Web Design Tutorial

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Web Design - A Brief Tutorial

Fervens design screenshot

The theme is by a loyal Smashing Magazine reader, Elena Gafita, and the design is by far one of the most beautiful I have yet seen.

Grab your own copy here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/05/fervens-a-free-wordpress-theme/

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New design, once again

They have an interactive website builder which can be easily used simply via entering a little bit of data in a few easy steps.

They offer over 4000 ready made designs, and they offer you to get a homepage and access to all those designs for only $9.95 a month, including a free domain name.

The package also offer basic Website Promotion Tools (I wonder what that is?) but most importantly a risk free 30 day money back guarantee.

They have a design gallery of some of their available designs. Although they are not very outstanding by any web 2.0 standard (do we have that actually? Officially I mean?), the designs are very nice considering the price.

If you want to create a website but you have a low budget and just want to get started, this might be the best place for you to get started.

p.s. They do offer a test-drive, so you can get a glimpse behind, and see what you get for the price.

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Have you seen BuildYourSite.com?

Years ago when I started out it was a problem to even convince customers to get online, and even more to actually pay for the development costs.

For me it was always important to save costs on the development, and increase my overhead on small projects. One of the ways I did that, was to implement the use of web templates.

DreamTemplate
is just one out of many sites that offer that to their visitors. But that is where the comparison ends. They have a very excellent system where you get unlimited access to all their templates, but for a very fair yearly price, $59.95.

For that price you usually would not expect very much, but the price does cover instant access to more than 1000 well produced quality web templates, including full source files in html and the original Photoshop source files for additional tweaking.

Now, for me that would be more than enough, but the membership also includes access to over 15.000 different cliparts, 500 word templates, 8.000 TrueType fonts, and the list just goes on.

What more do you need? Click the link to the left (aff), take a look and sign up!

P.s. If I were to add something negative, its the music that automatically plays whenever you go to the frontpage. It only plays for a few seconds, but it is VERY annoying in my ears.

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Finding good webtemplates

Once you have finished working on your design, its time to optimize your code. Cleaning a CSS file manually can be very cumbersome and you might end with strange results, going back and forth in your backups to put in a style you should not have removed.

I was about to embark on this task anyway, when I decided to do a little Google search, and actually found a Firefox Extension developed by Sitepoint.

It’s called Dust-Me Selectors and gives you a tool to automatically search a site for its CSS styles and then present you with a list of redundant styles.

See here for the list it gave me of a site I had been working on, putting selectors in and out, and making it a big mess:

The tool itself is very simple to use, after installing it in Firefox you get a nifty little broom tool in the bottom of your window.

(Image courtesy of Sitepoint)

The tool has many nifty features, such as searching your entire site via your sitemap (.xml format or HTML sitemaps are recognized). This helps you if you have a lot of differently designed subpages, so it does inadvertently advise you to clean a selector you were actually using on a different part of your site.

(Image courtesy of Sitepoint)

The tool is fairly small and uncomplicated, but it does give you the exact tools you need for cleaning your CSS style sheets.

(Image courtesy of Sitepoint)

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Tool to clean your CSS