Archive for the ‘design’ Category

There’s No Place Like www.home.com, your business website’s home page. With this familiarity, the website should encompass a professional theme. The home page should make visitors feel just as comfortable, but sometimes it’s hard to have an objective opinion of your own site.

The journey of a thousands sites begins with a single click, so maintain a positive first impression. With a positive home page reaction, your website visitors soon become interested in products or services offered. Sharp graphics and layout should use appropriate colors and fonts to match your business cards and printed material. The website visitors should be able to recognize your market branding on a website that is easy to navigate. Give your potential customers the ability to gather information quickly and easily.

The home page is the first thing your website visitors see and should attract website traffic. Bringing repeat customers is the advantage of a small business website, and with enough visual appeal, visitors will be encouraged to bookmark the website and tell a friend as well.

Consider these computer management shortcut tips when working with documents, photos or videos. Using shorcuts is very helpful and saves time when working on anything. With quick ways of accomplishing complicated tasks, your projects will tend to run smoothly.

Some useful tips include the use of shortcut keys such as with the shift or control button. Copying text or a section of a photo can be easily done with ‘control + x’ to cut, ‘control + c’ to copy, ‘control + v’ to paste and ‘control + a’ to select all. To undo anything on a text document or a graphic, just click ‘ctrl + z’.

Here’s a great tip for moving or uploading multiple files at once, and an alternative to selecting them all by dragging the mouse and boxing them in. Highlight the first file in a group to begin. Then go to the last file you want to highlight in the group and while holding the shift key, double click on it. This should highlight the entire group in between and allow you to move, copy or upload that entire group quickly and easily. If you want to copy a file instead of moving it to another folder, drag it with the right click of your mouse.

F5 is used to refresh a website page if you want to reload it, whether for seeing new changes made or to just refresh a stale webpage. In the same way, to do a “hard refresh” simply hold control while clicking F5. ‘Alt + F4′ closes the current window you are on.

Changing photos from one format to another is simple. If you want to change a file from gif or bmp to jpeg, or vice versa, an easy way is to right click on it, choose ‘open with’, choose paint, then on the top right of paint, under ‘file’ choose ‘save as’, and choose the format you’d like to save it as. Paint is kept in your accessories folder and can be useful to resize and edit photos as well, using the options across the top.

When changing video files from wmv to mp4 or between any other formats, DVD Videosoft could be a useful option. Adding graphics to photos can be easily done with Befunky.com. Add special photo effects such as starbursts, ink, text, shapes and speech bubbles.

Keep checking my blog and website for tips, tools and advice for making your online experience more productive. I offer custom CMS website design and SEO services for small businesses worldwide.

To the left are the before and after photos of a cabinet I considered using for display on a website design. The top photo had flaws I wouldn’t even attempt to display for a blog post. With some quick touch ups, the photo became good enough to post on a cabinet website page.

You’ll notice the “new handle” on the bottom (as well as the reflection) was a simple copy and paste of the drawer below. The lock and hole at the bottom was covered up with a simple copy and paste as well, from a blank portion of the cabinet. Finally the flaws such as the scratch and number “90″ at the top were removed with the same copy and paste method.

When you have photos that aren’t quite the quality that you would want to display online, from a website designer’s point of view, there are many methods to edit the photo. Therefore, you can use photos with imperfections and convert them into a quality image.

(click on the photo to enlarge)

Some sidebar ideas for a main website or blog is one of the first hurdles to get over when deciding on the creation of a new web design. Keep in mind that different sidebars could be applied for each section, tab, or page of your website. Review these ideas that could inspire you to plan out your website design a little easier.

Sidebar Ideas for the Main Website:

• A social networking feed such as Twitter or Facebook
• Provide a search box for easy navigation for your visitors
• Contact information to make it easy for visitors to contact you
• Add your picture to help create a relationship with your readers
• Subscription buttons to provide methods to subscribe to your blog

Sidebar Ideas for Your Blog:

• Provide a search box for easy blog navigation for your visitors
• Links to archives by date to make it easy for readers to locate old content
• Add a popular posts link to redirect your visitors to your readers’ favorites
• Add a list of recent posts on your blog’s sidebar to encourage additional page views
• A categories list should be added to help your blog readers find posts on a particular topic

If you are running your blog on WordPress, there are a variety of add-ons that can make it easy to customize your sidebar any way you choose, and change it as often as you like. A well designed website is about easy navigation by your visitors, so consider these web design sidebar ideas to use in your small business website.

When you stand out over your competition, getting customers can be easier than if you remain just one in a crowd. Forming a business niche helps separate you from others in your industry, so provide examples of what separates you from others in your same business.

When advertising your company, whether in print ads or in a website design, mention how your business will help the customer like none other. Talk about why someone should come to you rather than the competition, what goods or services you offer, who your target audience is, and what your unique position is in your market. By showing potential customers the advantages to utilize your company over others, a “a call to action” is conceived for those who encounter your advertising.

Form your business niche by giving your customer reasons to choose your company, pointing out what you do that others do not. By projecting a positive business image, knowing the importance of market branding and using advertising to attract customers, you may find that your business stands out over your competition.

I can show you how to obtain a winning website and use website advertising to attract customers for your business. Contact me by phone or email today for details.

There was a need for a new custom CMS website design template for my site and a cleaner layout for easier navigation.  I decided to do an entire new design and change a few things around for the desired look.  Compare the old home page at the left of this blog post and the new one to the right.  By moving the sidebar from the left to the right, using a lighter scheme of colors and changing the fonts, button styles and background, this is a look that I can be proud of to represent my business.

In order to solve the situation with having a clean, easy to navigate website, moving the Custom Google Search Box to the top of the sidebar seemed like a good idea.  Also now it’s easy to add different items into the sidebar exclusive to certain sections of my website.  This clean layout with lighter colors gives my website visitors a more pleasant browsing experience.

As a result, by using a new custom CMS design template for my website, navigation is easier and an improved browsing experience is attained.  Customizing the sidebar for each section is the next step, but for now, enjoy exploring my site for more tips and advice on small business website design.

This post is dedicated to some common mistakes that may make your website hard to read. A hard to read website can send your website visitors away to other pages listed in their index of search results. The idea of having a website is keeping your visitors on your page and getting them interested enough in your products or services to contact you. Avoiding these common mistakes that make your website hard to read may help.

Appropriate contrast between text and background is important so your content can be read easily. You don’t want your website visitors squinting to see what you write, so make text as readable as possible with high contrast against the background.

Don’t tire out your reader by writing long paragraphs. By breaking up the text into shorter paragraphs and using headings to break up the page, you give your reader the ability to scan your website page much easier.

Avoid using wide columns so your reader’s eye doesn’t get lost following a long line of text. Divide your text into multiple columns or use right and left margins to fit everything on the screen.

Highlighting with bold, italics, bullet points and hyperlinks can break up your paragraphs as well. Draw your readers into your website by linking to other pages that have a common theme with what you are writing about.

Avoid long website pages and using too many navigation links because this is just too much for the reader to take in. Keeping a minimum of links could keep your readers from being overwhelmed by so much to choose from.

Avoid these mistakes that make your website hard to read and you may find that your visitors will stay on your website longer when you track your stats. Visitors that stay on your website longer are more likely to use your products and services because they are impressed with how comfortable your website makes them feel.

Read more on related subjects on my blog:

Small Business Website Navigation
Small Business Website Home Page Advice
The 7 Best Website Optimization Techniques
10 Ways to Come Up With Blog Post Ideas

I’ve recently added a site index for the resources section of my website, seeing as it has grown to over 150 pages. A site index, much like a table of contents, has made navigation much easier because now you can see an entire section of my website at a glance.

The difference between a site index and a sitemap is that a sitemap is usually organized by importance or navigation, where a site index is an alphabetical order list index. This site index provides content overview at a glance to help my visitors navigate around my website. This way I could help engage my website visitors and interest them to navigate through other pages of my website.

By adding a site index to your website you offer easier navigation, more stickiness, increased SEO, and a clear layout of what your website contains. In turn, this could lead to greater traffic and more customers to your business. Have a look at my My Webdesign Resources Site Index.

Read my blog posts on:

Add a Google Searchbox to Your Website
Sitemaps For Your Website

For effective website design I tend to follow these tips to design a fast loading website. Website visitors won’t usually have the patience for a site to load and skip to the next one in search results. A fast loading website can help avoid missing out on potential customers who don’t want to wait for a website to load.

Minimal Number of Images
Minimize the number of images you use on a website and make them simple because load time is more important than a flashy site.

Optimize Your Images
Make sure images are in gif or jpeg format and minimize the image size for fast loading.

Minimal Animated Gifs
Animated gifs can take a long time to load and can distract your website visitors. Using smaller animated gifs could be used to redirect your visitor’s attention to a particular section of your website.

Small and Simple Icons
Avoid large and bulky images because they slow down loading time significantly.

Background Images Instead of Big Images
Using background images for headers and footers reduces the size of the web page, and decreases loading time.

Use CSS Stylesheets
CSS stylesheets can create pleasant text effects and rollovers and still maintain a fast loading website with simple yet good looking text effects.

Utilize Flash Sparingly
Using minimal flash can help your website load faster as well. Flash may slow down loading time for your visitors, and they might just move on to the next website in search engine results.

Design Mostly With HTML
Use HTML as much as possible, using tables, simple fonts, CSS stylesheets and minimize gifs, Flash and bulky images.

Next you can check your load time and get a free evaluation of your website at WebsiteOptimization.com to improve website performance. This tool helps calculate download time, web page size and composition, and incorporates latest, best practices of optimization, web page size trends and guidelines, and website optimization techniques.

Have a look at my website for more about Websiteoptimization.com at my Website Speed Diagnosis Report page. Also have a look at these other tips on my blog.

Using SEO tools for website design can give you the cutting edge over your competition. When you keep track of your backlinks, domain stats, duplicate content, keywords and keyword density, and Google, Yahoo and Alexa rank, you may be indexed more often with search engines. When your website is indexed better by search engines, the amount of your website visitors may increase, in turn generating a greater number of potential customers.

SEO Tools from Tools For Search Engine Optimization:

Alexa Ranking Tool
Backlink Builder
Backlink Anchor Text Analysis
Backlink Summary
Check Yahoo WebRank
Domain Age Tool
Domain Stats Tool
Keyword Density Checker
Keyword Playground
Keyword-Rich Domain Suggestion Tool
Link Price Calculator
Reciprocal Link Check
Redirect Check
Search Engine Spider Simulator
Similar Page Checker
URL Rewriting Tool
Website Keyword Suggestions
Website to Country