Creating a Web Design That Sells

Posted by admin on

September 2, 2010

The holy grail of website design is not a site that wins awards at some design conference or at a geek convention. The holy grail of web design is searched for and found every day by designers and scripters just like you. This web design holy grail is a website that sells. Whether it sells products, services, or free information, it doesn\'t matter. It sells. That\'s what commercial websites are all about and that is what you should be striving for when you design a site for a business.Of course, this selling isn\'t always direct. Sometimes a site is just a glorified online brochure for a company. That site is still selling. It\'s selling the company that you\'ve made the site for, so it is still a web design that sells. Your goal as a website designer is to sell your client\'s products, not to make flashy widgets that look really cool and accomplish nothing but wasted bandwidth and maybe an award or two for your portfolio.

This can\'t be overemphasized. I am contacted by both businesses looking for website designers and by designers wanting to know if I have any work for them. I rarely match them up because those designers who\'re looking for work have portfolios full of work that might look good in an art gallery or a design show, but that is not what business sites need in order to succeed on the World Wide Web.

So now the question is, “what exactly is web design that sells?” Fortunately, that part is easy to explain. Unfortunately, it\'s not so easy to accomplish. Many web designers think of themselves as artists, but they think of this “art” in the wrong way. They think they\'re visual artists who create art using the electronic medium of the web. That\'s not the case. Web designers are more like interactive or audience participation artists. They\'re more like illusionists and magicians than they are like mimes. This means your business site design is not about wowing the eyeballs, but instead getting the visitor involved in the site itself: getting them to click, to read, to participate. That\'s the true art of web design.

To accomplish this, your design must be simple, but not boring. It must be interactive, but easy to use. And most of all it must be gently guiding the visitor towards a goal: usually a sale, or the piece of information they\'ve been searching for.

Let\'s look at an all-time favorite of ultra-simplistic design: Google. This home page is probably the fastest-loading page on the web that consists of more than just “.” Yet it\'s one of the most user-friendly and most-visited sites on the Internet. Another great example is eBay. A little more complex, yes, but still fast-loading and very clean to look at. Very rarely does a visitor to eBay not know how to use this site—everything is laid out for them simply and neatly. All while still selling.

Simple and effective design is much more than just graphics and obscure talk about “visual flow.” It\'s all about how the user interacts with the site and what the visitor can get out of the site quickly. Most definitely it\'s about “selling” the site through its web design elements. Often this involves a strong mesh of team work between the designer, copywriter, and the back-end programmer.

The search for the grail continues as designers who understand their business continue to find innovative ways to make web design that sells rather than web design that wins obscure awards. Moving away from pure “art for arts sake,” they\'re capturing the holy grail and winning the awards that matter: happy clients who come back and send their friends and colleagues. That is great web design!

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Points you should use on your site

Posted by admin on

August 31, 2010

In order to have a successful website it is important to include certain things within it. Your website is like your storefront and will be your visitor’s first impression of you. You will need to be sure that this is a good one. Here are some points that you should include on your site in order to get the full potential from it.
• Firstly you will need to give your visitors some details about your company. This will encourage confidence and trust.
• Describe the services and products you are offering your visitors. Answer the question “what’s in it for me?’
• Give your customer every reason to select your products and services over your competition. Again answer their question of “what’s in it for me?’. Also establish your unique selling point with added value and more benefits.

• About you: Be sure to always include an about us section on your website. It is important to include little snippets about your accomplishments and reason for being in business. This again builds trust and credibility for you with your business. This will of course encourage sales.

You can easily add value to your website and products by using this free site http://www.moreniche.com. This site offers many free tools and content for promotions. This will give you a good start to your business and save you a lot of time and money. The better you present your website and the more resources you can offer the better your website will be and the more your visitors will want to stay and buy from you.

With these few points you can make a website that your visitors will enjoy and build trust for yourself. In this way you will increase click through and sales conversions.

 

 

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Creating Your First Website

Posted by admin on

August 29, 2010

Whether you\'re just entering the website development field and want to get started on your first, full-blown website or you\'re an amateur just trying to put together your personal website, it can be a daunting task when you see all of the jargon and options available. Don\'t worry, most aspects of website development are actually pretty straight-forward. The confusion is usually in the terminology and the complicated-sounding technologies you\'ll be using.Almost all of website development is about understanding Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the design elements of making a functional website. When you see a good site on the Web, you usually don\'t notice the design elements very much. That\'s what makes the sites so good. It\'s when those elements, like navigation, graphics, and the information on the page, get in the way or distract the user, that you notice them. This means the site\'s designer, or website developer, did not do his or her job correctly.

If you\'re an amateur building a website for fun or family, then this may not be as important to you. Most likely, you\'re using an online site builder or free website tool. The professional, however, should be very concerned about these design elements. The only way to know if your elements are correct is practice, revision, and criticism. Look around the \'Net at sites that you admire and focus on these elements to see how they accomplished what they did. Find similar sites and check them and look at sites that don\'t come up to standards and note their mistakes. Learn from other people\'s website development efforts in order to better your own.

Now comes the fun part: experimentation! The best way to learn on your own is to try things. Don\'t be afraid to fail, since it\'s your mistake and no one\'s going to fault you but you. Learn from it and try again. Play around with different concepts of navigation and design, fill pages with useless gibberish or random content so you can see what handling large amounts of written material is like. Make drop-down, hover-changing, and other kinds of menus to see how the buttons interact and the scripting holds up to expansion and changes. Above all, though, experiment with your website development!

Once you\'re confident with your skills, start building your first site—probably your own professional site to sell yourself. The successes during your experimentation are now your portfolio. Good work! Keep working, trying, and succeeding by learning from your failures. Website development is about practice and knowledge. Don\'t let your lack of experience hold you back, but instead utilize your unbounded imagination. Keep trying!

Now that you\'re ready to do something for real, you\'ll need to know some basic concepts about website development to keep your sites well-grounded. You\'ll need to know: what the focus of the site-to-be is, what kind of content will be included with, how much content is expected, how often feedback from the client will be given, and what kind of hosting will the site be on when completed (often the same as during development). There may be other questions, but these are the most basic.

The focus of the site is merely what the site is for: is it a sales site, online store, or glorified brochure. In other words, what\'s the point of the thing? You\'ll need to have at least a rough idea of what kind of content will be used on the site and how much of it (text, graphics, audio/video, etc.) there will be. Some clients are very open to letting you run with their website\'s development and come up with your own, while others want to control the process from start-to-finish and have a clear idea of what they want. This covers the question about client feedback. Most sites are built in stages, with a “skeleton” going up first to solidify the major design elements and the details and content going in next, page-by-page or section-by-section. The question of site hosting is very important if the site is to be anything more than just a cut-and-dried brochure or text-only site—a site that doesn\'t use much or any audio/visual or back-end scripting like shopping carts.

Now the fun begins! Building the site needs to be somewhat organized, but if you\'re given some leeway, take advantage of it and have fun with the concept. Start with organizing the content and creating a game plan for how the site will “flow” or be laid out for the user, from index page to final purchase or final goal. Use this game plan to start building the backbone of your site: its navigation. Square this away first, before you do anything else on the site. The navigation is so integral to the design, website development, and even file structure of the site on the server that it must be the first thing completed and ready to go. Changes to the navigation, once implemented, will probably be difficult and will affect everything else about the site.

Once that\'s done, it\'s a matter of taste and style. Once you\'ve got a feel for your client and their business (and therefore their clientčle), you can come up with a graphical design based around your navigation scheme to make the site great. After that, it\'s mostly just “plug-n-play” with content. Most sites are built on a basic template, which contains the major graphic elements and the navigation. This is because continuity throughout the site is visually appealing and less confusing to the visitor.

That\'s the basics of website development, in just a page or two. There is more to it, of course, but you\'ll learn most of it as you go. Once you\'ve got the foundation I\'ve outlined here, you\'re ready to learn the rest by experimentation. Besides, that\'s more fun than reading some boring article anyway. So have at it!

 

 

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Pros and Cons of Free Web Design Software

Posted by admin on

August 28, 2010

So you\'re a do-it-yourselfer and you want to build your website on your own? Great! There are a lot of great tools to choose from, including some great free web design software. Rather than being a listing of what software is available and what my opinion of it is, though, this article is going to be about the general pros and cons of using free web design software in general. It\'s something to consider, especially if your site is intended to be your business front or in any way professional. Just because you can do it for free doesn\'t necessarily mean you should.
Don't worry, though, often it\'s not a problem, especially if you\'re computer literate and have a good understanding of how the Web operates.First things first: why are you building this website? Is it to be a personal site, a site for a hobby or family interest, or is it to be a professional or business website? If your answer is either of the first two, then you can quit reading now and just go build your site. Find a good web host and you\'ll usually find free web design software that goes with it and that will meet your needs.
If you\'re building your site for business or professional purposes, though, then you\'d better keep reading. This site will be your livelihood (or part of it, anyway) and will definitely affect your reputation and standing amongst your peers and clientčle. So you\'d better carefully consider what your site is to look like and how you\'re going to go about making it look that way before you commit to using free web design software instead of hiring a professional.

No doubt you\'re head is full of ideas of how the content will read, how the site will look, and how many visitors you\'re going to be getting who\'ll be interested in buying your products or hiring your services. Well, it\'s good to have those dreams, but you\'d better keep your head in reality for a while. You have some real decisions to make.

The first thing to do is decide if you really have the time, energy, and wherewithall to devote to building your own website. Even with all the great free web design software out there, it still takes a lot of time and work to make a site look professional. Not only that, but there is a lot to learn if you\'re going to optimize that site so that you can maximize turnover (visitors to sales) ratios and search engine rankings. Not to mention the website copy itself and the design elements that make the site appealing and usable to the visitor.

If you\'re still up to the challenge, then let\'s look at what general kinds of free web design software are out there and which ones are best for you to use to make your new site. The two major types of free web design software out there are: stand-alone and web-hosted.

Stand-Alone Software
Stand-alone software is just that, it installs on your computer like any other application and is run almost entirely from there, with no Internet connection required for most functions. There are a lot of advantages to using this kind of free web design software:

* portability (no ties to any single web hosting provider)
* speed (it is usually not dependent on your \'Net connection speed)
* backups (your site, as it is on your computer vs. the Web is a “backup”)
* eases collaboration (if you have more than one person working on your site, this software can often make working together easier)

At the same time, this type of free web design software has some distinct disadvantages:

* incompatibility (sometimes your software is not compatible or supported by your host)
* support (free software is often not very well supported, often with little or no customer support at all)
* what you see is not always what you\'ll get (sometimes what you see the site looking like on your system is not what it looks like once published to the Web)
* not system portable (if you work on your site from more than one computer, you may not be able to move all the data back and forth easily)
* often does not integrate well with shopping carts and other web scripts (these scripts are usually built into the hosting plan and may not be able to integrate easily with your software)

You can see here that there are definite pluses and minuses to using free web design software that is stand-alone. Usually, this option is chosen by more experienced web do-it-yourselfers who have an understanding of the more complex parts of web design, such as HTML scripting and such.

Web Hosted or Web Based
Software that is included as part of a hosting plan and that runs almost entirely through your browser falls into this category. This is the most common type of free web design software now and has gained popularity for a number of reasons, including these strengths:

* easy portability (any computer accessing the web can be used to log into the software to work on the site)
* what you see is usually what you get (what you\'re seeing on your screen as you build the site is probably what it will look like when people see it on the Web)
* integrates almost seamlessly with host-supported scripts (shopping carts and other scripts are usually built into the web-based design software, which means they\'ll integrate nicely)
* good support (if your website host provides good support, then your free web design software probably has it too)
* fast setup and easy learning curve (this type of software is usually quickly set up through your host and is almost always easy to learn at least the basic operations of)

There are some big advantages to using web-based software, most of which very much outweigh the disadvantages for most people. This is why it\'s gained so much popularity. The disadvantages are too much for some, though, and include:

* host non-portability (once you sign up with a host and use their free web design software, you\'re probably married to them until you decide to revamp your site entirely or quit business online)
* changes may be irreversible (you may not be able to save multiple versions of your site for backups or temporary changes, such as sales or promotions)
* backups more difficult (often web-based software has no backup solution integrated)
* functionality or custom HTML limited (often you are restricted to using only the built-in objects and scripts and sometimes you are not even allowed to hand-code portions of the HTML itself)

There are definitely some ups and downs to using web-based free web design software, but as I said, these cons are often outweighed by the pros that I listed before. For many, this is the solution that fits best.

Whatever your decision, it doesn\'t hurt to at least try free web design software for yourself and see if you can make the killer site you\'ve dreamed about for your business. If you fail to do so, you can always scrap it and hire a professional later. It was free, after all!
 

 

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Create the Perfect Logo Design

Posted by admin on

August 27, 2010

How To Create the Perfect Logo Design for Your Website

Your new business and website will need a logo. This is fundamental to the design of the website and the creation of your business entity (called “branding”) in people\'s minds. Two businesses that are exactly the same in every respect except their logos will see a large difference in their marketing and success because of those logos.

First, let\'s look at what a logo is, exactly. Before you can create one, you\'d better know exactly what a logo is. It\'s more than just a graphic with a business name emblazoned over the top of it. It\'s a simple visual that conveys an idea to the viewer while at the same time linking that idea with the business\' name. For instance, a logo with swirly lines going in one direction conveys speed through the air and would brand a business in someone\'s mind as being fast. Another logo featuring a blue mass resembling a rock conveys solidity (blue is a “solid” color in most people\'s minds and rocks are obviously the same). These simple concepts are almost subliminal, but are very real in logo design.

Creating a great logo is a matter of focusing on the elements that set your business apart from others. If you\'re superior in service, quality, or strength, you\'ll want your logo design to convey this idea. Effective logos are also simple, they don\'t have a lot of details to clutter up their look—the shape you want to convey is more important than the shading and details to make it obvious.

Logo design should also be distinctive and bold, giving the impression you want to convey in less than three seconds. The company\'s name and graphic imagery should also be able to flow with this logo without looking out of place or unwieldy. The font you use to print your company\'s name on the logo should be simple and easy to read while still merging with the look and idea the logo is conveying. Swirly, stylized and old-English style fonts should be avoided.

The final element for most logo designs is to have the ability to convert it to black-and-white (for print or fax) and still retain the logo\'s ability to convey your message. This is often overlooked when designing a logo and is usually not noticed until later, when it\'s much too late to fix it.

Now that you know what should be incorporated in your logo design, you\'ll need to start making your logo. Depending on your artistic talents, I\'d suggest you sit down with pencil and paper and start working out ideas. Be simple, don\'t expect to have a finished product in a few minutes of pencil swishing. It will take some time. Most likely, you\'ll get the general idea down and then begin honing it to perfection, like any well-made item.

Once you\'ve done this, you can either put it on the computer yourself or, if you lack that talent, find someone to do this for you. A professional is key to making your logo shine.

One more option to try is to purchase or find generic logo templates on the Web and work off of those. They are good in a pinch or when you want a less personalized logo and aren\'t too worried about longevity, but if you want a logo that will stick out the long-haul and be there in the years to come, you\'ll want to have one professionally made. Logo design is not always simple and easy, but it can be rewarding to do yourself if you want to try. Even if you aren\'t able to make your own logo, at least you tried it and can have a better appreciation of what goes into making a great logo.

So try some logo design today and see if you\'re up to it. It\'s fun!

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