January 29th, 2010 — Website Design
Put yourself in the visitor’s shoes and analyze your website design. What do you see? You’ll definitely be able to mark out all the good’s and the bad’s of your web design. This elucidates the fact that your website’s design plays a great role in your online presence as well as online reputation.

If you Google your name, you’ll get every tiny detail there is about you on the web. Using this vast database, each day millions and trillions of users search for products. In such a place where competition is rising while the platform is one, managing your online reputation becomes extremely vital.
How can website design impact your online reputation? Here are a few tips to build your online reputation by utilizing your website. Let’s take a look.
1- Give the best customer service on your website. This can be ensured by setting up a FAQ’s page to remove visitors’ confusions and by making your contact numbers and addresses prominent on the website.
2- Over deliver on the products you are disseminating and selling to the users. Any kind of free bonus is exciting for people and they are likely to go for it. Moreover, providing additional information about a certain product you’re selling also increases your credibility.
3- Design a clean, simple, easily navigable, and fast loading website. You only have seconds to grab the attention of your visitor and you don’t want to wait that little time on your slow loading site. This aspect can be looked after by your web design company.
4- It’s always an extra scoop to insert your previous and existing client testimonials on your website. This shows your ability to provide solutions and satisfaction to others and a good magnet to attract potential visitors. You are known by what people talk about you, and if the words are good then don’t miss an opportunity to display them via a separate testimonials page.
Building your reputation is important for your online business. It’s because people only purchase, partner, or deal on the basis of trust and reliability. Offline, it’s easy for people to judge others and their genuineness by meeting them but this aspect is not available to the online users. Therefore, all the online users judge the business owner by their website design. This includes the overall professional image your website portrays.
January 28th, 2010 — Website Design
The best among the best web designs are those that revolve around your clients requirements. “Client is always right”, and if your web design company acknowledges this fact, it has paved way for prosperity and long term sustainment in this field of web designing.

If you are providing web design services, it’s imperative for you to identify your clients’ requirements for their ultimate satisfaction. This article explains what an average client would expect for their website designing. There are basically five main requirements of a client:
- A different appearance of the website
- The website should portray a professional image
- Corporate colors should be extensively used
- Timely completion of the whole project
- Website should be light and downloaded quickly
The first requirement involves the uniqueness and the creativity of the web design. Here the clients want something that is far better and above their other competitors. One essential tip for this kind of website design would be to stick with the industry’s best practices, yet spicing it up with a bit of creativity.
The second requirement of website design would be professionalism. The website you design must emit a business image and not something non-serious. Clients want to release a feeling of trust and reliability through their website, and if you’re able to do that you’ve certainly won your client’s vote.
Colors of the website play a commendable role, and this is what the third requirement of client concerns. Client demands a website that displays their corporate colors profoundly, and the ability of the designer to play well with colors and color shades. While using colors, avoid the ones that are hurting to the eyes and leave enough white space for design clarity.
The fifth requirement revolves around the nature of today’s competitive market where the race is on and only the fast participants hold a chance of winning. Therefore, make sure whatever you do and whatever you offer to your client – is fast!
Last but not the least, to ensure user friendliness and usability it’s important to design a website that’s quickly downloaded and does not take much time to pop-up in front of the user. Keeping in mind the hasty character of internet surfers, if your website takes longer to download, it may stand a chance of being ignored by the user.
Keep in mind these five essential client requirements and give them a web design they’ll truly love!
January 27th, 2010 — Website Design
Every kind of work implies the use of tools to make it more productive and professional. Whether it’s the industrial sector or the agriculture sector, tools work more profoundly and more quickly than manpower. Similarly, a number of tools are used by web designers to craft the most creative and professional looking websites within hours.
A web designer may not be termed one if they don’t use specific designing tools to craft a website from its conception to the end result. With several web design tools available today, we have handpicked only five effective ones for you:
1. Adobe Fireworks
Accessible by the Mac and Windows operating systems, adobe fireworks is a vector graphics editor hybrid from Adobe. Fireworks differ from Photoshop in a sense that it’s exclusively designed for web designers and offers a wide range of tools and choices to design a complete web layout easily.

The distinguished features of this tool are:
- Slicing and dicing a design copy into HTML/CSS. However, its better if you don’t use the auto generated source code.
- Capacity to enclose the complete website design as a PDF, along with clickable components for interactive and striking website prototypes
- Ensures search engine friendliness by providing optimization tools that help in making your web graphics smaller in size and easily downloaded.
2. Adobe Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver also incorporates with other admired Adobe products such as Photoshop, enabling you to share smart objects for quick and easy renewing and editing of graphics and images. This commercial web application is a fully loaded tool box for web designers including the following features:

- Wrong Grammar and syntax identification with smart Code Hinting
- A built-in FTP client
- Includes project management and workflow alternatives
- Illustrates the preview of your source code in the form of “Live View”
3. Panic Coda
The basic aim of panic coda is to decrease the quantity of applications you require for developing a website including FTP client, CSS editor, version control system and much more.

This tool entails a “one-window web development” idea by using a single tabbed interface for text editing, file transfers, SVN, CSS, and also web books. The straightforward and easily understandable interface of this tool made it acquire the Apple Design Awards two years back.
4. Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop is most probably found in every web designer’s toolbox, and it should be too. This tool is ideal software to control images, picture and graphics and is extensively used by designers and photographers. Photoshop is rich with all kinds of options and features a designer would want:

- Filters allow you to automatically insert effects to your selected image
- Brushes, actions and scripts allows mechanization and wide variety to edit images
- Layers and revert option work great as workflow boosting features
5. Firebug
This Firefox tool works best when used in connection with the Developer toolbar. Its special features like DOM inspector, HTTP request logger, header inspector, and CSS and HTML editing tools makes it an essential tool in web designing.

Basic features include:
- Inline HTML and CSS editing for modification or editing
- Console for logging
- JavaScript
- Innate Document Object Model (DOM) inspection tool to show you the co-relation between page elements
These five tools are a must in every successful web designer’s toolbox. If you are missing out on any of these, you can’t term yourself to be a savvy and updated designer yet.
January 14th, 2010 — CSS, Website Design
We are absolutely at an intriguing issue in time with the web. There are stimulating new characteristics in the pipeline for Cascading Style Sheets that will permit for a blast of creativity in web design. These characteristics encompass CSS fashioning directions that are being issued with the imminent CSS3 specification. You won’t be adept to use these on your everyday purchaser tasks for another couple of years, but for conceive blogs and websites directed at internet conceive community, these characteristics can help you impel the boundaries of up to date Web conceive today, supplementing that additional flavor to your conceive and assisting the commerce move forward.

There are new methods being conceived every day, and as developers, we have the privilege of concluding how and when to use them. Some businesses utilize progressive enhancement more than others. One large-scale piece for me is how much we use CSS3. It is not completely sustained over all browsers. If you still desire everything to gaze precisely the identical over all browsers, you should likely just close this item and not read about CSS for another 10 years. Client is not going to drag up your location in two distinct browsers to contrast the know-how, so they won’t even understand what they are missing. Just because certain thing is not completely sustained, that does not signify that we can’t use it to an extent.
Here are few new techniques snatched from the future that you can put into practice in your website design today:
- Border Radius
- Border Image
- Box Shadow and Text Shadow
- Easy Transparency with RGBA and Opacity
- Custom Web Fonts with @Font-Face
Now that modern browsers are stepping higher with advanced encourage for CSS 3, web designers have even more forceful transforms to play with. Page elements can be animated, spun or otherwise transformed in ways that at one time weren’t possible, or at least wanted complex JavaScript. Of course, browser encourage is immobile quite limited in “the real world,” so it’ll be numerous time in the past you can start engaging them strongly in your daily work.
Obviously, Internet Explorer won’t be able to render any of these CSS administers, so you’ll want to generate sure the appearances degrade for browsers that don’t construe CSS 3. For case, the first demo in the tutorial basically spins a photo and realizes a fall shadow. Browsers that don’t construe the CSS would basically show in public the photo without the rotation or sunshade – not ideal, but workable.
January 7th, 2010 — SEO, Website Design
We all know by now that websites are designed to increase business growth and generate more customers, and not just irrelevant traffic. But how can one ensure a website design that produces not just traffic but higher conversions also? Simply focusing on the bigger picture and the larger aspects won’t do the trick; because web design is not about “BIG” things, rather it’s about making small things look bigger on your web pages.
We have accumulated a list of to-do. When combined together, the following things can produce conversions beyond imagination. Check out the list and don’t overlook these little wonders when designing your website.

Appearance and User Experience
Develop a critical eye and then analyze your website from the user’s perspective. No doubt we all love our belongings, but you never know the others love the same. Moreover, be very specific about your industry audience requirements. If you want to give a good user experience, layout your website design that meets their needs and truly makes them explore further.
Be Innovative, But Stick to the Established Practices
Being innovative is great only if you don’t choke usability in the process. Make your website stand out by doing something other than the conventional, but don’t forget to keep your roots aligned with the established policies within the industry, or you may hold the risk of losing reliability and user trust in overdoing the innovative aspect.
In The Online World, “Simplicity Is the Best Policy”
Having a good design certainly doesn’t mean you have to be loud, colorful and cluttered. Website simplicity is highly important if you want your visitors to interact with you and not become lost while finding their desired item through the unnecessary designing elements.
Make Things Easy To Find, How?
ALWAYS give your users a search box to find what they’re looking for. Online users are in haste, and they indeed have no time to sit and explore your website in detail like your mom would. So better give them a shortcut and cut out their misery of going through every link to reach the wanted one. You can also improve your website’s search-ability by organizing your entire site’s information in a clear structure.
Use Appropriate Link Descriptions
Anchor linking, by inserting more descriptive text within the link text is a good practice. Also, adding link titles and alt attributes within each link can be effective to gain user interest and access.
How to Get In Touch With You?
Suppose you’re fortunate enough for a visitor to like your products or services, what next? The visitor will instantly look out for your contact information. Make this info easily accessible on your website and all the other web pages, and don’t forget to build an about us and contact us page for the interested prospects.
Website Fonts
Without getting into much detail about font importance, here are the three things to remember regarding your website fonts:
- Font size: Must not be less than 10 points as smaller font is difficult to read.
- Font face: Verdana, specifically built for web use must be used. Also avoid using many fonts and stick to two at the most.
- Font scalability: Instead of using fixed width fonts, permit users to adjust font size by making it scalable.
Be Calm with Using Colors
Online world is different than offline world. You may feel attracted towards loud and funky colors, but you’d hate websites with such eye-hurting colors. Therefore, be careful when selecting contrasting colors for your website and give your website color a mild and harmonized look. To ensure easy web scanning, dark text on a light background is preferred.
Graphics
Graphics should be considered something more than just eye-candy. Each graphic you use must enhance user experience rather than being distracting and irritating.
Call for Action!
Your website may contain elements requiring action from the visitor. Such elements such as linked text or image should be made obvious than the rest of the non-linked stuff by changing its color or making it bold – however method you prefer. Standard link formatting (blue and underlined) should be used for textual links and should change in color when it has been visited. The rest of the text should be in one same color.
Is Your Web Content Readable?
In order to make the words on your site appear readable and interesting for the visitor, try reviving it up a bit. It’s not necessary to insert long text paragraphs to prove your products or services, but simply organizing the already existing content by using short paragraphs and bulleted list may want a reader to scan the information easily.
Using Breadcrumbs
Are you familiar with the “Hackle and Jackle” story where breadcrumbs were used to track their way back home? Imply the same technique on your website for the visitors so they can easily know what their location is on your website and how can they trace their way back.
What about White Space?
What about it? White space is the most important user-friendly aspect you can add to your website. Adding considerable white space will relieve the crammed affect from a website, making the information more visible and easy to understand.
Follow these simple but important website designing tips, and you’ll witness your website’s traffic converting into long term customers in no time!