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 click-able 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.

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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!

A good-looking website definitely works to attract customers and fulfill the branding needs of a business, but what are the actual elements that call for action and make your visitor turn into your long lasting customer? Here are the 5 basic guidelines that will help you convert your website into a products and services selling platform.

1. Images Speak

It’s a common observation that an image induces a person for a certain type of action. For example, showing a sad child with no family makes an individual seeking for adoption instantly click!

Therefore, when you’re selecting images for your website design, be very audience specific and don’t choose images for their own sake. Whatever image you choose for your website must be enclosed with a certain message or feeling for the visitor.

2. Avoid Paradox of Choice

Don’t give too many options to the visitor that they become completely confused as to what deal would be the best one. When people spend excessive time selecting the best option out of hundreds, they may literally become paralyzed at one point and leave the website to search for some other place.

In order to prevent this “choice confusion” among visitors, make it simple for people to access products or services and organize all options by suggesting what features each option provides. This will make the choice easier for the visitor and may make your website sell tremendously.

3. Display Products & Services

It’s absurd when websites don’t show the products they are selling or don’t display the results of their services. When people enter an offline store, they can judge a certain product by the look and feel. Similarly, when a person lands on your website they must be able to view what you are selling in order to make the purchase.

In case of service providers, like a graphic design company, display your designed screenshots before the visitors so they can judge how skilled you are.

4. Offer Trial

Make the users get involved with the items. If you are selling some application software, offer a trial for the user to explore and learn first. Once the user gains understanding of your application, they are more likely to make a purchase when the question arises.

Most people are reluctant to buy from online stores, therefore offering trials or money back guarantees can surely help you win their trust.

5. Usability of the Design

Unlike focusing on the visual design, Usability refers to building a website design based upon user’s likes and dislikes. Usability is the only factor that can solely determine the success and failure of a particular website because the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and decides whether they want to stay on that page or leave. Therefore, if you’ve used a user-centric design then your approach is sale-able. If not, then you must revise your approach towards a more user preferable attitude.

Follow these 5 amazing tips to craft a web design that not only looks well, but also sells well. Wish you higher profits for the New Year!

This is a guest blog post by Alexandra Brain. She is a specialized content writer.  She is a God gifted talent when it comes to professional content writing as it is the requirement of every internet marketing company. She has the potential to boost PPC campaign by her creative tag lines which is always satisfactory for PPC management. She has the ability to adapt and write according to target audience.  Her written content plays a significant role in SEO services and helps a business to achieve next level.

It’s useless to have the best designed website which no one can find! Many web designers often ignore search engine optimization to improve their website’s search engine results page rankings. In this article, we’ve shared some quick and easy SEO tips all designers should be using in their layouts.

Tip 1: Employ SEO techniques right from the start of web design and development.

Tip 2: Designs must be given more importance, but it’s basically the back-end code that provides proper support. Therefore, try optimizing the code and checking for W3C compliance from the very beginning.

Tip 3: Don’t forget the basics including title tags, Meta tags, Meta descriptions, Header tags etc.

Tip 4: Don’t forget to optimize your website images using alt tags. Also make sure to optimize the image size and loading time to the minimum.

Tip 5: Search engines simply adore text and content, particularly the unique one. So make sure your pages have relevant content to boost your search rankings. Try not to overload your web design with so many graphic, but have appropriate text too.

Tip 6: Flash is cool and interactive feature to engage users, but it doesn’t work with flash. If you really want to put some flash on your website, use flash banners and slideshows, and keep alternative text versions for websites in full flash.

Tip 7: Competitive analysis is also crucial to know your competitor’s status. This way you can not only improve your own rankings, but also defeat them in areas where they are showing poor results.

Tip 8: Optimize your website URL’S with your relevant keywords. Assign a different title name to each page, and don’t repeat the same title throughout the entire site. Moreover, the page title must not exceed 65 characters.

Tip 9: Replace JavaScript sin navigation menu with CSS based navigation. Using JavaScript can make your menu less search engine friendly but you can some use of its features in a CSS menu and retain the fanciness of the navigational menu.

Tip 10: Use a SEO friendly design that does not block or hamper the indexing of important areas on your site. Also, to ensure both search engine and user friendliness keep your keyword rich content above the fold.

These 10 tips will help you design a website that works equally well on search engines and give your design the exposure and traffic it needs to survive in the online marketplace.