Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes

In the world of web design, there are plenty of mistakes you can make, and in this article, I'm going to look at what I believe to be the top 10 biggest. You need to check your site for these mistakes right now, and fix them if they're there – otherwise you're going to be annoying your visitors and driving them away from your site.

1. Unclear Layout and Navigation. Many websites, especially business sites, seem to suffer from some kind of disease where even the very simplest task takes ten steps to achieve. If people are emailing you to ask you how to do things on your site, then you need to improve your layout and navigation. Remember: if there are certain tasks people seem to want to do more often, put them on the front page.

2. Plugin Overload. You've got to keep media that uses plugins to a strict maximum of one per page: that means that if you've got Flash, then you can't have a media player, or if you're using Java then you can't have Flash. It's not as bad to use the same plugin twice, however.

3. Unclear Linking. You might think it looks better to only show links when people put their mouse over them, or not make their colour stand out too much from the rest of the text, but it's not – while it might make the design look nicer, it makes it far less usable. Use a clearly contrasting colour for links, and preferably underline them.

4. Too Many Ads. When you're trying to make money from your website, it's all too easy to try to fit in more ads than you really should, or start using ad formats that are too intrusive. If you've put a new ad on your site, go to the site as if you were a visitor, and ask yourself honestly: is this just too much?

5. Strange Fonts. Stick to the most common web fonts: that's pretty much just Arial, Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana. If you're using more obscure fonts, then most visitors probably won't have them – and the ones that do will find your text hard to read. The only time you should use non-standard fonts is in your logo or in headings, if they are displayed as an image.

6. Flash Intros. Please, don't use a Flash intro on your website. You'd think everyone would realise they're a bad idea by now, but every web designer still gets clients who just don't seem to realise that Flash intros are universally mocked and hated. Don't be one of those people.

7. Unlabelled Email Links. It's a very bad idea to ever use a link that will send email (a mailto link) without clearly marking it with the word 'email'. If you just make clicking people's names send email, you'll annoy visitors who just clicked wanting to find out more about the person.

8. Broken Links. You've got to check all your links regularly to make sure that they all still work. There's nothing worse than finding a site that looks useful, only to find that it hasn't been updated in years and none of the links work any more. Yes, a website does mostly run itself after a while, but that doesn't mean that you should neglect the essential maintenance it needs from time to time.

9. No Marking for External Links. There are two kinds of links: internal (to other parts of your website) and external (to other websites). For the benefit of your visitors, though, it's best if you mark external links, either by making them a different colour or using some kind of a symbol (a box with an arrow is the usual one). It's also good to make the external links open in new windows, so people aren't leaving your site altogether when they click them.

10. Badly-sized Text. It's important to keep your text around the standard size (preferably just below). Making text too big or too small makes it hard to read and annoying for many visitors. The best thing you can do is use relative text sizing (not pixels) that allows the browser to respect the user's preferred text size. You might also consider offering buttons on your site to decrease or increase the size.

Web Design Tips for Health Websites

Health websites have a special way in which they should be designed because web surfers anticipate a certain type of website. Web design is very important and while many companies were not aware of this for quite some time it is now catching on that a website selling medical imaging supplies should be designed differently than a website offering medical advice. It all comes down to people and their expectations. We all have them and whenever we walk in a doctor's office we expect it to look a certain way. The same goes for a movie theatre, shopping mall, and other places of interest. We have expectations for the places we visit in person and the same goes for the websites we visit virtually. Websites selling medical surgical supplies should be conservative and informative and make it easy for you to buy products whereas another website that is about gossip can be colorful and fun.

There are quite a few web design tips for health websites. One tip for health websites is for them to be designed in conservative colors like blue, black, dark green, and other similar colors. People visit health websites for a reason and they want the website to feel like a serious place. Organization is also important when it comes to designing a health website because people will most likely be visiting for informational purposes. As a result you want to have the information placed in a very organized layout so that visitors can find what they are looking for with minimal effort. Web surfers want instant gratification and if they don't find what they are looking for very quickly they will simply click off your page and head back to the search engine to try again. Because of this it is very important to have your website organized in a way that will keep visitors interested and on your page otherwise you will lose them.

So, make sure that when you are designing your health website you check out some other health websites that are popular and see what works and what doesn't. When you can use other websites as references you should because it will allow you to create an even better website with a design that will be outstanding and keep the traffic coming in to your site. Just always keep in mind that simple and straightforward is a lot better than creative and confusing.

Profitable Web Site Design - Designing a Web Site that would Capture Income

The very first thing to consider when you are designing a web site is to generate a lot of traffic. But traffic alone is not sufficient. You need to convince that visitor to linger in your site and found out more information. Of course, that would also mean that you need to encourage them to buy from your products or avail of your services. Design your site in such a way that it would be in sync with your primary objectives.

Here are some simple strategies to be considered when designing a web site.

1. No splash pages please. Splash pages would not give your visitors a direct answer to their queries. You might even encourage them to click on that back button instead of clicking your welcome button. They are time consuming for the customers.

2. Use only few banner advertisements. Right now, people are smart enough. They are not clicking on those pop-ups. Give them the reason to buy the product and stop forcing them to buy using banner advertisements.

3. Create easy navigation menu. When you are confused with how to go along with a site, you tend to back out and find another one. So do not give your customer a headache. Go with a basic but clear navigation menu.

4. Guide your customers. Your user should know where they are now in your web site. Provide a portion in the site stating on which part of the information found on your site. You would not want them getting messed up on your site

Why SEO Consulting?

Search engine optimization is an amazing process of increasing traffic to your website by ranking it high in the search results of a search engine. Today more than 400 million people are using search engine optimization to establish their product or service; hence it automatically becomes essential for the business as well. There are many leading Internet marketing company offering you search engine marketing solution and brilliant strategic Internet marketing. You can get fastest and highest ROI among all search engine optimization companies. You will also have full-service SEO solution to generate great sales and marketing results.

Internet marketing business today is highly competitive enough to be confusing even for those who are expert. How to select effective pay-per-click campaign? How to get best company for search engine optimization? How to get optimized content that can achieve high rankings? And many more questions goes on an on. Hence, it is important for an SEO consultant to understand the clients' business and marketing goals to improve the strategy and approach for a winning SEO campaign. Ideally, the SEO Consultant needs to understand things like:

• Business Objective

• Targeted Audience

• Media Mix & Dates

• Creative consideration

• Six Sigma Strategies

• Success Metrics

• Dependencies

• Methods of Measurement

Many SEO companies have strategies may or may not be working. SEO Consulting service reviews your resources and strategy and assists you in identifying adjustment, which can be made. They would also discuss how to appraise and fit in important metrics into your campaign management. With these companies you just need explain your requirements and why you feel you might need assistance. And they would show you how to increase the return on investment from your efforts.

It is significant to note that we could help guide your search engine marketing approach, making the search engine optimization talk worth far more than learning about your website. We offer SEO web design services, which utilize the best SEO methods; webmasters and business owners could now take advantage of our expertise. If your web site isn't working as hard as you, you should be concern why? So appoint the specialist search engine consultant and professional SEO services that can help.

Web Site Design- Use of Graphics and Fonts Part I

The use to which you put graphics and fonts in your web site design is more important than you might believe. It is more than just personal preference since they can not only affect the readability of your web pages, and hence the time that visitors stay on your site, but also your search engine listings.

Both graphics and the fonts that you use for your text should be chosen carefully, and not just because it looks good to you, or even different. You might think that your graphics look nice, but they should not dominate your web page. Graphics should complement a page, and be used intelligently to convey a message.

Website graphics are in either GIF or JPG format. JPG formats are generally better for photographs and GIFs for general website graphics such as buttons and menu bars. When inserting a graphic into a web page it is important that you state the dimensions as in:
.

This is because it takes time to load a graphic, but if your browser knows how much space is going to be needed it can set that aside and continue loading the rest of the page. The whole page then appears to load faster than if the graphic size was not specified. Some graphics can take a long time to load and you will have to keep an eye on that. Animated graphics especially can take ages, and your visitors will tend to disappear since they are generally not very patient when they visit a site.

Personalize The Entire Year Through Photo Calendars

If it were not for pictures, the world would indeed be a very dull place to live in. Someone rightly said this. Imagine a world without pictures; well I am certain that the only image which comes to your mind is a blank surface and nothing else. Photos have made our lives colorful, beautiful and have in fact given a new direction to the way we maintain our relationships and other things in life. Photo calendars are a wonderful means that help you to create your personalized calendar that you can use through out the year. Imagine how wonderful it will be to have a photo calendar that has been made and designed specially for you. You do not have to go through the whole trouble of creating that personalized photo calendar. There are various companies which specialize in making this type of personalized calendars.

To make a customized photo calendar or photo calendars, the first task for you is to find out an agency that specializes in making this. Well you can also make this personally if you have proper knowledge about using all the software for this. However it is suggested that you get the work done by a professional whom is an expert in this field. Also it is not possible that any one would like to make photo calendars. When you talk to the professionals to make the photo calendars tell them specifically what you want. If required sit with them and tell them properly which photo should come in which month of the calendar. Also if you have customized messages top be put in the calendar tell them where you want them to place it and how you would like to get it done.

Photo calendars make for a wonderful gift as well. Think of innovative ways through which you can give a personal touch to the photo calendar and distribute this to your close friends and family. One innovative thing you can include in the photo calendar is to have pictures of your family members in the 12 pages depicting the twelve months of the year. The pictures can be arranged in such a way that the picture coordinates with the birth date of that family member. Suppose your sister's birthday is on 23rd of May, you can have her picture customized on that page in the calendar in the month of May. That is not all; you can also highlight that date on the calendar so that no one will forget the date. Similarly you can also highlight anniversaries and special occasions that are associated with your family.

Generally photo calendars are printed on white glassy paper bound with a spiral. The calendar can be of different sizes and shape but the one that you can put on your corner desktop near the bed is perfect. In fact this can be put anywhere where there is a little space. If you are not interested in putting personal pictures in the photo calendars you can choose from different pictures that are available almost everywhere. Well with the world full of pictures, this is not at all going to be difficult at all.

Developing Effective Web Content

Web content writing is a somewhat different from ordinary writing. With the website businesses flourishing with each day, website content writing is also required accordingly. For a website to make good and proper impact to people, the content it holds plays a vital part in enhancing that effect. A poorly written copy will always offend the reader, resulting in no traffic at all on the website, which has a bad effect on the business.

Therefore, a good copy, which not only sells but also captures attention, is essential. While writing for the web, some of the things should be kept in mind, firstly, it effective and relevant keywords should be a part of the content, as this generates traffic on the website, web content with effective and frequently used keywords have more chances to appear in the search engines.

While writing, language should be kept simple. It is important to think from the point of view of the customer and not one's own self. Language should be easy to comprehend, words should be in sequence and the ideas should be refined. Always use everyday words, which anyone would use to describe a product; the most successful way of making your website content appear on the search engines first pages is to use words which would appear in any search.

Always avoid misspellings, lots of plurals, and also confusing phrases while writing an effective copy, as it tends to irritate the reader. Try to find contemporary topics and content for copyrighting.

Take Advantage of Eye Tracking Tests

Sure, eye tracking studies designed specifically for your web site could cost you tens of thousands of dollars. So, until you're ready to spend that kind of money, you might want to take advantage of data garnered from studies of other websites.

Most eye tracking studies yield certain consistent results that can be applied across the board. Let's discuss a few of the data, and then you decide how it can be applied to your own site.

You've probably heard the statistic that says 70% of the people landing at your site will leave the page within 8 seconds. But what exactly does your reader look at during those 8 seconds, and how can you use this information to improve your conversion rates?

According to eye tracking tests, generally, the first place your readers look is the upper left hand corner of the site. This is where most designers put the logo or other bit of useless, egocentric information. This space would be much better utilized with a call to action or a headline.

And speaking of headlines, there is a huge trend going on right now that eye tracking studies definitely do not support. Have you noticed how many web sites have been using centered headlines in red text? Studies show that red headlines get glanced at, but not read. And centered headlines do not get read as often as left-flushed headlines, especially if the headline spans multiple lines.

The best practice is to put your headline in the upper left corner, use black text and keep it left-aligned. (Obviously, you'll want to make sure it's benefits-oriented, but that's a copywriting trick that has nothing to do with eye tracking.) Another interesting phenomenon is that people don't necessarily read your headline word-for-word. They read the first word, skim through the next few words, read the center words, skim through the next words, and practically ignore the last few word. So, for instance, the eye would look like this:

Read Read Skim Skim Skim Read Read Skim Skim Ignore Ignore

To take advantage of this, you'll want to use a very eye-catching word at the beginning of your headline, such as "Attention!" or "Finally!" and another extremely powerful word at the center of the headline (consider a power verb).

OK, one final note about headlines. Eye tracking studies give us some interesting insight into the length of the headlines: the headline on your web site should be no more than 52 characters long. To be more specific, the headline should be no longer than twice the length of the alphabet it is written in. Since the English alphabet is 26 characters long, we've got a 52-character headline to work with. Any longer than that, and not only will the end words be ignored; you run the risk of the entire headline being ignored.

All of this information definitely goes against the grain of what we're seeing on the web today: super long, center-aligned, red text headlines. If you have a hard time going against what appears to be conventional wisdom, I urge you to do several A/B split tests and prove for yourself what works best.

OK, the upper left gets looked at first, then what? Well, the next thing visitors look at, in general, is images, and especially photos of people. And the area of the photo that gets looked at the longest is the eyes and upper portion of the face.

However, it's interesting to note that stock photos simply get glanced at while photos of "real" people get an actually look. Many designers believe they are making their site look more professional by using stock photographs, but instead they are just wasting valuable real estate. Another benefit to using "real" photos: it increases your credibility factor and improves the trust level visitors place on your site.

Moving along, visitors go from the images to the text that is directly below the images. Oddly enough, most web sites do not use captions with their photos, even though both on and off line tests prove that captions do get read. If you do not want to use captions with your photos, be sure to put your most important text under the photos. And position the photos so they lead the eye into the text and not off the page. A popular design technique is to place the photo or graphic on the left side of the page. You're better off placing the photo on the right side of the page in order to drag the reader into the page.

And a final note on graphics – when creating a graphic representation of a product (think especially of e-book covers and infoproduct boxes) many designers simply create a thumbnail of the product by resizing the image. Unfortunately, the text within the image now becomes unreadable. Eye tracking tests prove that if the text is readable, the graphic will get read and clicked on. You'll get much better results by creating an entirely new image that is meant to be read at a small size.

(Don't worry if the image is not the exact cover that appears on the e-book. By creating something similar, but readable, you will have better conversions.)

So, how do you take this eye tracking data and design a page for optimal conversions? First, decide what you want your visitors to do on the page, and then lay your page accordingly. Try starting with a banner-like header with your logo at the very top of the page.

Follow that with a black text, flush-left headline of 52 characters or less. Under that, place a left-aligned photo of yourself or another "real" person or a legible reproduction of your product or e-book. Next to the graphic, place a black text, flush-left sub-headline using power words in the front and center of the headline.

Time To Implement: Implementing eye tracking data can be relatively simple or extremely complex depending on your current site layout. If you have a template-based site or if you use a WYSIWYG editor, you should be able to reposition the various elements of your page in under two hours.

Best Web Sites Design - Why the Right Colors are Critical

People who visit your website usually form an instant opinion about you and what your website offers. They can't help themselves. Their instant opinion is formed in their subconscious mind. You might wonder why this happens. It matters not a jot how clever the text is on your page. You can have paid an expensive professional to produce your copy for you. The visitor need not read a single word, and yet they will form their instant opinion.

You might also have invested in some really great pictures or images on your site. I'm affraid this will carry zero influence on your visitor's instant opinion. It also doesn't matter how great your offer is. You might be providing a superb bargain or proposition, but again this isn't going to influence the instant opinion. This is because the initial reaction to your website is instant, and occurs the moment the page appears in the browser of your visitor. You might wonder what it is that is so important that it has this effect on your web page visitors? You may have already worked out that the answer is colors. It is the color scheme used on your website which causes your page visitors to create that instant opinion.

The reason this happens is because we all react psychological and intuitively to colors. There isn't anything we can do about this. Colors has an affect on each of us. This is one of the reasons why companies can invest millions in getting the colors exactly right for their products and marketing promotions. They invest this money as they know how the psychology of color works. The right colors can be the critical factor in the success of big company products. What webmasters have to realize, and this can be very important, is that the same color psychology applies to our web pages.

By the psychological power you could encourage your website visitors to leave your page the instant they see it. No matter what your website is about, it may simply be unsuccessful due to the colors you're using. Forget the text, it might never be read! The good news, however, is that you can use colors to engender a really positive reaction. This isn't a new discovery. The psychological power of colors is well known in the offline marketing world. In fact, it's been with us for years and years. Whatever our role in life, colors convey emotions to our subconscious mind.

What we need to do in our website design is to ensure the color combination on our web pages convey a positive feelings. If you do this, then you will be conveying a trust, sense of belonging and warmth. Conversely, the feeling sent may be one of distrust, coolness and rejection. Here is a list of colors showing the types of feelings each will evoke:

RED


Sense of power, strength, leadership, excitement, danger, energy, love etc

ORANGE


Steadfastness, friendliness, playfulness, courage, cheerfulness, comfort, confidence etc

YELLOW


Curiosity, intelligence, joy, caution, amusement, organization, brightness etc

GREEN


Health, money, life, harmony, healing, nature, food etc

BLUE


Trustworthiness, love, tranquility, stability, acceptance, patience, peace etc

PURPLE


Dignity, nobility, royalty, independence, ambition, wisdom, luxury etc

BROWN


Comfort, reliability, tribal, earthiness, durability, primitive, nature etc

BLACK


Power, sophistication, wealth, formality, dramatic, style, elegance etc

WHITE


Cleanliness, fresh, purity, easy, goodness, simplicity, innocence etc

Finally, be aware that your website color scheme should reflect the product or offering you make. The reason is that your visitors' subconscious minds will look to reconcile the color with the message. If they are irreconcilable, you will find your visitors click away from your page very quickly. And you may never see them again. The important issue therefore is that it is essential the right color scheme is used on your website. If you can achieve this, you will produce better results from your website. In fact, by getting the right colors on your website you could be looking at the difference between making a profit or a loss.

Little Devil & Angel

A couple of characters I created for a series of greeting cards. These two were created in Flash where I find my illustration style changes a lot from my freehand work.