January 21, 2008

The suggestions below are website design targeted at novice web designers and people that can use some basic advice to get things going.

Tip 1 - Use a reference (but don’t copy it!)
If you see an interesting web design, color scheme or layout, try to use it as a starting point for your own web design.

Tip 2 - Be unique
Try to create a unique design. Do not overdone your web design by adding numerous animated GIFs, fade-ins, etc.

Tip 3 - Content is king
Create content that purely relates to your website, the more pages with useful content you have the better. Make the body text on your wow gold index page focused and avoid the need for the user to scroll down on any page.

Tip 4 - Graphical elements
Any Graphics that you use on the website should always support the content and never dominate the content.

Tip 5 - Be HTML-compliant
Follow the proper HTML standards and check whether your website is HTML-compliant, to make sure that your website is displayed correctly in all browses.

Tip 6 - File size
Make sure that your site is quick to load in any browser. There are obviously a number of factors that can affect how quickly a website loads, but try to make sure that large file sizes isn’t one of them.

Tip 7 - Colorsheme
Use a colorscheme of logo design matching colors. Avoid excessive use of shouting colors such as green, yellow, or red.

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January 13, 2008

Tutorial on Designing for 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024 and higher

Designing web sites to fit all resolutions is a very important Website design principle. Try out the Entheos site in all resolutions higher than 800 x 600 and you will find that it is designed to fit the page exactly. Therefore, visitors who have higher resolution can see more content in one page which reduces scrolling. Most web sites are designed for only one resolution. They may look perfect in a 800 x 600 resolution but if viewed in a 1024 x 768 resolution look a little empty. You’ll find a lot of wasted space around it making the web site look quite small.

From our research we have found that majority of our viewers are on the 1024×768 resolutions and higher. As time goes by more and more people are going to switch to higher resolutions as seen by our site statistics. It is therefore very important to design web sites for all resolutions. That is one of the principles we follow while designing web sites for our clients. With that bit of background information, lets get started on how to design a web site for all screen resolutions.

Step 1: Decide on the lowest Screen Resolution
Before you start you need to decide on your lowest screen resolution. Your web site will have to be designed keeping the lowest resolution in mind. Through our research we have found that less than 0.5% are on the 640 x 480 resolution So we ignore that completely. The next important resolution is the 800 x 600 resolution. Some of our visitors are on this resolution so we use this as our lowest screen resolution. This means that our web site has to fit all resolutions equal to or higher than 800 x 600.

Step 2: Design Your Web Site On This Resolution
Once you decide on your lowest screen resolution you need to design your web site for that resolution This means that all your graphics will be designed for this resolution. Design your web site and export the images as you would normally do.

Step 3: While converting your design to HTML make sure all your tables are measured in terms of percentages
Important: This is the trick to developing Website design for all resolutions. You need to work in terms of percentages and not pixels. If you work in pixels you are giving an absolute measurement to a table, whereas working in percentages gives a relative measurement. The table will be a given percentage of the screen resolution.

I hope you have understood this clearly. I’d like to explain this with an example. If you were to design a site for a 800 x 600 resolution, you would probably make a table with width 800 px and height 600 px. Now if you were to design a web site for all resolutions you need to make a table with width and height 100%, so that whatever the screen resolution may be the web page will scale to fit the page. It will be 100% of the screen resolution or whatever percentage you choose to give it.

The first step is logo design to make a table with 100% height and 100% width. You could make it 95% if you want some white space around it.

Step 4: Within the table measure cells in terms of pixels except for the cell for the content
This a another very important step. You need to give a fixed measurement to all your cells except for the content cell. You can leave this cell blank.

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January 12, 2008

website design navigation is the most important aspect to consider while designing a website. The primary aim for effective navigation is get your visitors to stay in you site and also for visitors to easily find what they are looking for easily and quickly. Designing effective navigation can also entice your visitors to try out the other things you offer on your site. In this article we will look at some of the basic guidelines you need to follow while designing the navigation of a website.

Effective Navigation Guidelines
While designing the navigation for your site keep the following points in mind:

Organized Links
Make sure your links are well organized logo design according to the order of importance. Visitors should be easily able to find what they are looking for under different categories.
E.g. All our main links are found on the top i.e. our services, products,portfolio, resources etc.Other interesting links are found on the right of the page. These are common and consistent throughout the site.
Finally if the web page belongs to a guide E.g web design guide you will find the related links below the right menu and also at the bottom of the page.

Note: Related links are very important as visitors coming to a particular page will probably be interested in more information you have under the same topic.

Clear and Prominent
Once you have decided on your navigation wow gold links, you need to think of the best place to put them. Navigation should be clear and consistent. Try to design your navigation on the top or on the left as these are the first places our eyes go to. Also locate the primary links high enough on the page so that they are visible without scrolling. Navigation images should be seamlessly integrated into the site design. Avoid putting navigation links at the bottom of the page as visitors will need to scroll right down to see the links. If you like you could put the important links at the top AND bottom of the page just to make sure your visitors don’t miss the link.

Consistent
Navigation should be clear and consistent. The important links of your website should be on every page, in the same location, and in the same sequence. Don’t confuse your visitors by putting your navigation links in different places in different pages.

Easy to understand
Make your links easy to understand and to the point. Usually you won’t have enough place to have long links so make use of the space wisely. Visitors need to know where they will go on clicking on a particular link, so make sure your links are understandable or nobody is going to click on your links, which will defeat the purpose of designing a good navigation system.

DHTML Menus
If you have a large number of links under categories and sub-categories you could use navigation menus to organize your links. There are many cut ‘n’ paste scripts available on the Net that you could use to create great navigation systems. A favorite resource center is SimplyTheBest.net, you’ll find tons of useful navigation menus that are very easy to install on your site.

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January 9, 2008

The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. logo design While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load. Try out our tips to build a great looking web site that also loads fast.

Minimize the use of images - The key to a fast loading web site is to minimize the use of images. Images do enhance a page but don’t make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Notice the popular sites like Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Amazon etc., they have very few images because the load time is more important. Very often simple designs are the best.

Optimize images for the web - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image. You can also use online tools like Gif Wizard to optimize your images or to get a recommendation on how to cut down the size of an image.

Use Tables creatively - You can get some great website design looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like. Check out our homepage and our menus to see how we have used tables in our site.
Read more on Using HTML Tables Creatively

Cut down the use of animated gifs - Don’t use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor’s attention to a particular section of your site.

Design simple icons - Instead of using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor. We have used small icons in our homepage to highlight the main sections of our site.

Use background images instead of big images whenever web design possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small. The code will look like this :

Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.
Rollover the text on the right menu to see how we have used CSS Styles to get a simple but nice text effect.
Check out our CSS Styles tutorial for more cool tips on CSS Styles

Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don’t make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.

Design most of your site in HTML - As much as possible try to design your site using HTML. You can create great designs by just using HTML code. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc.

Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful. We kept using it to improve our site till we got a report that said good loading time!

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