December 9, 2008 at 7:01 pm · Filed under Web_Design
There is unlimited possibilities when it comes to designing a website. Flash, Database, content management, Client Login, etc,etc. A question to ask yourself when deciding how to do your website is:
How can I most effectively present my information to my visitors
Of course there are several things to consider like budget but I feel that when talking strictly design it is important to put your visitors as first priority as they are the reason you are building the website.
Flash - Flash I find is normally over done. It can do wonders to a site if used right, but it can also make a site look awful if not used correctly. To simply put it: If you have multimedia content on your website consider flash, if you don’t: stay away from it altogether. Flash is more time consuming to develop, and it can take away a lot of important aspects from your sites like Search Engine Optimization.
Database - Adding a database back end to your site can be very useful if you are going to be storing a lot of data, or if you are going to be changing information often. If you are just simply putting a page with your contacts online, I wouldn’t recommend using a database backend, again for the time that it costs to develop and especially for the minor benefit that you will see. On the other hand if you are storing all of your products online and you need the ability to update/add/delete products often I wouldn’t recommend not using a database and some type of content management.
Content Management - Content management is most likely used with a database back end in which you will have a control panel that you can use to “Manage Content”. Content that can be managed is anything and everything. Sample uses for Content Management are:
Managing Products - Add new and delete/edit existing
News/Journals - If you want the ability to constantly update your site with current news items or journals
Page Layout - Some more advanced Content Management systems will all you to manage all aspects of your site from the layout to the colors!
Again I stress the importance of putting your visitors first. Although you might think it would be cool to have a flashy intro and design, your visitors might find it annoying and distracting.
Feel free to reprint this article as long as you keep the following caption and author biography in tact with all hyperlinks.
Ryan Fyfe is the owner and operator of Web Design Which is a great web directory and information center on Web Design and related topics like Flash animation and Search Engine Optimization.
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November 22, 2008 at 6:04 am · Filed under Web_Design
It starts off simply; a few HTML pages, a few hyperlinks, some affiliate links. Your mother is proud of her clever son.
Then you install a forum, some more content, maybe consider using a Content Management System (CMS).
Before you know it, you have a monster on your hands. This monster is eating up your time and energy and money.
Here are a few tricks I’ve learned to save you time and money with your web design.
1. Avoid Windows servers, if you can.
I’ll admit I’ve never used one. I’ve had too much trouble with Windows on the PC, to risk it on my web site. Most geeks favour Unix. It’s been around longer, and is more stable. Web hosts offering Unix variants like Linux have always been cheaper. They also seem to offer a wider range of toys. I need SSI (Server Side Includes), SSH (secure Telnet), 10 MySQL databases, Cpanel, PHPMyAdmin and a UK IP number. And you can get this for $15 a month.
If you’re in business for yourself, consider Unix/Linux. If you want to be a full-time employee, consider Windows/Microsoft. Many businesses use it, as it’s compatible with their office software, they like that a major company supports it, and they distrust something that’s free.
2. Server Side Includes are the poor man’s CMS.
Each web page can be ’stitched’ together using Server Side Includes (SSI). You can ‘call’ a header and footer HTML file, using SSI, in each web page. That way, you can make site-wide changes in an instant. For example, you can add Google Adsense to the top or bottom of your site immediately.
Dreamweaver (http://www.macromedia.com) can display SSI pages correctly. This is another reason, one of many, for its popularity as a HTML editor.
3. Which CMS to use?
A Content Management System is very handy if you have a community-based website, or want to let others add content to your site. It must have a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) add-on. This means a novice can type in formatted HTML the same way he could a formatted Word document. He presses on-screen buttons to bold or underline words, and make hyperlinks.
Another keyword to look out for is HTMLArea. This means someone has made an addon to cause all ‘textarea’ form boxes to have word-processor-style buttons above them. This allows someone who doesn’t know HTML to add it to your CMS. Saves YOU having to do it, and that is good [grin].
Many are free. I can’t really recommend one at the moment, except perhaps Mambo (http://www.mamboserver.com). I’ve tried quite a few others, especially PHPNuke.
A CMS allows you to set up a website with professional features in a day. The downside is you can spend weeks customising it. You may find, as I did with PHPNuke, that it’s unsecure, that it can behave eccentrically, and that essential third-party addons may not work properly.
A CMS is for geeks with time on their hands. I would dearly love to be able to point to one and say to the small businessman “Put your trust in this”. I can’t yet.
4. Put keywords in the HTML.
Fairly obvious, but webmasters don’t go far enough. *Any* image name, ALT tag, form field, bolded word or hyperlink can have a keyword in it. So why not do it?
This is where someone who tweaks his HTML code by hand gains a great advantage. Newlines and double blank spaces are redundant in HTML. A large document can have thousands of these. They obfuscate your Search Engine Optimsation (SEO) efforts.
Use a text editor that can strip them out, like Editpad (http://www.editpadpro.com), or a HTML optimiser. Broken lines are not ideal either. Dreamweaver can ‘break’ a tag or keyword at an inappropriate place. Why make it hard for a search engine to promote your page? Strip out the junk, and put in the keywords.
5. Put at least 500 words of paragraphed text in.
If your web pages have the same header, footer, left side-bar, right side-bar, and only a small bit of text in the middle, you may suffer a duplicate content penalty. This means a search engine deems your site has duplicate pages. It considers it an attempt to spam its database, and so shoves it way down its Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
If you can’t write your own articles, get someone to do it for you at a freelance site like ScriptLance (http://www.scriptlance.com). You can get free articles at sites like EzineArticles (http://www.ezinearticles.com).
6. Offer people what THEY want, not what YOU think they should have.
This is most important. Before making a site, go for a walk in town. Sit down on a park bench, and try to figure out what people really want; not need, WANT. Then figure out how you can get in on that business with your site.
People want sex, drugs, gambling, money, a house, a car, good food, nice clothes, self esteem. The first three are disreputable. Promote them, and get cut off from sections of society.
It makes me laugh when I see pornographers saying ‘it’s just a business, I’m not doing any harm’. They’re making money *because* their subject matter is taboo. Most people don’t want to be associated with pornography or pornographers. Likewise, a bar owner isn’t welcome everywhere, and casino bosses rub shoulders with the underworld.
If you ever want to be on the school board, or run for local office, keep away from dubious content.
Look at what people really want, AND which will make your family proud, and then proceed with gusto.
About the author: T. O’ Donnell (http://www.tigertom.com) is an ecommerce consultant in London, UK. His latest projects are a mortgage calculator and ebook, available at http://www.tigertom.com/mortgages-uk.shtml
Tags: professional web design, professional web site design, web design, web site designprofessional web design, professional web site design, web design, web site designShare This
November 16, 2008 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Web_Design
A “template” is simply a design format which you can apply to all (or most) of the pages in your web site. The first advantage of using a “template” system is that it allows you to make your most important design decisions at the beginning, and then just focus on content. The second advantage is that it allows you to quickly create new pages based on your standard design.
The disadvantage is that many template-based websites look homogenized and seem to lack a unique character. Designers who sell templates tend to use the same formats over and over again, insert the same generic images, and use the same techniques.
Just as important, templates are often not ready-to-go right out of the box. They almost always need modification, and often modifying a professionally prepared template is difficult because the designer will have used techniques you may not fully understand or are specific to the tools he or she used to create it.
So it is preferable not to think of a web template as the kind of thing you buy from an online template store. Rather just think of it as a basic page format that can be used over and over again. The best template is therefore one that uses “standard” techniques that can be modified without the use of specialized tools or programs (like Front Page or Dreamweaver).
Creating a Basic Template
If you are not familiar with web design, try working with a “bare bones” template to begin with. There are two ways you can go. You can work with basic html and tables, or you can create your basic template with CSS. Since CSS is rapidly becoming the new standard, it is probably better to begin with CSS — especially if you have not yet become used to constructing web pages with tables.
CSS stands for “Cascading Style Sheets”, but at the beginning it is not important to understand what that means. What is important is to understand that CSS allows you to create a set of formatting parameters in a “style sheet” (a seperate file) which you then can very easily apply to your individual pages. In other words, you seperate the “style” from the “content”.
A simple style sheet can contain just three or four design elements. Here is an example which you are free to copy (right click and “Save target as” to a location on your hard drive, then change its name to “sample-1.css”.)
Style Sheet Sample (be sure to change its name to “sample-1.css”).
This template contains a definition for the body text, a header component (with a background image), a “navbar”, and a definition for two headline styles, h1 and h2.
Now that you have a style sheet you can begin building your web site by creating a basic home page. Here is an example which embeds the style sheet referred to in the previous paragraph. You can get the html code by just opening the page in a browser window, looking at the “Source” code, and saving the resulting file on your hard drive as, for instance, “sample-1.html”.
Now you should have two files in the same location on your hard drive — “sample-1.css” and “sample-1.html”. You can get the image file by just right clicking on the image in the sample page and saving it to the same location on your hard drive.
Your second step will be to create the pages referenced in the “navbar”, so make sure you think of names for these pages before proceeding (e.g., howitworks.html, products.html, about.html, sitemap.html, contact.html). Then build your hyperlinks into the navbar. (Look at the code of the sample file to see how it is done.)
Once you have your basic home page with links, this then becomes your template. Just save it as “howitworks.html”, “products.html”, etc., and make the changes to the specific pages.
The result (once you upload it all to your host server) will be a basic, functional website containing a number of properly interlinked pages. It will also be search engine friendly because the design is not cluttered with scripts, and the most important elements are clearly laid out at the top of the page.
For more web design tips and techniques see the Linknet Marketing Resource Library.
Rick Hendershot is a marketing consultant, writer, and internet publisher who lives in Conestogo, Ontario, Canada. He publishes several websites and blogs, including The Linknet Network of Websites. This network provides an inexpensive way to advertise your website, and get as many as 100 low cost links.
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