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Web Site Designing Tips

Discussion in 'HTML & Website Design' started by Reflections, Jul 24, 2007.

  1. #1
    The website should be designed in such a way that it will be visitor and search engine friendly.
    Some important Web designing tips are:

    1. The landing or the home page should be eye catching, looks cool and attractive.
    2. The colour combination should be perfect, if possible use green or blue and avoid black and red.
    3. Properly navigated so that visitor can move to any page.
    4. There should be relevant content about your business or services.
    5. The contact address, phone no or form should be in proper position of home page.
    6. The logo of your company should be there.
    7. Put small images with “alt text” relevant to your business.
    8. Do not make your site heavy and un ordered.

    Some more tips appreciated .........
     
    Reflections, Jul 24, 2007 IP
  2. Dan Schulz

    Dan Schulz Peon

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    #2
    I don't agree with #2 or #7.

    Web site design involves so much more than what you're talking about here. It not only encompases Web page design (which you barely touched upon) but also information architechture, accessibililty, and usability. A Web site has a logical structure that is followed from page to page and directory to directory (that's section to section for those who prefer plain language).

    Before you even open up your graphics program of choice or code one line of HTML, you should know what the site's overall structure is going to be. This involves knowing what sections are in the site (products, services, about, contact options - which should include a form, phone number, and other contact information - your home page, and so on), what pages will be in those sections, and how they will all relate to each other and fit into the overall site design.

    For example, the logo should always go in the upper left hand corner of the Web page (in a content block specifically identified as the header, or branding). If you have a lot of menu options, or expect other content (like a search form) to be in the same general area as your menu, it would be best to put the menu along either the left or right side of the page, rather than across the top. The right side is recommended for usability purposes, but the left side menu has almost practically become an accepted Internet convention. If a search form is included in every page of the Web site, it should be near the menu (and sitemap) so that people can have more than one means of searching for content on your Web site (this is Web usability at work).

    Web sites are built using a traditional flow model that consists of the header, menu, content area (this is where the products, services, news, and other regular page content and information go), sidebars (if applicable, often used for additional navigation, relevant information and advertising), and the footer.

    As for design choices, such as color schemes, you have six basic options. Monochromatic (multiple shades of a single color - like the greens used here on DigitalPoint), analagous (adjacent colors), complimentary (where you have two colors that are opposite of each other, such as a warm color and a cool color), split-complimentary (two colors that compliment each other, such as two warm colors, that are complimented by a cool color for example), triadic (a variation on the split complimentary scheme, but with three equally contrasting colors, like red, green, and blue), and tetradic (basically two complimentary color patterns blended together).

    Now, taking your "don't use black and red" statement to its conclusion, I'll agree with you if you're talking about using red or black for the background and the other color for the text (black text on a red background, or red text on a black background). Not only will people who are color-blind have problems reading the page, but the color combination will hurt the eyes of normal-sighted viewers. However, if you were to blend the two colors as part of a design pattern (and allowing another color like white for the page copy's background with a good text color for appropriate contrast), then you can create some visually stunning work.

    Using green and blue may be your own personal preference, but you should also understand that colors have different emotional impacts on different cultures. For example, blue is often used to represent immortality in China, while Jews consider it to be a holy color, and Hindus consider it to be the color of the god Krishna (not to mention a color often preferred by men). It's also a calming color, and is often used to suggest a high-tech Web site or company. Green is another calming and uplifting color, but is also an earthy tone, and one that is assocated with money in the US (whereas someone in Europe probably wouldn't associate green with money at all).

    Now let's take a look at black and red, shall we? Black is often associated with death and mourning or evil in many parts of the world; those who wish to aim for a cosmopolitian, progressive, prosperous, elegant and sophisitcated look will also use black as well (usually in combinatination with a color that provides good contrast to black). Red is often preferred by women (to provide contrast with men's blue), is considered to be a color of celebration and good luck in China; whereas some western countries consider it to be a color of prostitution ("red light district" anyone?).

    As for the use of alternative text in images, the attribute is there so you can provide alternative informaiton about the IMAGE, not your business or Web site. If you're selling flowers, and have an image of a daffodil, then the alt attribute should be used to inform the user (who cannot see the image, such as an individual using a screen reader or who has turned off images to help the page load faster, for example a dialup user; not to mention search engines) that the image is of a daffodil. Your business information should NOT go here.

    I can go on if you like, but I think I'll stop here.
     
    Dan Schulz, Jul 24, 2007 IP
    8everything and ChaosFoo like this.
  3. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #3
    Which ties into the concept of working with content BEFORE presentation. Too often you find people that have a flashy .psd file that ends up sliced into 300-500k of bloated images with little or no thought given to actually having CONTENT on the page - which makes the site not even worth wasting bandwidth on apart from being a SEO abusing click-through advertising link whore.
     
    deathshadow, Jul 24, 2007 IP
  4. benihana

    benihana Peon

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    #4
    Sweeping set of niave generalisations, presented as gospel.

    1. The landing or the home page should be eye catching, looks cool and attractive.

    Looks Cool? define 'cool'. I dont want my banks site to look 'cool'. I want it to look secure robust reliable trustworhy corporate official professional

    2. The colour combination should be perfect, if possible use green or blue and avoid black and red.

    Red is a colour of intensity and passion, excellent for many types of sites. Black can invoke many moods and is an excellent offset to many colours. the 'perfect' combination is very much based on preference, and impossible to define across the board.

    3. Properly navigated so that visitor can move to any page.
    you mean:
    Well considered naviagtion structure so the user knows where they are and where to go next to achieve their goals?

    4. There should be relevant content about your business or services.
    Yes. there should be a point to your website.

    5. The contact address, phone no or form should be in proper position of home page.

    Why? as long as there is a clear contact link to the info, this information really doesnt always need to be front and centre. commerce/booking sites often prevent leakage by having a prominent phone number, but its not nessecary for every site.

    6. The logo of your company should be there.

    7. Put small images with “alt text” relevant to your business.

    No. Provide alt text descriptive of the image for every image that appears in the HTML. If its purely a decorative image put a null alt, or better yet, let css handle it.

    8. Do not make your site heavy and un ordered.
    Unodred we coverd already. some sites are heavy in terms of bandwidth (which i assume your talking about) by their very nature. know your audience. youtube is poor on dialup.
     
    benihana, Jul 25, 2007 IP
  5. richweb2007

    richweb2007 Peon

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    #5
    1. The landing or the home page should be eye catching, looks cool and attractive.

    Comment : Depends

    2. The colour combination should be perfect, if possible use green or blue and avoid black and red.

    Comment : Buddy DATING sites and sex sites depends only on Red and Black

    3. Properly navigated so that visitor can move to any page.

    Comment : MOST IMPORTANT PORTION

    4. There should be relevant content about your business or services.

    Comment : Must Be

    5. The contact address, phone no or form should be in proper position of home page.

    Comment : Yeah, It helps to get fast result in SEs as it represents specific region.

    6. The logo of your company should be there.

    Comment : MUST be

    7. Put small images with “alt text” relevant to your business.

    Comment : Dont apply alt tag all the time but left it blank for small images like space image

    8. Do not make your site heavy and un ordered.

    Comment : Obviously !!

    According to me the following are the main aspect for any successful website:

    1> Subject Oriented Look

    2> Proper Navigation Structure

    3> Convincing Enough Information about the Subject

    4> All Browsers Compatible Design - Perfect HTML Structure [ Remove Code Blotting - Don't Confuse Browsers as they confuses your visitors ]

    Isn't it???????
     
    richweb2007, Jul 25, 2007 IP
  6. benihana

    benihana Peon

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    #6
    Firstly, lets try to get the nomenclature right. Its an attribute, not a tag. Pedantic, maybe; but an important distinction for newbs (which is important round here), and when talking about the title

    Secondly, 'space image' :eek: Welcome to 2007! We have CSS now. There is no need for a space image. ever.

    Thirdly, If you do have a purely decorative image, which somehow is in hhml, you should still give it an alt="" . Screenreaders will ignore it, instead of saying 'image'. People who have images off will not see the
    word 'image'.

    I disagree. Yes they are important, but Content beats them all.

    Myspace proves that the rest are secondary. (i.e. their aesthetic, structure, layout etc are awful. but they are wildly successful)
     
    benihana, Jul 26, 2007 IP
  7. richweb2007

    richweb2007 Peon

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    #7
    Hey benihana,

    Did u gone through the 3rd comment of mine :

    3> Convincing Enough Information about the Subject

    Information means content, isn't it?
     
    richweb2007, Jul 28, 2007 IP
  8. benihana

    benihana Peon

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    #8
    yes, and its more important than the rest, therefore should be no. 1
     
    benihana, Jul 30, 2007 IP
  9. Jenn

    Jenn Peon

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    #9
    my dad runs a website and he uses news. well, he has the program on http://www.usflashmap.com/component/flash_news_scroller.htm and the news always run. my boyfriend likes it (he's computer freak) and says it's cool. try then, or......
     
    Jenn, Jul 30, 2007 IP
  10. Reflections

    Reflections Peon

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    #10
    Thank u all for your information. Keep continue
     
    Reflections, Aug 8, 2007 IP
  11. Nectarine

    Nectarine Peon

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    #11
    I don't agree with #7, and I don't agree with the second part of #2.

    People that use screen-readers (who are not all blind), have huge customer loyalty. If they like your site and your product, they will buy and continue to buy. If you overdo the alt-text, your page will sound like this:
    "This is a picture of my dog men's health prostate health dog food canines puppy chow his name is Rex."​
    Doesn't sound that appealing, does it?

    I hate hearing people theorize how screen readers read pages -- you can get a screen reading plugin for firefox (for free!), so there's never an excuse not to know what your page sounds like to these visitors. Some screen readers say the alt attributes, some don't, some determine whether or not to by the size of the image. A lot of this is subject to change based on the settings of the software. Some people set it to "no images," some set to "all images" but most keep the standard settings.

    #2: While blue and green are soothing, they can be a bit drab depending on the nature of the site. Spice it up! :cool:
     
    Nectarine, Aug 8, 2007 IP
  12. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #12
    Agreed. We can test for this stuff, so test for it.

    The biggest problem is that as you mentioned some screen readers read alt tags, some don't. To address that in my own pages I've been using variations on the glider-levin image replacement technique - with empty alt tags for content images, and span's with backgrounds for presentational whereever possible.

    It also gives me the net advantage that I can make a site that looks presentable images off/css on - which is always a good thing.
     
    deathshadow, Aug 8, 2007 IP
  13. josh_coffman

    josh_coffman Peon

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    #13
    josh_coffman, Aug 8, 2007 IP
  14. sagargemini

    sagargemini Peon

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    #14
    I would say that the site should be simple, neat & clean, which results into a great user experience. The colors really do not matter, as long as the user finds what s/he wants in a few clicks. What matters is whether the user stays there for 1 second / 1 minute! Rest all will fall in place accordingly.
     
    sagargemini, Aug 12, 2007 IP
  15. Reflections

    Reflections Peon

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    #15
    Thank u all.
    Using Flashes in websites will make a site attractive. Flashes are dynamic. I think designing with flashes is not Search engine Friendly.
    What is your view about this?
     
    Reflections, Oct 30, 2007 IP
  16. Dan Schulz

    Dan Schulz Peon

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  17. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #17
    Flash for things like banners, menus and goofy animations is a total /FAIL/ at intarweb in my book. It bloats out a perfectly good website with non-validating code, several hundred k of crap that does NOTHING to enhance the browsing experience besides make the page take longer to load, and in the future looks to not even work once everyone gets on the 'you can't make it start playing by itself' bandwagon thanks to that little lawsuit. Even worse is when people use it for content since that makes people like me who browse with flash disabled end up with a big giant blank unnavigatable page.

    Seriously, if you aren't using it for a video or game, **** flash.
     
    deathshadow, Oct 30, 2007 IP
  18. 8everything

    8everything Peon

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    #18
    There are lots of points to go through :p but... I'll state that #1) It should look cool? Or it's probably best not to have a landing page at all because most visitors won't click pass beyond the splash page.
     
    8everything, Oct 30, 2007 IP
  19. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #19
    Landing pages/splash pages are just a waste of bandwidth, an annoyance to repeat visitors, and even an annoyance to people coming to the site for the first time because frankly they are not visiting your site to see some goofy full page animation or banner, they are (at least SUPPOSED to be) visiting your site for the CONTENT.

    Anything that gets between getting the visitor to the content as quickly as possible is usually a BAD idea.
     
    deathshadow, Oct 30, 2007 IP
  20. nix

    nix Guest

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    #20
    I always visualise what my design is gonna be before i even sit down to make it, lol sometimes i take 2, 3 five minute breaks after designing parts of the site just to revise on the look and start fresh so i get better ideas to implement the design.

    I always follow the golden rule : "if it doesnt seem to look good, IT ISNT GOOD!"

    another important rule i follow is keep a good contrast between the site and important content so that it flashes up to the reader on first glance, and doesnt waste time looking elsewhere...

    just the other day i read somewhere.... webmasters spens an average of 1-5 minutes on a new website trying to assess if the site is useful, THE REST SPEND LESS THAN 30 SECS!, now thats hell of a short interview of the website with the customer... so make a site which sweeps the customers eyes way from the start to the purpose of creating it.


    hope this was helpful to you all lol just my opinion on the matter
     
    nix, Oct 30, 2007 IP