Website design should have good look and feel to attract visitors and to convert visitors into potential customers. Keeping this in view the website can bring business to you only if it looks professional as it represents your business identity and standard of service you provide. A good looking professional web design can do wonders for your brand image and credibility online. Here are some innovative ways in which you can now transform ordinary pages into stunning web pages. View my blog on how to make your website professional. You are most welcome to share more suggestions on making website more professional and putting impressive corporate image on the user and potential visitors.
Certainly, this goes for the "old-school" (personal) homepages with busy and/or animated background images, examples of which one still encounters once in a while. Those background images are very distracting and very unprofessional, but what do visitors in general think about the currently popular smooth gradient background colour, such as the one in the attached file "background1.png"? Is that considered equally annoying as an "old-school" background image? What about the one in the attached file "background2.png"?
I agree with Lawnchairlarry. The gradient background is very popular right now..even in web 2.0 website, they use it too.
Some suggested items for your list on how to make your website professional: Cross-browser compatibility - Often neglected during the design process, yielding ugly or even malfunctioning websites Avoid an advertising overdose - Many newbies to internet marketing stuff their website with advertisements, which is rather annoying for visitors. Add a sitemap - A simple thing to do and always useful for large websites and SEO
Thanks yes i missed these points i agree that unnecessary advertisements, pop ups should be avoided and yes sitemap is a useful resource for browsing the website at a glance but can you elaborate how can we neglect cross browser compatibility
Well these background colors are quite popular these days but they should be used in a proper manner like the content on these backgrounds should be clearly visible and should be placed in a contrasting color match plus they should go with site's theme. But still I prefer light background images may be white in color which can give my site a clear look and feel
Actually, backgrounds are pretty popular with a lot of professional designers. Like you mentioned ealier, it's just how you implement them that makes some sites look less professional than others. Right now, horizontal tiling background images are very popular for professional looking websites. I got these examples off CSS Mania: webdesign.nl printfellas.com
Yes i do agree , horizontal scrolling should be strictly no while designing any site whether it is formal or informal, commercial or non commercial To add on scrolling also hinders the user friendliness of the website.
At the end of the day, it's down to user preference. Some people don't like scrolling down to read, but how would a forum be possible without downward scrolling?
I think scrolling down is ok: People with slow internet connection then don't have to load many sites. But i am against scrolling horizontal. If someone's just surfing through the net and comes past your site with horizontal scrolling, I think he wouldn't make himself the effort to scroll to the side. And the first appearance of your website counts the most: It decides whether the user comes back to it or not... Well thats just my opinnion
Thing one missed much professional need not be engrish. Leastwise not be engrish ranguage site be needed.
Oh, BTW - to make a site 'professional' it probably shouldn't do what it's doing in the attached .png... Which I'm seeing in Opera and Safari... It also shouldn't have TWO scrollbars for one page like it does in Firefox/Opera. (here's a tip, overflow-y is a BAD idea, especially since it's not valid CSS even if gecko and trident support it!) Let's go down your points: 1) I agree with this... One should not use too many animations - especially flash. Frankly I don't think flash has any place in any LAYOUT, and should be restricted to games and videos. There's a reason it's called flash and not substance. 2) Duh, anyone who doesn't know not to use popups by now needs a brick upside the head... Though not all sites are about 'making purchases', even information based websites or galleries can get annoying with this ****. To this I'd tack on ANYTHING that opens images in a separate window as the default behavior or siezes the focus from the page - like lightbox. That **** is annoying, feels slower, and in general makes pages HARDER to use. 3) Now this I disagree on. Certainly image backgrounds can be taken too far - but for a lot of pages it's enhances the appearance greatly be it simple shading or a certain type of striping. The big thing to watch out for here is to make certain your backgrounds do NOT go behind the actual page content... and I'd tack transparancies onto this as well. Too often you'll see backgrounds running behind text with transparancies that make the text itself almost impossible to read. This is getting worse with crap like Vista's new theme which tried to do that rubbish to your desktop. (I ****ING HATE TRANSPARANCIES). Usually though you only see this type of garbage from myspace nubes. 4A) ABSOLUTELY. Another excellent example of this is 'download now' links that take you to a page with a 'download now' link that then links offsite to download.com's page with a 'download now' link that takes you to their actual download page. Quite often with a number of companies I end up screaming at the display "FOR **** SAKE, JUST LET ME DOWNLOAD THE ******* FILE!!!" 4B) partially agreed, BUT, you can go WAY to far the opposite direction. You see this with news sites where 80% of the page is filled up with advertisements and template, having maybe 1000 words of article divided up into 10 pages. Waiting for all the rest of that crap to load just to read past the second page is often enough for someone to say "screw this", go into google and try to find another page on the subject. 4C) While the home page should probably be on a site's menu, having a link "Go back to home page" is unprofessional and ancient style coding. Needs to go the way of the dodo along with "click here" links... Though it could be worse like say... this nonsense of putting a header over the menu that reads "navigation" or "Main Menu" - people know what a menu is, you don't need to label it. 4D) I used to think this way, but as sites grow dropdowns can become unwieldly and annoying. (or that could be my arthritis bitching about absurdly undersized fonts on menus making them hard to navigate anymore). To your list I'd add a few more points... MAKE YOUR FONTS BIG ENOUGH IN THE FIRST DAMNED PLACE. I cannot believe how many sites you see (like the one we're linked to) that use fonts smaller than 12px for their CONTENT. At the very least content should obey the system metric so large font/120dpi users aren't diving for the zoom control when they land on your site. I consider 12px the smallest size you should EVER use for accessability reasons, and I get twitchy below 14px unless said text is all caps. REALLY you should be using %/em or pt so that users (like me) don't have to zoom in 25% or more to make the page JUST reach legible font sizes. DO NOT USE MULTIPLE VERTICAL SCROLLBARS - one scrollbar per page is enough. Multiple vertical scrollbars are annoying, confusing and a pain in the ass since it takes users normal navigation, bends it over the table and, well... DO NOT PUSH YOUR CONTENT DOWN MORE THAN 200PX WITH HEADERS. Again, the site in question is quite guilty of this. With that honking oversized 'all your website needs' banner, giant logo's below the sections area up top, the menu and THEN the actual article header - 1024x768 users are likely having to scroll down just to read the first line of actual content text... I know 800x600 users would (not that the design is 800 friendly)
I think the key here is that backgrounds need to be a lot more subtle if they are still going to be used. Also, if you are using a free image hosting site to hold the background image, be aware that if you get a flood of visits they may suspend the image and leave you with a hideous looking background. I've read an e-book that talks about using only white for a background under the assumption that Google, Yahoo and MSN use them because of its simple look. Does anyone else agree with this?
Very nice article for people who are just getting into HTML / CSS. The only thing I disagree with is the following; ) No image backgrounds You will be surprised to hear this but having an image background on your site can actually send out the wrong signals to customers! Any professional web design strategy will never use such images. They send out an impression that your site lacks quality, is unprofessional and is generally sub-standard. Code (markup): That is very untrue. Microsoft uses a background image, do they lack quality (ok maybe), but they are professional...