The Dos and Don'ts of Successful Web Design

With the online world growing increasingly competitive, having a profitable site has become more important than ever. Website design now needs to be about successful SEO, good user interaction and successful conversion rates. Fundamentally, you want a site that makes you money, not a site which is left to look pretty and collect nothing but 'virtual dust'.

Whether you are looking to make your own site or seek the services of a professional web design company (see - flyer design), here are a few of the top dos and don'ts today in successful web design:

Don't make search users work too hard. When on your website, users should not have to spend time looking for your products and services. So - avoid filling your site with irrelevant content that will distract visitors from what they're searching for.

Do focus on easy navigation and simplicity. A website which is well structured, to the point and easy to navigate will always prove popular with search users. When people view your site, they need to be able to find and buy your products or services easily. A site design that concentrates its efforts on good user-navigation will always prove to be more productive.

Don't overwhelm your users with too much information. Badly written or irrelevant content will not go down well with either search users or search engines.

Do include good-quality content. Remember - content is king! Relevant, good-quality content will be seen favorably with both search engines and search users. High-quality content will also lead to more organic linking to your site.

Don't use black hat SEO. What is regarded as black hat SEO? Invisible text, doorway pages or keyword stuffing - these are all considered to be forms of black hat SEO. Those who use black hat techniques risk missing out to higher rankings. So, is it really worth the risk?

Do hire an SEO expert. For your site to rank well within the search engines and place well amongst your biggest competitors, your website will need to be benefitting from exceptional on-site SEO. If you're new to SEO or not particularly confident in your ability to fully search engine optimise your website, you have two options; outsource some of your web design to an SEO expert, or choose a web design company that offers SEO as part of their web design package (see - business website design ).

These tips may help to mean the difference between a profitable site at the top of Google and a site that has been left to waste out in the online world.

For more web design tips and hints, or help from the professionals, see - www.webdesignessex.net or click here .

Get Going With it: Making the Most of Website Graphics and Also Photographs, Some Advice from Us about Graphic Design

If you are on the Web at all, you realise how much frustration is involved in waiting around forever for a site's images to appear. Yes, all those showy graphical contraptions can glitz up your site; however, they can dramatically slow down the load time of the page. Research unveils that a person doesn't typically have to wait longer than 8 seconds for a webpage to come into view. Thus, you must find the most effective balance between the proportion and excellence of your site's graphic content. Usually, web designers incorporate a 3-step method for optimisation of the image of a site.

Graphic Design Tip #1: Modify the Size of the Images on the Website

The most productive means of dealing with the size of images on a site is to implement image editing software which lets web designers to modify graphics to the most suitable size for your requirements. Image resizing should occur before images are place on a site. In short, you should not use web design software for revising images for the reason that they will load slow anyway. Typically, web developers incorporate unique software. If designers are cutting images down to size, they generally will provide the height and width attributes as these tell the browsers of the visitors the image's size. The end result? Speedier page loading.

Graphic Design Tip #2: Cut Down on the Number of Colours Implemented in Images

The number of colours there are in an image decide its size. Since larger-size images take a longer amount of time to load, you need to use as few colours as is feasible. However, the end result could be unnecessary colour banding in the site's imagesthis refers to the places where colours have been taken out and filled in with solid bands of colour Using this process, the colours are mixed together in an image to upgrade the looks of the banded areas. It tricks the eye as it makes us think that the page has more colours. Some testing with some pro-level image manipulation software can aid a web designer in locating just the right balance between size and colour.

Graphic Design Tip #3: Save Images in a Compressed File Format

The two most widely-used compressed file formats are JPEG and GIF. GIF stands for "graphics interchange format," and it works by preserving data in compressed image files by way of a loss-less process. However, the number of colours in a GIF image is limited to 256. Because of this, GIF is most appropriate for basic images like line art or little icons. JPEG is an abbreviation for "joint photographic experts group," and performs data compression so that data is lost, known as a "lossy" technique. If done correctly, the amount of data lost will reduce the size of an image, but not be noticeable to the user. Since JPEG can store millions of different colours (unlike GIF), it's ideal for intricate graphics and photos.

There is quite a bit to mull over when on the hunt for online-based graphic design and spending some time to understand the finer aspects will only serve to help you in the long run.