Posted by admin on April 23, 2008 under Web Design | 
Creating a website is not so much a feat, if we compare it to the education of other technical skills. Most people tend to give up and pack their bags as soon as they hear the word “programming” and “technical”. They think it`s too much of a hassle to actually learn a whole computer “language”. HTML, the most basic computer language in building websites, is actually pretty simple to understand, as long as we have the interest in learning new things.
What is HTML?
HTML is the acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. For learning purposes, just think of it as a language that the computer understands. For example, as humans, we were taught different languages; i.e. HTML as a language, is mostly and specifically used to create a website. The web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, will then decipher and interpret the code or rather, language(HTML), and display it in a way we can understand it, just like in a basic webpage.
Coding.
Coding the HTML language might be a bit tough for some people, so we can actually purchase programmes, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, or even Microsoft Frontpage. These programmes are solely created to help individuals in designing professional web pages/websites.
Furthermore, one could also gain access to online web-builders, website builders that are inbuilt and can be directly controlled from the net. There are many different and specific builders online.
Books and magazines contain guides that can help in offering tutorials and ways to put up our own websites. Even online tutorials are credible, as in the modern world, information technology is the best and most cost efficient way in retaining knowledge, especially in this particular field.
So, you could start and build one right away. If you enjoy coding, it might even become a favorable past-time.
Books on creating websites
Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual
by Matthew MacDonald – Computers – 2005 . Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual is a witty and intelligent guide for all of you who are ready to make your ideas and vision a web reality. Limited preview .
Microsoft Office 2003 All-In-One
by Joseph W. Habraken – Computers – 2004 . Creating Web Pages in Word In this lesson, you learn how to work with Word’s capability to build World Wide Web pages, and you learn how to add hyperlinks.
Creating Web Pages For Dummies
by Bud E. Smith, Arthur Bebak – Computers – 2006 . You’ve probably seen a few impressive Web sites and now you’re inspired to Creating Web Pages For Dummies will help make your Web page stand out in the .
Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Creating Web Pages
by Todd Stauffer – Computers – 2002 . The book begins by explaining the need for HTML and the basics of good Web page design. Limited preview .
Creating Web Pages All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies
by Emily A. Vander Veer, Eric J. Ray, Deborah S. Ray, Damon Dean, Doug Lowe, Camille McCue, Emily Sherrill Weadock, Joyce J. Nielsen, Mariva Aviram, Stephen Lockwood, Madhu Siddalingaiah – Computers – 2004 . 9 books in 1—your key to terrific Web sites! Your one-stop guide to building great pages with the most popular tools Whether you’re opening an e-business or .
Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third-Generation Site Design
by David Siegel – Computers – 1997 . In this expanded second edition, you’ll find the techniques and principles you need to build sites for today’s 4.0 and the coming 5.0 browsers. .
Dave’s Quick ‘N’ Easy Web Pages: An Introductory Guide to Creating Web Sites
by Dave Lindsay, Bruce Lindsay – Computers – 2001 Sites My goal in writing this book is to make web publishing accessible to as many This book shows how to create a web site without spending any money. .
The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Websites
by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, Jason I. Hong – Computers – 2007 . Beginning with a tutorial on customer-centered Web site design, this updated manual features a comprehensive compendium of ninety Web site design patterns, Limited preview .
Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites
by Patrick J. Lynch, Sarah Horton – Computers – 2001 . .
Creating Web Sites Bible
by David A. Crowder, Andrew Bailey – Computers – 2004 . Jam-packed with more than 800 pages of expert advice and hands-on guidance, this book has everything readers need to build their own cutting-edge Web sites ? .
Posted by admin on under Web Design |
There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.
Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.
If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.
Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.
Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.
Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.
Books on Creating Search Engine Friendly Web Sites
The E-Business Formula for Success: How to Select the Right E-business Model
by Susan Sweeney – Business & Economics – 2001 . Objective — Design Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly Creating a search engine This means that the more Web sites you can get to link to your site,.
Search Engine Visibility
by Shari Thurow – Computers – 2003 . Read What’s Being Said About Search Engine Visibility The mythos and shares her knowledge about creating search friendly web sites in this invaluable.
101 ways to promote your web site
by Susan Sweeney Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly Creating a site that is search This means that the more Web sites you can get to link to your site,.
Streetwise Maximize Web Site Traffic: Build Web Site Traffic Fast and Free
by Robin Nobles, Susan O’Neil – Computers – 2000 . Create search engine-friendly Web pages that will boost your site to the top of the rankings and significantly increase your Web site traffic for your.
Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists
by Shirley Kaiser – Computers – 2006 . If you provide good, search engine-friendly internal HTML text links within your site, crawlers will likely follow those links. If any of your web pages’.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Web Page
by Paul McFedries – Computers – 2002 . Using the <META> Tag to Make Search Engines Notice Your Site The big search engines such as Google and AltaVista scour the web for new and updated sites..
Building Online Communities with Drupal, PhpBB, and WordPress
by Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little, Jared W. Smith – Computers – 2005 . Getting good search engine ranking — that is, getting your site higher up in the search results when people look for web sites on your subject — is.
Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase Sales
by Catherine Seda – Business & Economics – 2004 . E-Commerce Sites Aren’t Search-Engine Friendly E-commerce sites are mostly dynamic. What did you learn in Part III about dynamic web pages?.
How to Start a Home-Based Online Retail Business
by Jeremy Shepherd – Business & Economics – 2007 . Page 75 Web sites done strictly in Flash might have the graphic pizzazz, Although there are ways to design a Flash site that is search engine-friendly, .
Marketing Through Search Optimization: How to be Found on the Web
by Alex Michael, Ben Salter – Business & Economics – 2003 . Have HTML links Often, web designers only create image map links from the home page to inside pages. A search engine that can’t follow these links won’t be.
Posted by admin on under Web Design |
Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.
Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.
Books on Good Web Design Practices
The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Websites
by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, Jason I. Hong – Computers – 2007 . Tedeschi, B. (1999, August 30) Good Web site design can lead to healthy sales. New York Times E-Commerce Report (www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/.
What is Web Design?
by Nico Macdonald – Art – 2003 . Clients ln the early days of Web design clients understandably knew little about design in the medium and good designers were in demand..
Dreamweaver 8: Design and Construction
by Marc Campbell – Computers – 2006 . “Best design practices using Dreamweaver. Fast prototyping using Dreamweaver. Fast web development.” “Cool idea,” I replied. That’s when he informed me,.
Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web
by Jennifer Niederst Robbins – Computers – 2007 . This edition has been completely rewritten to be in compliance with the standards and modern web design practices. The markup chapters emphasize using HTML.
Designing With Web Standards
by Jeffrey Zeldman – Computers – 2007 . Bad Browsers Lead to Bad Practices Then came the 4.0 browsers. to support Netscape 4—and mistake “support for Netscape 4,” which is a good thing,.
DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model
by Jeremy Keith – Computers – 2005 . In this chapter, I’m going to apply those practices to the image gallery. Whether it’s CSS, JavaScript, or visual design, a good web designer will.
Handbook Of Human Factors In Web Design
by Robert W. Proctor, Kim-Phuong L. Vu – Computers – 2005 . If you start off with a bad design, small changes just make it not quite so bad. It is the deep and detailed analysis that leads to good initial designs..
Technical Communication and the World Wide Web
by Carol Lipson, Michael Day – Education – 2005 . A good web designer listens and understands immediately why a user is having A great designer becomes the user during the act of design..
Innovation Networks: Theory and Practice
by Andreas Pyka, Günter Küppers – Technology & Engineering – 2002 . The case studies highlight that, while web design is constrained by and notions regarding what qualifies as ‘good design’ or ‘good design practice’..
The Architects’ Journal
Architecture Periodicals – 1919 Do not be put off if the design company has not done an architectural web site before. After all, most practices have yet to establish sites..
Posted by admin on under Web Design |
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
- Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
- Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
- Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
- Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!
- Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work.
Books on Web Design Rules
Search Engine Visibility
by Shari Thurow – Computers – 2003 . Thus, a perfectly good #1 search engine position can be wasted if your site designer does not consider download time, or any of the other design rules..
Handbook of Human Factors in Web Design
by Robert W. Proctor, Kim-Phuong L. Vu – Computers – 2005 . Example of Design Rules FIGURE 38.4. Types of guidelines and sources. Note. Recommendations include design rules and ergonomie algorithms..
Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference
by Jennifer Niederst Horizontal Rules The simplest element you can add to a web page is a the <hr> tag that allow authors to “design” rules more to their liking; however,.
The Online Rules of Successful Companies: The Fool-Proof Guide to Building
by Robin Miller – Business & Economics – 2002 . Basic Web Design Usability Rules This Web stuff is not brand-new anymore. We have enough experience with it that we can come up with rules that make a site.
Systems, Social and Internationalization Design Aspects of Human-computer
by Gavriel Salvendy, Michael James Smith – Human-computer interaction – 2001 . Design rules: they comprise a set of functional and/or operational specifications that specify the design of a particular user interface..
Professional Web Design: Techniques And Templates
by Clint Eccher, Eric Hunley, Erik Simmons – Computers – 2004 . Page 4 KNOWING THE SEVEN RULES OF WEB DESIGN There are seven basic rules that, if followed, will help a beginning or intermediate designer become a professional: .
Web Design Tools and Techniques
by Peter Kentie – Computers – 2002 . Web Design Rules Rules and laws apply to all professional areas. In professional Web design, some might assume that these rules are still under.
Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web
by Jennifer Niederst Robbins – Computers – 2007 . You will find that there are already rules in the style sheet for changing the colors of the four link states. Start by turning the underline off for all of.
Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM
by Cameron Adams – Computers – 2007 . Accessibility is now very important in the field of web design. The rules of CSS Style sheets consist of a number of rules that define how various web.
Web Accessibility: Web Standards And Regulatory Compliance
by Jim Thatcher – Computers – 2006 . Statutes and Regulations A statute is an act of legislation declaring, commanding, or prohibiting something — such as a website design element..
