(Web developer) Some Major Keys To Better Websites
No commentsBy Kristi Ambrose
Most people simply do not understand the pure importance of a professionally built and professionally looking website. However, to put this into perspective imagine this; when buying a new pair of pants, what do you look at? Well if you’re like the other 98% of people on earth, chances are you are going to really focus on the design, how its made, if you see any imperfections, etc. Well this is the same way people look at websites. Now in most cases the website really doesn’t matter if it’s a personal blog of some sort. But, if this blog or this website is your business then ya, design means everything.
Not only do you want it to be visually stimulating, but you want the website to look professional, like the person who owns the website really wants to show everyone that he or she is serious and that he or she does care what you think. Be organized. Make sure the site is user-friendly. It doesn’t matter if your selling novelty t-shirts or diamond earrings, the website is but the “face” of the site. In this one situation, I would recommend judging a book by its cover!
Let’s say for example you have two stores. Store A and Store B. Store A has a good website design, and incredible graphics. The colors match perfectly. The site has pictures available which are the correct resolution and the site also has the correct fonts, not too small, not too large, not hard to read. On the other hand, Store B has some really hideous graphics and the colors alone make you want to leave the site in a hurry. You realize suddenly that puke green, pink pastel, and neon yellow are three of the worst colors on the planet, especially when used together! There are pictures available, but they are grainy and pixelated and the fonts are all mismatched, on one part of the site they are all Arial bold type size minus 1trillion - so small you have to squint, and on other parts of the site its Italic and underline with a hint of ginormous, the font is so large you can literally read the print from your computer while sitting on the other side of the room!
Now who do you think is going to have the most conversions? The most sales? The most inquiries? Chances are everyone that goes to site A will stay awhile and look around, and with site B they won’t stay but one minute. This is what I’m talking about! The importance of design is above and beyond the main thing you want to pay extra attention to! So what do you do? What happens if you are color blind and don’t know what colors go with what? What happens if you don’t know how to size your photos perfectly? Easy! Hire a web designer!
Nowadays designers aren’t as expensive as they used to be, and with today’s technology these guys can build and design a professional alluring website for you in a fraction of time it would take you and your puke green, pink pastel, and neon yellow colored website! In fact, the designer in most cases will blow your mind at the experience he or she has! Now you can either get the designer to build the entire site for you from the ground on up or you can hire them for smaller jobs, such as designing a template, which is a great idea since templates are hard to make and pretty easy to upload.
Seriously, if you have had any complaints about your site, or if you aren’t receiving the amount of visitors you thought you would receive for your type of business? Check these guys out, I can absolutely assure you that you won’t be disappointed!
This author is a HUGE fan of Good Web Designer
The Good The Bad And The Ugly; Are Flash Based Sites All They’re Cracked Up To Be?
By Kristi Ambrose
As with anything else in life, there are pros and there are cons. As the master user, you are the one to decide if the con outweighs the pro or vice versa. Of course you always have a choice when doing a website, static, dynamic, flash, etc. But you also have to look at the pros and the cons not just from an owner view, but from a user view. Flash based sites have been a hugely popular thing to add to your site over the last few years, Macro-media has constant additions and features being added on to flash so we can only predict that more and more people will use them. However, flash sites often been said to be unnecessary and overloaded. Here is a breakdown for you, and then you can decide if you really want to go Flash Based or not:
The Good:
Interactivity - Flash’s Actionscript opens a vast amount of possible actions. Software Engineers, and designers have utilized Flash to create interactive characteristics arraying from very lively feedback forms to appealing Flash-based games. This entirely new degree of interactivity will always leave people coming back for more!
Standard Site - With flash based sites you needn’t worry about browser compatibility. No more woes over how a particular css code shows differently in IE, FF and Opera. When you position your website elements in Flash, they will always appear as they are, as long as the user has Flash Player set up.
Better Expression Through Animation - In Flash, you can make use of its animating benefits to convey a message you’re trying to make in a much more efficient and effective way. Flash is a light alternative for animation because it is transmitter based (and hence smaller file sizes) as opposed to real “movie files” that are faster based and hence much greater in size.
The Bad & The Ugly:
The Player - People ultimately will have to have already downloaded the player beforehand or they won’t be able to view flash movies. I know the annoyance isn’t lost on just me, I know a lot of us have gone to a site that only allows flash, and it won’t allow you to see anything unless you have the newest player on your computer. Frustrating. And even more frustrating in most cases you can’t just download the player and be on your way, no, you have to reboot, restart your browser, go back to the initial site and try again! It takes too much time, and you can in turn lose customers by having flash on your site.
Optimization - In most cases, if your website is in flashed based form, search engines won’t be able to index your content. Which in turn means you probably won’t rank well in the search engines and that means you probably won’t be getting as much traffic as you would, if you had a regular website, with no flash!
Loading Time - You want to get your customers/clients/users attention ASAP, the last thing you want to do, is lose a potential customer because the text and or image took too long to load. The longer it takes to load, the bigger risk your chancing that your customers won’t stay.
The best way to go is to use Flash only when you absolutely need the interactivity and motion that comes with it. Otherwise, use a mixture of Flash and HTML or use pure text if your site is purely to present simple textual and graphical information.
This author is a HUGE fan of New York Web Designer
Locate A Web Developer For Your Website Needs
Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
