Web Design Los Angeles

Archive for November, 2011

There are 1000s of ineffective websites on the Net because mistakes were made in the original design. You may have paid a lot of money to get a beautiful design but if it’s not serving its purpose (ie making money, attracting visitors) it will be rendered useless.

Top 10 mistakes in web site design

1. Unclear purpose

You may have been pressured to build a website for your business but failed to clearly define its purpose. Here are some questions to ask yourself in order to clarify your website’s purpose:

Do I want to generate leads? Do I want to display or sell products and services? Do I want to interact with my visitors? Do I want to build a relationship with my website customers? Do I want to offer tips, articles, coupons, etc on my website?
2. No long term plan

You may have heard the saying “if you fail to plan your plan will fail.” Your purpose integrates with your plan. For example if you want to generate leads, determine how many new leads you want each month, how you will acquire and build a relationship with them. You’ll also need to create a marketing plan.

3. Unclear navigation

Visitors need to easily access all parts of your website from the home page. If not they will click away to your competitors. Avoid using images, flash or javascript if possible. Search engines can’t index these files. Use CSS navigation instead. It contains clean code, loads fast and can be spidered by the search engines.

4. Cluttered pages

Web pages filled with images, videos, flash objects and text makes it difficult for visitors to read the page or understand what is most important. Web pages should contain plenty of white space between all the objects and be clear what you’re offering. The images should enhance the value of the content. Separate your content into short paragraphs. Use numbers or bullets to clearly define your ideas.

5. Inconsistent appearance

All web pages should have a consistent appearance so the visitor is not distracted from the purpose of the website or thinks he or she is on a different one. All the website components (ie images, text, navigation) should be in harmony with each other.

6. Poorly written web copy

Visitors arrive at your website to read what you have to offer. For example your home page should clearly state the purpose of your website. If you sell products write good descriptions about them. If you sell a service try to pre-sell the visitor on your website by talking about the benefits of your services.

7. Not optimized for the search engines

Most site owners want to generate traffic to their websites. One of the main strategies for achieving this is to optimize the web pages before the site is active. People find your website by entering keywords in the search engines. These keywords should be included in the content, meta tags, links, heading and subheadings of your web pages. Do your keyword research first so you can incorporate them into the design before the site goes live.

8. Slow loading pages

Typical visitors will only wait 3 seconds for your website to load. Many site owners want to fill their pages with lots of images, videos, flash objects and javascript. This may dramatically slow loading times and cause you to lose visitors. Reduce the amount of content on your web pages if your site has slow loading times.

9. Too much scrolling

Avoid horizontal or long vertical scrolling. Horizontal scrolling shows the site was not created professionally. Most visitors do not want to scroll down 10 pages to view information. Instead use links to direct them to another page. This helps break up the content and makes it easier to read.

10. Code errors, broken links and browser incompatibility

Errors in HTML, xhtml, php, javascript can influence the appearance, usability, loading and indexing of your website by the search engines. Make sure the code correctly validates before uploading it to the server.

Broken links prevent visitors from correctly navigating your website. Search engines will not be able to find your content. A large site contains lots of images and links. It will be easy to miss some of them. Run the website through a link checker and repair them before it goes public.

Your website may look fine in your own browser (ie Internet Explorer) but look terrible in browsers (ie FireFox, Safari, Google Chrome) your visitors are using. Check if your website renders well in all major browsers before it goes live.

If you want to build a successful long term business online you need to have a professional website designed that doesn’t contain any of these top 10 mistakes. Use this list when hiring a web designer to help you make an informed decision before spending your hard earned money.

A clean markup means the web design which is simple, void of confusion, complies with the standards and in which the structure along with the tags of the coding languages are used for the anticipated purpose.

The utility of HTML is said to be void of clutter only when the tags are used sparingly, the extraneous is got rid of, and the task is achieved with only the markup that is needed. Attributes like inline CSS that are needless are just avoided. This results in a design that is well organized and structured.

The CSS is said to be clutter free only when the repetition is avoided and there is optimum use of the re-use classes and inheritance wherever possible.

We can say that the web design complies with the standards when the design is validated with the W3C standards for HTML, XML and CSS.

Why is the clean markup needed?

There can be a number of reasons for adhering to the clean markup. Some of the prominent reasons are as follows:

• There are many clients that want the web design to be prepared as early as possible. The designer may succumb to the pressure of delivering the web design and for this may compromise on the requirements of a clean markup. This could result in a design that is carelessly prepared.

• If the designer were to adhere to the clean markup he/she would have to take the future projections of the business into consideration. When the design is done hastily, it is only the present that is given importance and not the future. When the web design becomes 3 or 4 years old it is most probably going to require changes or upgrading. If clean markup is not used the upgrading or changing can become a very difficult task.

• If the web design does not comply with the standards prescribed by W3C, there are least chances that the search engines favor you. On the contrary the web design may not be considered search engine friendly and fare badly on the search engine listing.

Here are some tips for Clean Markup

• Terms that can be understood should be used to name the IDs and CSS Classes

• The tags need to be used where they are needed the most and not everywhere. The heading of the page should have h1 tag. Care should be taken that no other text on the page has this tag.

• The CSS inheritance should be put to good use.

• The code generated by the WYSIWYG should be checked twice and changes made where necessary.

• The designer should not have a “will do” attitude. The website needs to work perfectly.

• If you are running short of time it does not mean that you should introduce extraneous tags or inline styles.

• The HTML, XML and CSS that you use should be validated.

Copyright © 2011

It is very important for web development companies to maintain best practices in web design industry. The web development and design business has grown in leaps and bounds since few years. The development firm need to have clear guidelines about the design, development, testing, support, and hosting phases of the project. All the project documents should be properly studied and analyst must prepare a scope features document. After approval, design team must use standard Google guidelines to design the page. The layout must be well organized and colors scheme must be synchronized at buttons, menu items and different sections of the home page.

The web design companies must adopt implementing the design in W3C/CSS confined layouts. They must implement each and every page with the compliance to make the web site look and feel professional. The sections should not overlap and all pages must look clean and properly aligned. It is important to test the user interface properly along with performance of the site. It is important that site must be browser complaint and should open in normal mobile phones and other operating systems like Windows, MAC without any issues.

A good hosting with proper security certifications is very important to maintain the performance and speed of the web design. The hosting should be taken from authorized providers only like Host Gator. The support and maintenance team must be appointed to solve immediate issues. From search engine point of view, it is very important that site must have industry related tags, keywords to attract crawlers of Google. This will generate traffic and leads in the website helping the portal to achieve business targets. All the pages must be coded in modular style to make quick updates in the later stages. The use of modern scripting techniques like JavaScript, AJAX ensures the dynamic features are displayed in the simplest user interface.