Website Usability Tips

Navigation

Logically build navigation is essential to avoid that your site’s visitor get lost and give up on continue reading your site. With the lack of optimised navigation you can loose potential customers to your competitiors.

You can include home button in the navigation or back to the top link at the end of the page, the relevant category link on the sidebar, related pages link at the bottom of your page, breadcrumbs, clear where you are links etc. to make it easy and logical to your visitors to get from “A” to “B”. Don’t forget, not all your visitors will enter your site from the home page. It’s more likely that the starting point will be an article or a subpage introducing your services – you should guide them to reach the important contents from all the possible pages.

Don’t waste other’s time

Be clear and simple. Most users have limited time to get to the important information, you should consider if your links or content is hidden or hard to reach most likely your visitors won’t take the time to look for it. What may seem selfexplanatory for you it may not be simple for others to figure out.

Avoid Cluttering Elements

You might think it’s a good idea to put your favorite song in the background or automatically starting video cast, you are not on the right track in terms of usability. If it is your personal web designer and you don’t consider usability issues – well, it is up to you. But any other case give your visitors the chance to choose if they are really interested to watch that video, download that plugin or listen to that audio file. For some pleople (including myself) nothing is more irritating than arriving to a website where there is no clear guide what to do next or how to stop some annoying animation or advertisement.

Include Tag-lines

Statistics show that a website has 8 seconds to capture visitor’s attention before they leave the actual page. With a clear tagline you could help to sumerize what is your site’s main focal point.

Include Site search

Especially if you have an extensive content on your website, you can help your visitor to get to the important data by implementing a site search. Consider some main rules for the search box: make it 27 character wide, place it on top of the page and include a clear search button.

Graphics

Use it wisely, it should add some extra meaning to your website. Avoid using generic images which just take up the space and doesn’t have any value in terms of usability. Don’t forget that sometimes less is more.

New Technologies

There are always some very attractive solutions what the modern web browsers are capable of handling. You should always consider the fact that your visitor might use an older web browser or visit your website on a smartphone. Inlcude degradation, special style sheets for different media, fall backs for these cases. Test your site on different browsers and devices to make sure it will be usable for everyone.

Responsive web designing

Not long into the current millennium, design for the web was in transition. The methods and techniques we had used to make our first mark on this new communications medium were becoming staid and unsustainable. New possibilities in separating content from the presentation layer were permeating their way into the industry, and cascading style sheets were the way forward for the responsible designer. Adoption was neither universal nor instantaneous. There was resistance, confusion and some very vocal debate throughout the design community.

From the CSS with dynasols. The site, if you don’t know it, accepts CSS submissions and applies them to a core HTML file, demonstrating how separating content from its presentation facilitates a beautiful, effective flexibility. In 2003 it marked a sea change. It enlightened many designers, including me, and put the argument for the jump to CSS beyond debate.

We are in similarly epochal times today. Technology, hardware and software combined have presented us with another fork in the road for online design. The flagship approach to these new challenges has an official name: responsive web designer, a term that packages up a collection of techniques. A banner of convenience it may be, but it at least suggests a direction. Its greatest achievement has been coalescing the design community in a way that links circulated on Twitter or hundreds of disparate, fragmented blog posts – no matter how insightful – do not. RWD offers a sense of unity.

There are a number of other, less celebrated concepts in circulation that are often confused as interchangeable with RWD: future friendly. One web. Content out. Number wang.

The smoke signals coming out of the industry simply add to an air of confusion; strangely, it’s a topic that sets designers at odds. I say strangely, because any forward-thinking designer must see the accommodation of multi-device access as a necessity. In that sense I am an advocate of RWD. And yet I am also wary of sliding towards a ‘the answer’s RWD, now what’s the question’ stance.

Uncomfortable reality

In practice, we can face an unenviable choice on commercial projects: do we deploy a visually unappealing but responsive website, or a highly engaging fixed-width site? An exaggerated distortion perhaps, but one that I believe represents the uncomfortable reality for a large proportion of designers trying to integrate a responsive approach into cost-sensitive projects. Implementing RWD techniques can occasionally detract from the user experience, specifically in the area of visual design. Is compromise the ultimate price we pay for progress?

RWD may not be perfect. It may not be suitable for all projects. But it is evolving. Ben Callahan’s excellent post ‘The Responsive Dip’ references Seth Godin’s ‘dip’, the “long slog between starting and mastery”, and applies Burch’s four stages of competence to responsive web designer. We’re all in there somewhere, and I’ll willingly place myself in the ‘conscious incompetence’ category. And like many others in the profession, I’m working hard to bring sense and order to the new device landscape we now operate in. I believe that in essence the argument is settled. We all want what’s best for the user, right? We’re just fussing over the minutiae of technique.

So what do we need? I believe we need a new focal point for the design community, in the spirit of Shea’s original proposition. We need a centre where we come together to work, to grow, to tend and to nourish. We need … a garden.

Why? To create a bridge between the zealots who imply we should all, as individual designers, just get on with it, put up or shut up, and the deniers who have their heads in the sand, sensing that RWD means a further loss of control over the visual layer.

Communicating Your Needs to Your Web Designer

Communicating Your Needs to Your Web Designer

Communicating with a web designer can be the most difficult part of the hiring process because you and the web designer don’t speak the same language when talking about the details of a website. This article explains how to get your ideas across to the web designer you want to hire.

Ok, so you’ve decided to hire a professional web designer to build your website. You spent some time looking for the right person. Eventually you found the right web designer that you believe will design the most “remarkable”, “extraordinary” website the internet community has yet seen.

So now what? Explaining to the web designer the layout design you have in your mind can be a very frustrating process. You will find that putting the “picture” in your mind into words can be a difficult task. Actually in most cases this is the biggest hurdle between you and the final outcome. No matter how talented the web designer is, if you can not communicate with him properly, in his own professional language, he will not be able to use his talent to achieve your design.

There are two possible situations you may face:

1. You know what content you want on the website but have no clue how to present it to the user.
2. You know what content you want on the website, and you have the layout in your mind, but you don’t know how to implement it.

In both cases you will need to explain your thoughts to the web designer. Although most people who read those lines are probably thinking that being in the second situation is better then being in the first situation. However, real life experience shows the opposite to be true. Giving a web designer the complete freedom of action regarding the web design based solely on the website content is usually a smart thing to do. You will find that explaining to the web designer what the nature of your website is, whether it’s a product that you want to sell or a hobby item, is much easier then trying to explain to him the temperate of the color schema or an undefined shape that you would like to have in the website header.

Actually for both of the situations, I would suggest you use the same approach, but with a minor modification to each situation. If you know of a website that has all the features you want or need and/or a site that looks the way you want your site to look, be sure to give the site’s url to the web designer. Doing so will give him some idea of want you want. You will both be looking at the same thing but will actually look at it from a different angle. Therefore, it may be better to give him more than one website as an example. The more websites you find that can express your feelings and/or needs, the easier it will be for web designers to understand your intention without you having to use a single “technical” term. Chances are that you won’t find a single website that has all of the feature you want. After all, if such a website already exists there would be no place for your new web site to be born. Use several websites to express the different features you want. Spend as much time as necessary until you find just the right websites to provide examples of your needs. Doing research at this stage will definitely save you a lot of time later trying to point the web designer in the right direction.

Although you are the one who needs to express your self to the web designer, you must learn to listen to him as well. When he uses technical terms, ask for their meaning. Do not finish any part of the conversation unless you are absolutely sure that both sides are on the same page. Remember that when a web designer speaks about the temperature of a color, he is not talking about the next day’s forecast.

Remember, you hired a professional web designer because you want a professional looking website and you couldn’t do it yourself. So, trust the web designer’s judgment when they tell you something you want won’t work or isn’t the best way to accomplish your goals. After all, you are paying them for their expertise. Don’t try to tell them how to do their job.

It is OK to require that a web designer gets your approval each step of the way so you can tell them if one of your goals isn’t being met. Also, if you really don’t like how something looks and want it changed, tell them immediately. Don’t wait until everything is done and then decide you don’t like it.

eCommerce Website Design

eCommerce websites have their own unique character that is designed to lead the visitor to one simple task – make an online purchase. A web designer needs to consider a variety of online selling principles while designing an eCommerce website. In this article we will try to take a look at some of the major design aspects that you must have in an eCommerce website.

Many of you are probably already asking why eCommerce website designing is different from any other website design. They all need to be attractive, well organized and use the right colors that fits the website spirit and so on. Your instincts are good. However a close look at some successful eCommerce websites will reveal the conceptual differences that are typical in a successful eCommerce website.

An eCommerce website needs to follow certain selling principles:

Give the user a pleasant experience during his online shopping.
Make certain you provide sufficient information on who owns the website and why they should be trusted.
The website must be easy to use. If it isn’t, the visitor will go to your competitor.


Those principles are not new. We all know those basics from our day to day experiences in the mall, shopping center and every other market place that is waiting for us to open up our wallets. The big challenge for a web designer is how to translate those conventional marketing techniques to the virtual world of the internet. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that in most supermarkets the bread stand is placed at the far end of the building, yet you can smell the fresh bread at the entrance (sometimes they even use a special air duct to carry the smells). That has been done deliberately. Marketers use our sense of smell to draw us through the store where we are exposed to all sorts of tempting goodies as we go to get our loaf of bread.

How do you draw an imaginarily path in a web page? A path designed to lead the visitor to do what you want him to do…make an online purchase. Unlike the supermarket our website has no smell. In a website the distance from one point to the other is pretty much the same, so the exit is always right there. In a website you can try to order the “shelf” in the way you think will best expose the visitor to many of your products, but there is always a chance that he will find a short cut to another page that can also be the way off your site.

As can be see, although putting your products on the web is much easier then renting space and opening a supermarket. However, selling your products on the web can be difficult.

A good eCommerce website design will lead the visitor to the right page in one click or two at the most. Sometime web designers will use techniques that would never be considered for non-eCommerce websites. Everyone has seen at least one sales letter website. On these web pages the only link is to the order form. Sales letters are not the most typical eCommerce website because they usually sell only one product. That allows the web designer the ability to exaggerate the one click principle and make it an advantage. All the facts about the product have been presented to the user is a smart way while every few lines he has the option to click on the order form. If he is not yet convinced he will have the option to continue to read more facts and testimonials about the products. Believe it or not, those sales letter websites are actually selling.

“What about online shops?” Online shops have to deal with more then one product. Of course, the greater number of products increases the complexity of the website. Sophisticated eCommerce websites use a variety of personalization technologies in an effort to determine the best selection of products to offer to the visitor. Personalization technologies are a major part of advanced eCommerce websites. However this topic is beyond the scope of this article. The cleverness of an eCommerce website’s personalization technology has a major influence on its design. The first to use such technology was Amazon.com who decided to push their client’s books to a visitor based on that visitor’s past orders combined with the statistics they had collected on all visitors used to predict what someone looking at a specific book might also be interested in reading. Today the goal is to try to predict what to offer the user on his first visit as well.

An eCommerce web design is also about the layout. One important aspect is where the user’s eyes look first when accessing a web page. Lots of research has been done on this topic. Most research showed that the middle left side area will attract the most attention followed by the center of the page. By using these techniques web designers try to draw the “walking path” for the visitor’s eye, much like what was done at the supermarket. An experienced eCommerce web designer will know how to create designs to meets those demands.

If you are about to open an eCommerce website or you are already own one, make sure you understand the web design principles for online selling. Consider consulting with an experienced website designer preferably someone who has experience with eCommerce websites.

Tips Profoundly Useful For Web Designers

While designing and development of a website, it is imperative for designers to keep a check on its usability. The more it has the usability factor, the greater it will be liked and used by the users. Present era in the Internet world is a challenging time for web designers as they need to develop their website more of its worth.

The other important thing designers should do is to pay attention to the exact needs of their clients with meaningful custom web designing. This should be their sole objective. According to some, concentrating on usability factor for start ups and smaller businesses proves little costlier and which is an area exclusively for fortune 500 companies. But if given focus on small but important points after doing an extensive research, small companies can also increase usability of their websites. This article discusses on those usability factors that you must include in your web designing project to increase its visibility and improved usability, these are;

Test your Site's Usability Early in the Development Phase

It is better to check the usability of your web design at the early stage of website development so that changes, if needed, related to technology used, design and optimization can be done with ease and without letting the website hampering its performance on the web.

Make an Analysis of Your Website's Traffic

Keeping a track on the visitors coming to your site will help you know the weaknesses and strengths of your website. And accordingly you can find out which web page attracts more traffic and for how long people like to stay on particular page. This way you can build and apply a better strategy to your website for better results.

Make Web Pages Scannable

it has already proved that visitors usually avoid reading the whole website content and spend a lesser time on the website. They just scan the website. Therefore, keep the important lines highlighted and sub headings bold and make use of various colours.

Give a Tagline to Your Website

A suitable Tagline given to your website reflects the exact objective and motto of your business that helps create impression on visitors. Try and use effective Tagline related to your business that will help audience understand what is your business all about and attract majority of visitors towards your site.

Make sure to Give Proper Navigation Route to Product Categories

Here, we are basically referring to E-commerce sites or sites offering a wide range of products. Such websites have greater usability when their design layout has good navigation system. It should allow the visitors to browse through the categories/ products well, along with their name, price, value, date and other specific details of the products. If you will not do so or your visitors don't find easy access to the products, your site will have probability to lose potential customers .

Use of well-structured Typography

The designers do not need to master in the creation of their own style of fonts instead they should have basic knowledge about the right use of typography used in the web page. As a designer, you must know that typography used in a website design has to do a lot with website's usability.

Ensure Checking out a Simple Process

Make sure to keep check out process simple for customers. About 60 to 65% of potential customers discard their shopping carts because of complex checkouts. This may create the biggest problem for you as it restricts potential customers to turn into real ones. Ask your visitors few important things only which are really necessary.

Implementing above mentioned points into your website will increase its usability and make it more accessible to the users. And not only this, it increases the chances of transforming your visitors into real customers.

Maneet Puri is a Managing Director at LeXolution IT Services, a professional web design firm in pakistan. The company provides efficient web designing services and SEO services to its clients in addition to expert advices by the consultant to create a successful online presence for their business.

5 Timeless Web Design Elements

5 Timeless Web Design Elements!

Change is a constant thing in the web design industry. New trends and technologies come up every new day and new styles are defined. While something may be hot favorite today, the same might go stale tomorrow. And to keep up with the industry trends, you need to employ the latest styles in your website design. However, given the volatile nature of the web design company and the changing fashions, it becomes and impossible task to change your website design according to the changing fashions. That is why you need to identify styles and trends that have a timeless appeal so that they continue to work well for your websites for a long time.

Here are some popular web design elements and trends that have a timeless feel to them and continue to be in fashion till now and will be for a long time.

Green Elements – Trees, Leaves and Grass!

Hardly any environmental website can do without the use of some greenery. In fact, the use of green trees, leaved and grass have gone beyond just environmental websites and is used to display an 'eco-friendly' feature. And with more and more businesses 'going green,' this trend will go a long way.

User Icons & Avatars

With the immense increase in the popularity of social media, user icons and avatars have come to play an integral part in website design. They are used as graphic elements on social media websites like social networking websites, blogs, forums to represent users. The whole emphasis is on the user base and community. And because social media is predicted to be the future of Web, this web design trend is here to stay for a long time to come.

Slide Shows

Slide shows are a very popular web design element used primarily by corporates and business websites to display their products and services. This is usually featured on the homepage as a welcoming presentation. In addition, blogs and news websites use slideshows to feature their posts.

Animated Characters

Several websites use animated characters as a mascot. These characters not only add life to the homepage but serve as a website ambassador for the visitors. Popular microblogging website Twitter has a blue bird as its mascot and is literally identified with it.

Huge Vibrant Icons

There was a time when huge massive vibrant icons were a big no-no. However, with the changing times we have realized that people are less interested in reading huge rolls of content and rather are more comfortable in navigating crisp buttons. Moreover, with the increasing popularity of mobile web, large sized buttons and icons are becoming the need of the hour.

Gone are the days when whitespace was considered waste-of-space. Designers now realize the immense importance of having whitespace in web design to create a neat and clean layout. Professional web designs incorporate lots of whitespace in their designs in order to highlight the key elements on the web pages. In fact, the background color of the website is best kept white or at least restricted to any light color.

Maneet Puri leads LeXolution IT Services, a reputed offshore web design company based in India. His company offers an extensive range of web based services to cater to all the online requirements of clients. Some of the popular services offered by the company are website design & development, website maintenance and even website redesigning.

Flash Web Designing

Much has been said about flash websites by webmasters, web design companies and web gurus and a vast majority of the discussed content criticizes flash rather than appreciating its functionalities. The deciding factor why using flash has been put into the disrepute is that its effectiveness is judged with a website’s ranking in a search engine result pages. Because flash websites require more work and these are not easily ranked on Google and other search engines, flash is best believed to be ignored. But if you consider the pros of flash and the improved range of functionalities it come with, flash websites are actually not an evil, but these are vitally crucial to engage your target audience. Given below are pros of a flash web designer and how to fall in love with it rather than not using at all.
Why use flash?
Flash movies load faster with quick response time, it quickly caches its movies eliminating the need for reloading, it adds interactivity into a website, and it can creatively sell your message to your target audience using functionalities unfounded elsewhere.
Flash creates possibilities of using innovation to its highest level
A website designed in flash is a creative showpiece of your work! In other words, you can use movies and animations to creatively introduce your products and services and then thoroughly add other features that can further excel its look
Flash engages viewers; makes scope for detailed interaction that works!
Flash websites record a good amount of traffic rather than their HTML counterparts not because of improved ranking, but because flash can convince traffic with artistic design and receive repeat viewers who love to visit the site/s on a regular basis.
Flash is easy to create
Such websites are easy to create and relatively economical compared to other form of interactive media development. If you hire a web design service or a web design company to create a completely new flash website, chances are you would get it done quickly since developers can tweak and bring in the new look without much work
Cons of flash websites
To create a wonderful flash-based website, you need to have a good knowledge about your target audience and create movies that are just perfect.
Flash can make a site bulkier if the web design company you have hired work on wrongly focused ideas rather than working on core things.

Later Innovations in Web Design

The internet is an evolving product. The earliest web pages were text and static images only, which took an extensive amount of time to load over slow, dial up connections. The language behind the web, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) had limited features, to link pages together and facilitate finding files. Asides from that, the internet birthed out of teletype machines and text based newsgroups. But the web as we know it today took several evolutions before it was as an obscure a hobby as having a HAM radio licence. Over time, however, the web evolved, as did the education access, including web design courses.
A web designer probably uses a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web design software program, uploads files without thinking much about it, and makes the wireframes of their design in a sophisticated, GUI based graphic design software program. The can certainly still work on HTML in a text editor, but they also have graphical and design control elements, such as Div layers, which govern exact placement on a page of image elements and text, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), over arcing graphical and layout guidelines that allow style guidelines for an entire page to be part of a single document.
In the early 2000s, the most exciting thing in web design was tables. There were animated images, and in browser video players, but social media was a telephone and mobile phones were brick like objects that belonged to stock brokers. Over the course of the decade, despite an initial dot com boom caused by over investment in all things technical, progress marched forward.
Blogging, meaning an online journal, became a thing. Oversharing through web cameras was pioneered, and more and more people got online. Web design courses started being part of high school, rather than the bizarre province of nerdy autodidacts. Social media came to be, and email increasingly became a browser based endeavour, rather than under the control of a separate software client. Computer courses changed almost annually to keep up, and libraries house a legacy of progress with outdated software manuals. Several operating systems came and went, while new browsers pushed to the forefront.
From a web design perspective, screens got bigger, so pages changed in look, evolving from clunky tables to cleaner and sleeker displays. Blogs birthed blogging software that is now used as a content management system by many websites, while web design became a matter of front end looks and back end coding. Social media plugins, a term, incidentally that came into common use from a popular open source browser of less than a decade of age, are now integrated into many pages to keep users connected across websites in ways that
Valeria Stephens is a Copywriter at Higher Education Marketing, a leading Web marketing firm specializing in Google Analytics, Education Lead Generation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Mobile SMS Alerts, Social Media Marketing and Pay Per Click Marketing, among other web marketing services and tools.

How to get started with Responsive Web Design

Buzzwords and hot topics making the rounds in web dev circles these days include the phrase “responsive web design,” also referenced by the acronym “RWD.” The phrase was coined two years ago by Ethan Marcotte and first introduced in his List Apart article “Responsive Web Design“ and then his A Book Apart format, Responsive Web Design. If you have not read his article, I suggest you take time to review his key points, including:

• flexible foundation
• fluid grids
• flexible images
• how “responsive architecture” in physical spaces became the catalyst for his forward thinking of practicing responsive web design
• implementing the media query

How to grow as successful web designer

Communication is the key

Effective communication is the key to success in a web design project as you are communicating with a customer or web developer. So, while you are presenting your work to client, you must be bold and vivid. You should be strong about your design choices like why you select them and how will the design you choose will benefit their business.

Sell Yourself

Now a days, competitions among web designers were grown high. So you must be willing to sell yourself. while you are presenting your work to client, you must be bold and vivid. You should be strong about your design choices like why you select them and how will the design you choose will benefit their business. Some of them are Word of mouth marketing, social media marketing and even business card marketing can work well.

Plan First Design Next

Prevention is better than cure. While designing keep this proverb in mind before you start to design. Better start is half done. So you need to think and design which will make your design looking good.

Evaluate and Get Feedback

Feedback gives you the plus and minus in your design. You can make changes as per the feedback received. This will make the design more appealing and catchy to users. So always evaluate your work.

New Technology Up-Dates

As new updates in designing are coming out frequently, you should keep you updated to compete in the world. So study all the new web technologies in design field.

Be business minded

A web designer must be good in creating business solutions for their clients, rather than design a web site. You must understand the firms marketing requirements and predict the thoughts of the potential visitors.

Well Updated Portfolio

Have your portfolio well described about you and your projects. A new client will give you job only he satisfied with your profile. He must be having the hope and faith that you can do this web designers. So list your expertise and tools you know and projects you completed and so on.

Designing For Your Website

When designing your website you will have to get your creative muscles going. Depending on your level of experience, and how much time you are willing to spend, you will have the opportunity to choose between designing the site yourself, purchase a pre-designed template or hire a web designer. They all come with their advantages respective disadvantages, making the decision a tad difficult. However, either way you choose to design your website there are a couple of “think abouts” that you need to know.

Mistakes to avoid

Let us begin with having a look at a couple of the most frequently made mistakes. In avoiding these you are on the right path to a beautiful and functional website.

Poor navigation

When designing a website there are lots of things to consider and one of the most crucial is the navigation of the site. For example, think about what the most natural and user-friendly way of setting up the menus is? Should they be vertical or horizontal, or maybe even both? Browse the web to check what the current trends are in order to stay up-to-date. Whatever you do, make sure you do not have way too many links and images as it will only leave your visitors confused as where to click.

Overusing Bandwidth

Most of you will probably get, or do already have, affordable quality hosting supporting your website but you will still have to be careful with overusing the bandwidth. This is especially true if your site is crammed with images or other heavy graphics. Also, remember that your visitors might not have an equally strong Internet connection as you do, resulting in a very slow experience for them. Visitors who feel that things are taking too long to load will most likely leave your website.

Making it too complex

We have already mentioned that your website should be user-friendly and publishing complex graphics is quite the opposite. We understand that it can be tempting to use for example Flash on a website but try to resist this urge. Flash will not get indexed by the search spiders and some visitors will have to download a plugin to see your Flash file, something that they do not want and should not have to do. If you can not resist using Flash – be sure to publish readable content that complements the Flash file.

Two simple tips

So you now know three things that you should try and avoid. Let us now instead take a look at two simple tips that can be good to keep in mind as well as trying to implement in the design plan when creating your website.

Create pages

It is perhaps a no-brainer but the more content, read pages, you have on your website the more pages will get indexed by the search engines, hence boosting the authority of your site. However, remember what we said above – the site has to be easy navigated and too many pages can become confusing for your visitors. Yes, try to create a lot of content but do not add content and pages simply because the sake of creating content. It has to serve a purpose.

Link internally

One way of increasing the user-friendliness of your website is in creating and adding natural links internally. If done properly your visitors will be able to click, and surf, your site and find exactly what they were looking for and hopefully also much more. Linking internally is also good site working with SEO as search spiders like to look for good links. Do not use phrases such as “click here” when linking internally – try to use relevant keywords and phrases instead.

optimize and optimize

The next important step to take is optimizing your website. You want people to find you, do you not?

Best Web Design Companies Listed

Great Web Design Companies Listed

If you need help with your website, you should choose a web design company firm that are present in the region that your visitors are coming from. In the listings below, you can find some of the best web design companies around the globe...

PAKISTAN

1.dynasols.com
2.webdesignislamabad.net
3.medialinker

Canada

1.Deck Fifty Design
2.Jatech Web Design
3.dynasols.co.uk

Costa Rica

1.Quazar Web Design

Arizona

1. Web Design by Steve
2. Web Design Phoenix

Arkansas

Australia

1.Multimedia Australia Web Design
2.Media Two
3.Definite Web Design
4.CSSReX
5.Above & Beyond Web Design
6.Webtron

New Zealand

1.AMG Design
2.Digital Arts

1.Armadillo Web Design

California

1. Link Web Services Inc

Florida

1.Tampa Web Design
2.Flourish Web Design

Georgia

1.GoWebDog

New Mexico

1.Robust Group Albuquerque Web Designs
2.Data-Scribe

New York

1.Blog What Design
2.New York Web Design
3.Aunt Reenee's Websites
4.You Need it All Web Design

North Carolina

1.Capstone Design Group
2.BlueTone Media Web Design

Egypt

1ClickNet

South Africa

1.FirstNet
2.The Internet Company
3.Enigma-Designs

Hong Kong

1.Siam Communications
2.Pete Wong & Designers

Web Design Guidelines

The goal of most web designers is to create an attractive, easily accessible and functional website that will convince the visitor to do something. Creative web design requires good graphic design, easy and intuitive site navigation, logical site layout and good web copy. The following suggestions are general web design guidelines.

Web Content

You want the visitor to see you as a knowledgeable information source and/or a reputable business. Poor grammar and spelling will immediately reduce your credibility. Remember that people use the internet to find information. Whether you are selling your own product or recommending someone else’s products, you must first provide valuable information to the visitor or they will click away and find a website that gives them what they what they want.

Graphics and Photos

Web surfers are impatient and studies show that most people will click away if a webpage takes longer than 10 seconds to load. Always optimize your photos and other graphic files to have as small a size as possible without sacrificing picture quality.

Always use the height and width attributes on the picture so the rest of the page can load while the graphic files is downloading. Use the ALT HTML tag so people with graphics turned off and those using hand held devices know what the picture is supposed to be.

Multimedia

Multimedia is composed of flash movies, video clips, audio clips and background music. Always use streaming media because it reduces download time. Make sure the visitor can stop and start multimedia files or in the case of flash introductions, skip them if they want. That way people with slow connections or devices that don’t support multimedia can ignore them.

Also, put any important information presented in multimedia in text as well so the visitor has access to that information without using multimedia. If a plug-in is needed to use the multimedia, always provide a link to it so the user can install it. Finally, always remember the 10-second rule for site loading when deciding to use multimedia.

Site Navigation

Site navigation should be simple and intuitive. Studies have shown if a visitor cannot access the information they want within three clicks, they will leave the site. This is called the 3-click rule. Every area of your website should be reachable within three clicks from anywhere else on the site. If you use anything other than simple text links, make sure to test your navigation in all the major browsers.