Web Design Tips

Useful Tips for Effective Web Design

• Neat and Easy Navigation: Navigation of links on your site plays a big role in determining the stickiness of your site (how long your visitor stays and explores your site). Ask yourself this, What do visitors do as soon as they open your site? They would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find any other page that interests them. Read our article on Web site Navigation Tips. 

• Clean Layout Design: A clean layout that uses a lot of white space enhances a site's looks. Try to keep the focus on your content, use dreamweaver templates for this. Use fonts that will be available on all computers to prevent your site looking messed up.
• Program using pure CSS: The world is moving away from table based websites to pure CSS websites because it offers accessibility, reusability and considerably reduces file size apart from giving greater control over the look of your website. The single most important skill you can learn today to become a quality web designer is CSS programming! Even if you are not an expert at CSS you can learn to use the following simple CSS Styles Effects to enhance your website:Cool Text Effects using CSS Styles: Text Links Rollover, Text Case Setting, Text Spacing, Line-through  Effect. 1.Bullets in HTML or Deamweaver:   Using CSS Styles with bullets (shapes, decimal, roman-numerals, images, etc.) 2.Links without Underline: Use CSS Styles to display links without the appearance of the underline.

• Optimum Load Time: Make sure your load time is low. For this you must: Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They hugely increase your file size. Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your site doesn't have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.Use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever possible. SSI files once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster.

• Design for all Screen Resolutions: A site that is easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay and read your content. For site with long pages of content this is very crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. Suppose your site doesn't look good for a particular resolution it is very probable that the visitor will close the browser window feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. Designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and professional site. Read our article Designing for all Screen Resolutions for more.Ensure Web site scalability: Make sure your code and design is scalable. As technology advances and configuration of computers & their monitors keep increasing and varying it is impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and platforms.
• Cross Browser Compatible: Make sure youcheck your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1+, Opera 7+, Safari 3+ and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the worlds browsers.
  

• Animation and sounds are distracting. How can anyone concentrate on reading what's on your site when there are things flying around the page? It's like trying to read a newspaper when someone's poking you in the shoulder repeatedly. Also, visitors who have slow connections may resent that you wasted their time by forcing them to load animations and sound files against their will. Conventional wisdom is that people will be drawn to an animated ad, but it's actually the opposite: Readers who are assaulted by blinking ads are more likely to leave the site immediately without clicking on anything, and are far less likely to bookmark the site, return to it, link to it, and recommend it. That's why research shows that animated banner ads may be no more effective than static ads, anyway. That's been my experience too: When I switched the ads on a friend's site from animated to static, click-through didn't suffer at all. (That site pulls in nearly $400 in advertising revenue, by the way.)
• Another problem with scrolling text is that the reader can't read it at their own pace. They're forced to read it at whatever speed you deliver it. They might have preferred to read those two sentences quickly and then move on, but because it's scrolling they have to sit there and wait for the text to slowly appear.
• This brings up an important point: Always keep your visitors' interests in mind. Make sure you try to please them, not yourself. Scrolling text does nothing to serve the visitor. If it's on a site it's because the site owner thought, "Let me show how cool I am." Do you see the difference? Don't design the site for yourself, design it for the people who will actually use it.

Now that you've created a website, how do you make money from it? There are at least two ways in which sites can make money:
Advertising Revenue
Selling Goods and Services
The first way is most common for earning money from a website.

Here is some definition:
CPM - cost per impression
Every time an ad is displayed it counts as one impression. Rates are usually quoted for 1,000 impressions. Good choice for a busy site.
CPC - cost per click
Every time someone clicks, it counts as one clickthrough. Rates can be anywhere form a cent to a dollar with .10 to .17 being common.
Leads
If you send a person to the site who then "signs" up or participates in some way specified by the ad sponsor then a "lead" is created.
Sales
You receive a commission on sales. Amazon is an example of this type of program. 
Affiliate
When you join up with a program or "associate" yourself with it you are an "affiliate". Usually they handle getting the ads, keeping statistics and you just need to display the ads.

Enjoy making money from your site ^_^