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Web Design

What are visitors looking for in a web site?
What is good web design?
What do you mean by navigate?
Is it hard to create a great web site?
What is bad web design? Why does download time matter?
What should I call my home page?
I just want to sell my product.  Does it matter what my site looks like?
I want my site to look good but I don’t have graphic skills.  What then?
What are good sites to visit to learn more?

What are visitors looking for in a web site?
Visitors usually come to your site with a question or on a mission.  They will love your site if you give them the answers to their questions or the solution to their mission very quickly.   

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What is good web design?
The secret of good web design is to design for the visitor.  Good sites are usually

  • Clean.  The designer didn’t use extra ‘stuff’ to make their point.  The buttons may have been beautiful, but they all did something. 

  • Simple.  The more clicks you have to go through to find what you’re looking for the more likely you are to loose people.  A good rule is two clicks.  The Internet is all about instant gratification. 

  • Easy to navigate.  If visitors wanted to dig through piles of stuff, they would have gone to the library.   Web sites are just groups of files linked together through hyperlinks.  If you make the links easy to understand then the visitor can find the pages.  If you have files that nobody can link to then you have a dead page that nobody will ever see.

  • Fast.  You can’t dazzle a visitor with your site if they have to wait forever for it to download.  Each graphic is a separate file.  If you have 15 pictures on your home page, then your visitor has to download 15 additional files just to get to your first page.  It’s better to put a page with lots of pictures deeper in your site so the visitor already knows they want to stay and may wait for the download.

What do you mean by navigate?
When you navigate a site you are moving from one page to another.  Most sites have some sort of navigation bar.  Ours is on the top of every page.  Some sites have their navigation bar along the left hand side of the page.  Others have them in both places depending on how deep their site goes. 

Another part of navigation is moving around on a single long page.  Take this page.  We've placed "Back" links throughout the page so you don't have to scroll back to the top to see more questions.  The back links compliment the  bookmarks throughout the page so you can jump to the answer without scrolling.

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Is it hard to create a great web site?
The hardest part of designing a great site is knowing what you want to say before you actually sit down to Dreamweaver or FrontPage or Notepad to pound out your files.   Content is still king.  Know what you want to say and design your site to say it.

For example, you want to sell frog ponds.  You sell the ponds and you sell the frogs?  Who is your audience?  What attracts them to want to put a frog pond into their back yard?  Will they want to see how easy it is to put in the pond or how nice it is to hear the frogs chirp at 10 p.m. 

What is bad web design?
A bad web design is usually

  • slow to download because it has so many large graphics that may or may not be useful. 

  • cluttered with no clear focus point.  If you’re selling frog ponds, then make those frog ponds the center of attention.  Are you running an ‘end-of-season’ sale?  Then make that part of the focus.  Don’t put a picture of every pond you sell on the home page, though.  That would be hard for the visitor to wade through (no pun intended.)

  • hard to navigate. If the visitor has to ask “Where is that?” then you are already in trouble.  

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Why does download time matter?
There are still people using a 28K modem who may want to access your site.  If they are looking for frog ponds and the search engine gave the 400 sites that also sell frog ponds, then you have about 15 seconds to keep their attention.  If your site takes 30 to download then you’ve lost them before you even got them.  

What should I call my home page?
Call your homepage default.htm, default.asp, or default.html. You can use index.htm or index.asp, as well, but it is less common.  If you use these names then anybody typing in www.yourdomain.com will not need to specify a page name.

I just want to sell my product.  Does it matter what my site looks like?
You can have a simple background and simple graphics and still have a great web site.  What is most important? Does your site give the visitor what they were looking for when they typed in your URL?

I want my site to look coordinated but I don’t have graphic skills.  What do I  do then?
Cheat.  There are hundreds of sites out there where graphics are free – free backgrounds, free buttons, free bars.  For a small fee or no fee at all you can use them on your site.  The only thing that the artist usually asks is you give them credit for doing the art.  Usually they have an attractive button you can put on your links page.  It’s a win/win.  They build a reputation and you get a better-looking site than you could have done on your own.  

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Where can I learn more about design?
One the fastest ways to uncover resources is to go to a search engine like Altavista or Google, type in such words as "design" "tutorials" and "free" and browse the sites returned.  Below is a very brief list of some we've found very useful.

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