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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.
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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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