Web Design Elements You Should Avoid Having on Your Site

Web Design Elements You Should Avoid Having on Your Site

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your
visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most
important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn't matter if you had
the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly
done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors
will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about a
good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point
out that there are many components which contribute to a good website
design -- accessibility design, interface or layout design, user
experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is
graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I've
come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your
own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the
criteria, you should know it's high time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything
related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting
looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to
you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages
and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the
background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I'd
just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add
to the visitors burden when viewing your site -- users on dial up
connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is
meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics -- user
accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on
your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors
to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the
content of your website or your sales copy is, if it's illegible you
won't be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in
my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just
close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my
popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and,
well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important
message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed
most of the time it appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses
its function immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your
job is to make sure your website does what it's meant to do
effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from
functioning optimally!

--
Regards,

Jeyasithar R
(www.CO5.in)

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Ways To Improve Sales Through Your Website

Ways To Improve Sales Through Your Website

Anyone who has been marketing online knows that the lifeblood of a
business is the traffic of a site. More visitors equal more sales.
However, here are some ways that you can tweak your sites with to
improve sales without the need to get more visitors.

The first method is to weave in your personal touch in your sales
message. Nobody wants to be sold to by a total stranger, but many
people will buy what their close friends recommend to them. If you can
convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their
best interest at heart, they will be convinced to buy your products.
Remember to speak to an individual in your salesletter, not to your
whole audience.

The second method is to publish testimonials and comments from your
customers. A good idea would be to publish both good and bad comments;
that way prospects will be really convinced that these testimonials
are real. When prospects see testimonials on your website, they will
have the confidence to buy from you because human beings follow the
herd mentality; when others have bought and proven it authentic, they
will jump on the bandwagon and buy too.

Use visual representations for the problems and solutions that your
product offers. Not everyone will read your text copy from the head to
the tail, but most people will pay attention to images on your
website.

Offer quality bonuses to accompany the product. When you offer bonuses
that complement your product, your prospects will feel it's a very
good deal and it would be stupid to miss it. Be sure to state the
monetary value of your bonuses so that people will be even more
compelled to grab your good bargain.

Lastly, ask for the sale! Many people entice their prospects with the
benefits of their product, sell to them with stories of how it has
solved many problems, even offered killer bonuses but forget to ask
for the sale. Give a clear instruction on how to buy your product
(e.g. "click the button to buy now!").

--
Regards,

Jeyasithar R
(www.CO5.in)

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The Importance of A Good Design

The Importance of A Good Design

Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual
representation of your company whether your company exists physically
or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you
physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline
company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a
good design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your
salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are
dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally,
you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This
works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put
together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute "quick fix", you are
literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and
you do not care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website
layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have
given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about
professionalism. You are organised, focused and you really mean
business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your
company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to
promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as
you grow your business, these items become the face of your business.
Once again, think of the "salesperson dressed shabbily" anology, and
you will get my point.

--
Regards,

Jeyasithar R
(www.CO5.in)

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Search Engine Friendly Pages

Search Engine Friendly Pages

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors
coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is
search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence,
by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank
easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index
websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a
page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own
database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using
frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots
and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover,
frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your
site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images.
Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you
present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual
form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that
search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is
about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are
making the search engine robot's job easier so they will crawl and
index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and
efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and
make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

--
Regards,

Jeyasithar R
(www.CO5.in)

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Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization

Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization

Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every
year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good
old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of
the equation when you're designing your website, and a very major
consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of
your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short
time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is
mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to
strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract
your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on
your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I
really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary
information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file
size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an
image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the
"quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good
enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it
at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many
free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce
your image's file size.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to
get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your
images in GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the
color information not used in your image, hence giving you the
smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often
compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

--
Regards,

Jeyasithar R
(www.CO5.in)

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Pros and Cons of Flash-based Sites

Pros and Cons of Flash-based Sites

Flash-based sites have been a craze since the past few years, and as
Macromedia compiles more and more great features into Flash, we can
only predict there will be more and more flash sites around the
Internet. However, Flash based sites have been disputed to be bloated
and unnecessary. Where exactly do we draw the line? Here's a simple
breakdown.

The good:

Interactivity

Flash's Actionscript opens up a vast field of possibilities.
Programmers and designers have used Flash to create interactve
features ranging from very lively feedback forms to attractive
Flash-based games. This whole new level of interactivity will always
leave visitors coming back for more.

A standardized site

With Flash, you do not have to worry about cross-browser
compatibility. No more woes over how a certain css code displays
differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. When you position
your site elements in Flash, they will always appear as they are as
long as the user has Flash Player installed.

Better expression through animation

In Flash, one can make use of its animating features to convey a
message in a much more efficient and effective way. Flash is a
lightweight option for animation because it is vector based (and hence
smaller file sizes) as opposed to real "movie files" that are raster
based and hence much larger in size.

The bad and the ugly:

The Flash player

People have to download the Flash player in advance before they can
view Flash movies, so by using Flash your visitor range will decrease
considerably because not everyone will be willing to download the
Flash player just to view your site. You'll also have to put in
additional work in redirecting the user to the Flash download page if
he or she doesn't have the player installed.

Site optimization

If your content was presented in Flash, most search engines wouldn't
be able to index your content. Hence, you will not be able to rank
well in search engines and there will be less traffic heading to your
site.

Loading time

Users have to wait longer than usual to load Flash content compared to
regular text and images, and some visitors might just lose their
patience and click the Back button. The longer your Flash takes to
load, the more you risk losing visitors.

The best way to go is to use Flash only when you absolutely need the
interactivity and motion that comes with it. Otherwise, use a mixture
of Flash and HTML or use pure text if your site is purely to present
simple textual and graphical information.

--
Regards,

Jeyasithar R
(www.CO5.in)

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Movie remix - sms

Boss (a) baskaran remix:
"paperla answer elutha evlo kastapada vendi iruku paathiya?"

"Vidra machan, papera thiruthum podhu mark poda avan kastapaduvaanla"

Regards
Jeyasithar

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