Website Design Ideas

I’m sure one cannot imagine a world without the Internet or e-mail. The new generation has been lucky enough to be raised in one of the most advanced and downright coolest times in technology. There are iPods, iPhones, touch screen computer desktop systems and the explosion of digital cameras and camcorders on our telephones. In terms of website design, a website is so much more than slapping together a few HTML codes that you copied from the source of another cool website. Web designers, graphic designers and webmasters work together for a common goal – designing the best website on the Internet. There are so many facets of a website – here are a few web design ideas to get you started.

The Basics

The purpose of website design is to create a website that presents well to the end user over a variety of platforms and bandwidths. If you have a dial-up modem and the website uses Flash plug-ins with music over a framed website, it may load slowly and be difficult to capture the designer’s intent. Content, visibility, usability and appearance should all be taken into consideration when designing a website and can make for create website design ideas.

If you browse the Internet, you will see lots of websites that garner website design ideas for your own use. Basic website design ideas include style, color, navigation, implementing web traffic techniques, optional content like blogging and images.

Website Design Tips

A well designed and developed website requires a lot of thought, a little research (look at other websites) and someone who can make your ideas come to life. The first page that a person sees is the website’s homepage. This page is the person’s first impression and will determine a return visit. Well thought out web design ideas need to start here. If the background or text color is neon orange, it will probably not invite people again. Beginner website design ideas often start with the person’s first image. So, to determine the right color is to do a little research on what background color compliments your text and graphics. Picking the right color sets the mood and tone of your website. For a few website design ideas about color visit [url]www.colorcombos.com[/url].

Navigation and menu items are also important website design ideas to consider. Try being creative by using website design ideas using different shapes like a map or an island with links to other parts of your website. Clean, neat navigation can be vertical, horizontal, images or text. Some websites still use some form of rollover buttons or rollover swap images. Macromedia Flash is a wonderful n application used heavily in website design to add interactivity.

The popular use of patterns makes for wonderful website design ideas. Wood, notebook-like paper, paperclips, watercolors, tacks and handwritten notes are a great set of website design ideas that are popular trends. These website design elements aren’t solely for those in the graphic arts field. Child psychologists, tourism departments and personal online portfolios now embrace website design ideas like post-it notes, large fonts, script fonts, sketches and vintage/retro styles. Notebooks or post-it notes are great website design ideas for writers or clothing designers. Each of the different elements mentioned serve a purpose in terms of filler, pizzazz and texture.

Have You Seen My Website?

After you’ve created this über-cool website, now you need to publish it for the public to see. Webmasters are adept in FTPing the files and implementing techniques to boost traffic like submitting the website to search engines and utilizing web statistical software.

Website design ideas often come from seeing other websites. Blogs are another popular element in websites today. There are millions of blogs in existence. A blog is essentially an online commentary with text, images and sometimes music, audio and video. Blogs can be personal like an online diary or more formal like for businesses. To determine whether your website design needs to incorporate a blog involves a little thought. In terms of website design ideas, blogging is a great Internet marketing tool. To use it personally, it can be a fun way to post personal messages about yourself or what’s going on in the world.

As a business owner, a blog is a way to have a real voice to users (as opposed to a customer service representative or e-newsletter), post discount coupons, announce sales or company updates and increase revenue to your online store. A blog does not take the place of a traditional website or your online store. The blog portion of your website design idea will need a unique domain name like [url]www.mystore.com/blog[/url]. In addition, when you decide to add a blog to your website, make sure it’s in the same subdirectory so that traffic ranking sites like Alexa don’t count your blog and website as two different sites. If everyone is visiting your store, but not as many people are reading your blog, the hits still count and give your store a better ranking position.

The hardest part of website design is the brainstorming. There are often so many website design ideas to choose from to settle on just one. Just take your time and keep the end user in mind. You can always re-design your website in a few years!

Web design is a crucial part of crafting a small business, especially if one intends on doing almost all of their business online. The web design of a small business’ web site can make or break their profit margins. Small business owners have a lot to consider when pondering the web design of their new web site; should they have a flashy web design or something more simple? Should they outsource their web design or attempt to complete the task themselves?

Web design can be an extremely daunting task that leaves many small business owners feeling as if they will never be able to make a successful mark in the online retail market. However, here are some simple web design tips that will help any online retailer improve their web design.

Make a Plan and Stick to it - Too many small business owners become caught up in implementing cool features and unnecessary flash in their web design. When embarking on web design, have a concrete plan of how you would like your web site to be designed, and what special features you would like to have. After that, do not be tempted to add more features or expound on your original plan to much. Nothing turns potential customers away like an overcrowded and hard to navigate web design.

Color Counts - Color is an important part of web design, and color can make a small company look more interesting and exciting. However, going overboard on color in your web design can leave your business looking a little cheesy. Not only is yellow text on a hot pink background difficult to read, but it appears as if a thirteen year old girl did your web design! Feel free to play with color, but remember that unless a very young or eccentric crowd is your target audience, it’s probably best to stick with more “mature colors”, such as navy or burgundy in your web design.

Easy Navigation Wins Customers - Nothing is more frustrating than a difficult to navigate web design to potential customers. When constructing your web design, remember that sub pages should be easily and visibly linked to on your index page. If someone is seeking a product or a piece of information, it shouldn’t take four hours to navigate your bulky web design before they find it.

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In the first article in this series, we reviewed the psychological power of color and how colors are subconsciously associated with symbolic meanings.

Colors have the power to affect our emotions, perceptions, and interactions. I failed to mention the color symbolism in the first article, Web Design Tips: Power of Color Part I was based on a purely Western perspective.

Other cultures may view colors from a totally different psychological point of view than Westerners. For instance, Westerners commonly view the color red symbolically with love and passion.  But, it represents good luck to the Chinese, and purity to those from India. Red is the color worn by brides in the East and mourners from South Africa.  It represents Communism to Russians and a color of Christmas and Valentine’s Day to most Americans.

Find out what a particular color may symbolize before targeting unfamiliar cultures.  This will help you to avoid any unintentional offense. Otherwise, web designers trying to maximize the psychological power of color may have their attempts severely backfire.

That being said, this second article will focus more on the effective use of color combinations and how color can be used to bind a design together for optimum appeal. Here are some web design tips to help in choosing colors in your next web design.

Web Design Tip #1) Don’t use more than two or three colors on a single page. Too many colors become too busy and distracting.

Web Design Tip #2) Use the same background color on each page of the web site. Maintaining color consistency throughout the web design is very important to overall site continuity and avoiding appearing disjointed.  Think of uniform background color of all site pages as the glue holding the site together.  Take away your glue and the site starts falling apart.

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When developing a personal or small business website, it is important to make sure that the user feels interested in each page and that they are motivated to fully explore the website.  There are many strategies to accomplish this and we will explore several such ideas below.

Tip 1:  Make each page count

If a user is going to click on a link, they want it to be informative, interesting, and worth viewing in its entirety.  One way to ensure this is to craft each page to be either new information or content that is useful to the reader.  Each new page on your website should answer the questions “Why is this page important for the reader?  And why should they click the next link?”  If the page includes advertisements, the ratio (and placement) should reflect this goal.  At the very least, each page should contain a 3:1 information to advertisement ratio.  The ads should also be broken up within each page to ensure that the page is fully viewed; nothing dissuades a customer like a long block of ads with no original content.

Tip 2: Avoid clutter

Nothing undermines the professionalism of your website like distractions.  Do not rely on animation and sounds; they can be distracting.  A visitor’s eye is best trained on the text of each page and the links you provide.  Unnecessary flair detracts from this purpose.  It is like trying to read on a crowded bus while being constantly jostled.

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Webmasters, maximize your web site’s appeal by incorporating effective use of color into the web site design. Color has psychological power. Humans subconsciously associate symbolic meanings with colors.

A web site’s color palette has the power to affect on-line visitors’ emotions, perceptions, and interactions. The right colors can help welcome visitors, soothe them, invoke their trust, and make them more tempted to buy.

Here are some web design tips to help you make more effective use of color in your web designs.

Web Design Tip #1)

Think of color as on-line window dressing. Real world brick and mortar businesses use attractive window displays to help draw passer-buys’ attention. Choosing the right color palette gives that same enticing appeal to on-line web site designs. It’s what binds your web site’s design together, giving it that professional store-front sparkle.

Misused, colors can have the exact opposite effect. Colors may unintentionally irritate site visitors, much like a bullfighter aggravating a bull by waving a red cape.

Web Design Tip #2)

Color choices should appeal to your targeted audience. The most effective color choices for a particular web design will not necessarily be personal favorites.

As a web designer, you are designing to impress your targeted audience. Help them more easily interact with your web page by choosing web design colors with this goal in mind.

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Web site designs generally evolve in certain stages over time. Inexperienced on-line business owners and web designers become fascinated and enthralled with flash movies, Java script, animation, and all the other more popular “bells and whistles”of website design. They frequently implement website design tips and strive to create “the coolest” looking web site they feel will appeal to their target audience.

Unfortunately, what often happens is this they fail to realize customers may become irritated with extraneous flashy and noisy features after they’ve see them several times. Instead of enticing web traffic and potential customers, all those extra flashy features may actually be distracting, rather than attracting traffic and potential sales.

More importantly, if the web site has not been optimized, customers may not even be able to find it on popular web search engines. Web site owners should implement some method to monitor web traffic and test to see if certain added features optimize, or reduce, traffic to their web site.

Avoid the “Dreadful Four” website design pitfall.

Many web designers fall into what I call the “Dreadful Four”. By avoiding the dreadful four you will save yourself a great deal of time and money.  Here are the stages:

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We all know that content reigns king, and the quality of the content on your website will determine its overall value to the reader. What we may not understand is the link between the psychological principles of online content and the response generated by the reader. Below is a look at some of elements to keep in mind when you are generating content for your website.

• If a potential buyer is involved in a conflict between their emotions or their intellect, the emotions will win. It’s your job as the content producer to either make this principle work for you or to avoid such a conflict.

• People tend to seek easy formulas to make complexity simpler. Any factor-benefit, feature, or otherwise-that creates confusion regarding your web content should be dropped from awareness, no matter how great it seems. This applies to selling as well as non-selling factors.

• Negative ideas can be misunderstood and take longer to interpret. Avoid negatives in your web content; Don’t introduce problems that didn’t already exist in the potential customer’s mind, even if you see your product or service as the solution to it. That will also create confusion, and it can un-sell what you already may have sold.

• People’s responses are usually in direct proportion to that with which they personally identify. Don’t assume that just because you know something about your product or service, your potential customer will too. On the other hand, NEVER assume that your prospects know nothing-never talk down to them.

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Hello Valued Foo’s!

We would like to be the first to welcome you to our newly designed skin! Yes, FooWebDesigns.com has upgraded our look and our servers too!

Unfortunately, in the process of upgrading to high-bandwidth servers, our database was lost, and hence the majority of our content. Not to fear fellow Foo’s - we are currently developing new articles that will help you drive traffic, increase your Alexa ranking, enhance your branding, and add powerful SEO tricks to your arsenal.

So slap me some skin, enjoy our newly design skin and let’s get back to SEO, web deisgn and branding tips, tricks and ideas that will leave your comeptition in tears.. All that is left is to pity the foo!