Successful Web Design Through Search Engine Friendliness

The internet is a vast relay of connections filled with hundreds of millions worth of data. Search engines play a crucial role in helping users get to the right information at a convenient amount of time. With the use of specific keywords, users find web pages that are filtered by search engines in different terms such as relevance and popularity. This process makes it easy for people to find what they are looking for. Search engines such as Google are one of the most popular in the internet, where billions of search processes are generated every month in the United States alone. Adding to the outstanding amount of search engine usage would be AOL or Yahoo! which contributes to search engines being the largest source of online traffic from any website.

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Spruce up Your Website!

The website has become a mandatory thing for every business and every one wishes to have a website in order to make them popular. The popularity of a website is determined by the number of users visiting the website and hence in order to promote the number of visitors for your website, you will have to design the website well. A good website design would be a great reason for many visitors to visit your website! A bad website design can spoil the entire idea of designing a website. It would irritate visitors, which in turn corrupts your name! Hence it is better to put good efforts in bringing out an excellent website. The following things must be given an attention in order to make your website look attractive!

Your Logo: Your logos would simply describe and make your company famous. Hence it is essential to put your logo in the website in order to make it familiar among the users.

Attractive tagline: Any one would be attracted with a good tagline and hence it is mandatory to add a good tagline to your website that would immediately catch the reader’s attention.

Interesting portfolio: Portfolio is another aspect which would attract visitors! An attractive portfolio would work wonders with the user visits!

Illustrate about yourself: The main purpose of a website is to illustrate who you are. Hence it is essential to put the details about yourself, which you wish to communicate to the public.

Describe your services: In order to make people understand about your company, you must add the services offered by you in order to make your clients understand and this would provide a great business opportunity for you!

Links to your blogs: If you have blogs, then you could provide links for it in the website! This would promote the user visits to those blogs. People generally tend to click link out of curiosity. This is also a great way to promote blogs!

Contact information: Contact information is another mandatory part of your website, which makes potential clients to contact you.

Link to social networking: There are lots of social networking sites which can be used to make the websites popular. Hence it is essential to add links to various social networking sites.

Links to contact you: There must be enough of links which would enable the clients to contact you!

Good content: Last but not the least, the content of the website must be interesting for the readers.

Also read 5 Important Tips for Web Design Success for more understanding on website design structure and important elements that make a big difference in the success of a website.

Until next time.

~ Valik

I Heart Post-Its, Why Post-Its Is An Effective Designer Tool

by Giancarlo Gallegos

Now, that I got your attention. I want to tell you a secret.

I love Post-Its. Period. I think they are one of the best inventions in the world. If there is anything I cannot live without, it would probably post-its. Okay. Maybe that might be an exaggeration. But, who has not benefitted from that yellow 76mm squared colored adhesive piece of stationery? I could never think of a more effective tool in reminding me of the things I need to do, of creating a stick man flip book, of communicating with others during meetings, of flagging emails print outs, bookmarking the last read chapter of my favorite novel, etc.

Lets Travel Back

If you are one of those unfortunate ones who is not familiar with Post-Its, here is a brief description of what they are. A Post-It note is a piece of stationery with re-adherable strip of adhesive on the back. It was designed to temporarily attach notes to documents and other surfaces such as walls, desks, computer screens, and so on. The most common color you would see is the yellow 76 cm square note (see image below). The unique thing about Post-Its note is that it uses low tack adhesive the can enables the note to be easily attached and removed on any surface without leaving marks or residues.

It was co-invented by Art Fry and Spencer Silver of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Comapany or 3M, in March 9, 1970. Leveraging its yellow note success, 3M decided to manufacture other product related to the Post-It brand such mini post-its, highlighter pens with post-it tabs, etc. Computerized versions came out soon after.

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The Structural Approach to Web Design

Photo credit: rudiriet

When designing a website, several factors are taken into consideration. One of the main objectives that designers often are required to satisfy is the usability of the website. It is important to note that if you have specific objectives to promote user friendliness instead of aesthetics that a structure-first approach to designing web sites should be used. A structure first methodology, which can look like an unintuitive way to design web sites for visually oriented designers actually carry several advantages.

Structure-first web design approaches are pedagogical; the designers are required to conceptualize the design as a separate but interrelated step. They are also practical, if you consider the functionality and effectiveness of a site it is measured by the validity of solid HTML code, which requires a separation between structures of the document by using tags and aesthetics by using Cascading Style Sheets.

Taking on a structural perspective in web design ensures that the contents of your web site will maintain readability in cases where the styling rules are disabled in your user’s browser. In situations where the user browses the pages by using a handheld device, like cell phones your visual formatting and assistive technology like screen readers are often ignored. A structural focus leads to the generation of many flexible web pages, which are viewable by users in several ways. These pages are easily reformatted if necessary, and can easily be revised and updated.
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Design Spectrums as a Balancing Act

Building a design spectrum is a method of visualizing the overall aesthetic and functional elements in a web design. It is important to use a gauge when measuring these properties to maximize the web site and ensure a balance is achieved between form and purpose. In web design, there are usually three spectrums that you can employ to measure if you are creating the right end result based on your objective. Spectrum one is to design the website to influence its users to generate a certain impulse, emotion or finish an objective. Spectrum two is used when your web design is focused on maximizing assistive tools to help the user complete the task generated by the design. The third spectrum is utilized when a product has functional and an aesthetic agenda, which require the web design to be attractive yet of good use.

A purely aesthetic approach would put your plans in spectrum one, where the design’s significant objective is to create sensory fulfillment, visual properties as well as color and stimulation are most important. Generating tools and creating portals or registration pages belong to spectrum two, where physical and behavioral stimulus is reinforced. In this spectrum, aesthetics are not important. Ergonomics and proportion is important in spectrum three; thus designs for projects like crafts, construction as well as objectives that mix visual and kinesthetic elements are best put in this category.

Usability against Aesthetic Value

This has always been a concurrent discussion in the design community, often referred to as “design versus usability” or a running argument that the elements of purpose completion is directly opposite to overall visual stimulus. One must need to consider that the overall design is influential; therefore an eye in aesthetic requirement is also important. It is practical to use one spectrum as compared to multiple design spectrums, it has often failed to deliver when a web design becomes a jack of all trades; trying to excel in both aspects.

A fundamental key to this is maintaining a balance between pleasing additions to a design and completing its functions. There are superior aesthetic sites that are functional and useful due to the developer’s diligent efforts to balance all elements in the layout, although this is not a concrete definition that all websites need to be on the aesthetic side.

When does your site need to be beautiful?

With websites whose primary objective is to promote product functionality helping the user achieve the completion of his task and fulfill the end goal of a specific objective is more important that creating an aesthetic feel to the project. In some cases, products that have a serious functional objective may be perceived as negative if drowned in high-end aesthetics and coloration. One must take into consideration that the more graphics embedded in a page, the slower it loads. This is often a disadvantage especially if high speed access to a specific site is detrimental.

The important thing to remember is to figure out the site’s ultimate objective. This will increase the chances for success and objectify the purpose of the product which will save you a huge amount of time avoiding redesigns. Placing specific markers at the start, middle and final review of the design to see if you are following your design spectrum will make sure that the objectives are met and you have a perfect balance between use and form.