USA SEO Pros: Web Design Blog

Most of the Web sites online have white backgrounds. There are good reasons why this is the case, but it can also be argued that there are times when using a darker background could be a good option.

What it really comes down to when you’re considering what kind of background to use is who your potential readers are and what the Web site is going to be used for. If you want a stylish Web site that doesn’t require a lot of text, and can be improved by highlighting a few specific things on the page, a darker background might work. A photo-heavy Web site or one that logically deserves a darker looking theme are times when a dark background are fine. Just because a lot of Web sites use white backgrounds doesn’t mean they all need to.

If you decide that a darker background is for you, then there are a few things to keep in mind:

If the Web site might be looked at by people at work, you may want to consider a white background instead. If someone is trying to look at your Web site when they shouldn’t be, a darker background is more likely to grab the attention of those who the reader may not want looking over their shoulder. For these time wasters at work, a site with a white background may be one they are more likely to stay on and check out. Also, keep in mind that the majority of people prefer a white background on sites regardless of where they are.

If your demographic isn’t time wasters at work and you want to make a dark background, then make sure to leave a lot of empty space around the content. A darker Web site is more likely to look clustered if there are too many things on the page, so make sure everything is surrounded with a border of the darkness. This empty space even applies to the text on the site. Use text that is more spaced out and a larger font size if it doesn’t make everything look bad.

Also, if you’re thinking doing a solid black background, you may want to reconsider. Using a darker background doesn’t necessarily mean using a black one. A black background causes too much a of contrast and can strain the reader’s eyes. Instead of using the black background, consider using a dark grey with a text color that doesn’t stand out as much. Using a background with some sort of designs is also an option, but the solid black can be a turn off.

There are a few very helpful landing page design tips that people can take advantage of when they decide they need specific pages to attract customers to different kinds of products on their Web site. If your site offers more than on kind of service or product, it may be a good idea for you to create different pages there serve different purposes.

For example, if you sell different kinds of auto parts, it might be a good idea for you to advertise for those different parts separately online, and if you do, it’d be a good idea to have those different advertisements go to different landing pages. Below of a few suggestions on how to do landing pages correctly. If a landing page is done right, it can increase your sales significantly.

1. Know your desired user by defining you landing page purpose
   If you sell cheese and crackers then your landing page purpose is to sell cheese and crackers to hungry, cheese-and-cracker-loving people. If you sell cell phones along with cheese and crackers, then you have two landing page purposes and need two landing pages. Don’t make your landing page a one-size-fits-all for everything you offer. People are going to your site for a purpose. Know what that purpose is a use it to your advantage.
2. Simple Design
   With any Web design these days, going crazy with graphics, flashing text or anything that will distract your user from the intended purpose is a bad thing. Subtlety is key in your overall design. Make it very simple for your customers to find what they want and purchase it, no one is going to be amazed by flashing images, unless that happens to be what you’re selling.
3. Focus on Purpose/Interest and the Call to Action (conversion)
   These go hand in hand, and they are what should stand out since the site is ultimately built for a specific type of user with a specific interest and a specific purpose.
4. Simplify your forms
   There is no reason to make your forms anything more than they have to be. If you Web site urges people to sign up through some kind of form, make it easy for them. Make the forms in logical place, and only have users fill in the information that is necessary.
5. Testimonials - depending on the landing page
   Depending on the kind of product or service you’re providing, testimonials can be an excellent thing to include on a landing page. Testimonials can provide credibility and trust to your business, which will make potential customers more likely to buy from you.

Check out the video below if you need some more convincing on why landing pages are a good thing to focus on when creating a successful online business.

The average Web site on the Internet doesn’t scroll horizontally, it has vertical scrolling. That means when there is more content on a Web page than there is displayed in your Web browser, the site will scroll down to show you the rest of the content. Web sites don’t have to have a vertical scroll, but it has become the norm.

Another option you have when creating a site is to have it scroll horizontally. This means the site will scroll right to left, instead of up and down. There are some designers who are using the side-scrolling option and it just doesn’t work, but there are also those who are able to use this design method properly. What it really comes down to is whether or not the site you’re working on is compatible with a horizontal scroll.

Not all businesses can benefit from a side-scrolling Web sites. If your Web site doesn’t naturally work with the design, a horizontal scroll is just going to confuse people. One thing that comes with vertical scrolling being the norm is that it’s what most people expect when they are introduced to a new site. If you decide to make your site scroll sideways, make sure there’s good reason for it.

Horizontal scrolling can work for photography sites, Web design and other not-so-business-like sites. If you’re site is supposed to be fun and encourage people to play around with it, then this kind of scrolling can work for you. In general however, a Web site should be easy to use, and horizontal scroll makes it more difficult. If you’re interested in this kind of scrolling, check out some inspirational horizontal scrolling Web sites.

If you decide to go the horizontal scrolling route, make sure to take into consideration that not everyone has the same resolution on their monitor. If you don’t take this into account, it’s much easier to forget to make sure everything is included on the screen that you  want there. People with lower resolutions will end up needing to scroll down as well as sideways if you aren’t careful.

After you learn the basics of how to design and code a Web site, there is still the matter of figuring out how best to design it for your specific purpose. What you think looks good, may not look good to everyone else, especially if you’re trying to get them to buy something from you.There are certain ways for you to improve the functionality of your ecommerce site in order to potentially improve your sales.

Building a successful ecommerce site requires more than just a good looking design. You have to make things easy for your customers. Never sacrifice ease of use to make things look better. The first thing you need to do is make sure things are easy to buy. Make your products visible and give people all the information they need to know before buying. Make sure not to include any excess information they could get lost in, and make sure to limit the amount of clicks in takes to get through the buying process. All the customer really needs to know is what they are buying, if it’s the right product for them, and how much it costs.

Also make sure to create several paths that customers can take to get to the purchase page. Using more than one path allows customers to find products in more than one way. If you have a directory, search and featured sections, then customers have multiple ways to find what they’re looking for. Combine that with a simple check out process, and it makes things a lot smoother.

Make sure the “buy” buttons are big enough for people to easily see, and don’t clutter up your Web sites with a bunch of unnecessary material. There are a lot of tips to turn browsers into buyers, but as long as you use some common sense and think like a buyer, you should be able to create something that will work. Focus on usability more than design aesthetics, and make sure it’s easy for people to buy what you’re selling. If they’ve found your site, you probably don’t need a whole lot of convincing, but give them enough information to feel comfortable with buying from your site.

The video below suggests six pages that ever ecommerse site should have. Those pages should be enough information for average buyers. Including more information than what is necessary could clutter your Web site up too much. Keeping things clean and simple is probably the best way to go for most sites.

Stealing is something very common in Web design. People are always being inspired by the clever things they see on Web sites, and then going and trying to reproduce a form of them on their own site. Although a lot of this is just a evolution of Web deign, there is definitely a line that shouldn’t be crossed.

A designer should never steal another site’s complete design or concept. While little things throughout the site might inspire similar functions you want to produce, make sure to implement a good chunk of your own creativity as well. It’s okay to be inspired, but that’s as far as it should go. Never steal someone else’s code, or mirror their design. An article from SitePoint describes this rule of stealing in simple terms: it’s okay to steal the inspiration, but not the outcome.

If you find yourself in a situation where you feel someone has been “inspired” by your Web site a little too much, there are actions you can take to try and take back what’s yours. It’s good to be a little forgiving, after all, imitation is the greatest form of flattery. But if the offending site is obviously ripping off what you worked so hard for, it’s time to do something about it.

A great article was published on Freelance Switch concerning what to do if someone steals you work, and it’s a good place to start when trying to build up defenses around your content.

The first suggestion in the article can seem a little amateurish, but that means it may be effective against those amateur thieves who are looking for good content to steal. At the end of everything you create and own online, you can put a phrase that lets everyone know that your content has copyrights, and that it isn’t okay to steal the content without your permission.

If you need tog o further than a simple warning on your Web sites, you can always send a cease and desist request, or contact a lawyer if you want things to get messy. Make sure to examine what the damages are that were caused by the infringement, and if they are small, then it might be best just to let some stuff slide.

Here’s what not to do when being “inspired”:

When you begin designing Web sites, there are a lot of ways to go wrong in what you’re trying to accomplish. The following is a list of what not do, and how to do things correctly.

Over Complicated Design Schemes/Layouts

Keep designs basic, putting in more than the eye can handle will cause visitors to leave your site. Before you start coding your site, reevaluate your layout - even if you have to go back and start from wireframe.

Not Sizing and Saving Images/Graphics for Best Use

Make sure to pay attention to image sizes,  prevent aliasing when saving and decrease load time.  If images are larger than they need to be, it will take longer to load them, even if they don’t appear as big on the Web page.

Using Tables Instead of Divs

While tables serve their purpose in a Web site (tabular data) they should not be used for your layout or navigation. Your code will get unnecessarily bloated in a hurry if you use tables where they don’t belong, which makes it overly difficult for anyone coming after you to edit or make updates to the site.

Not Keeping Consistent Design on Every Page

This is a classic sign of a complete novice. Your Web site is the online face of your company, band or whatever you may be promoting or using the site for. Let’s say a visitor finds your site through a Google search and the first page they are taken to is the “About Us” page. It has a nice blue header, white background and black text - not the best but clean and professional. The visitor likes what they read so they click to the “Home Page” and all of a sudden they’re on what appears to be a completely different site. Now there is an orange header, black backroung and white text. The visitor will quickly be wondering to themselves if they’re even still on the same site.

Let’s Find the Navigation

This also falls under “not keeping consistent design on every page”. If your navigation is horizontally placed just under your header on one page and vertically placed in the left column on the next, visitors are forced to play “find the navigation” on every new page, and that game sucks. Also make sure that all of your links work before you publish your site, article or update.

Not Checking in All Browsers

Designers need to make sure their design works on all of the major Web browsers. Fortunately, there’s only one Web site you need to go to to make sure that your design work. It’s called BrowserShots. Use it.

There are many reasons to think designing a website is an easy process. With the amount of software programs out there and with the number of free templates, it might seem like anyone can create a website. There are, however, many guidelines in the process of web design that not all templates include.

Here’s a list of some of the key design aspects needed to make an effective, functional and appealing design. No matter what you use for a design, whether it be a free template or building from scratch, including these simple design tips can go a long way to achieving the best possible website design.

The first tip seems to be one of the most important in designing  websites today: You need to make the site more usable for the people using mobile devices. The idea here is to increase the hit area on links for easier navigation on touch-screen phones. By increasing the padding of the links it’ll make it more accessible to touch the link you want to go to through your phone for better mapping.

Other web design keys to creating a quality design:

1) Make sure images and bad code do not slow down load and response time. This can cause problems with the effectiveness of your website. People are usually impatient when it comes to view websites, so slow load time is a very bad thing to have. It can also hurt in overall exposure of your website; a site with bad source code will not rank highly on search engines.

2) Bulky Flash Designs - We all know that Flash makes a site stand out and look more appealing than just plan images and text. The problem with Flash on many websites is the usefulness of the Flash. Most designers incorporate Flash design but forget to make it user compatible. This might make the site look good, but it weakens the usability.

3) Typography is a major key in design, more important than most people realize. There are three things to keep in mind.

• a) The website tagline explains what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Your tagline should communicate your site purpose within the crucial first 10 seconds.
• b) Split content and make it easy to read. First, content can not be too long on the pages. If it is not said in the first two paragraphs, then it will not be understood. Also, when writing content about whatever your business is doing, it should make sense to the common educated person. Use simple words and simple ideas.
• c) Size matters. Make the font size easy for all screens and people with all eye sights. There are design tools to make the size of the text expandable, but to play it safe, text should be no smaller than 12pt in content. The optimal level should be 14-16pt. Take into consideration that your view is someone in there 40’s with the requirements of reading glasses to view things up close. This should make it easy to determine size and color of the text.

These are just a few tips for when you’re beginning to make your own websites. The rules get more complex as you dive deeper into the web design world, but don’t worry, the information is out there to help you at every part of the journey.