Layout and Appearance
When designing a website, it is essential to pay attention to its layout and appearance. These aspects make your visitors want to stay longer on your website or even buy stuff. Great web design and a unique appearance bring your website to life. Here are some aspects that help your website have a great layout and appearance.
Compelling Layout Design
A striking layout design captivates the visitors’ attention and maintains it. It needs the use of basic principles of design such as constant logo, header and navigation elements on the web pages. A compelling layout also brings some good contrast between the text and the background, the images and white space as well as an ideal alignment of elements. The best layouts utilize a customized structure with features that showcase the content attractively. A page layout also becomes successful when it appeals to the specific audience and makes use of interactive elements to keep the visitor engaged.
A Balanced Use of Graphics, Color, and Multimedia
The layout and appearance of your website can go wrong with excess color, incompatible color combinations, and unnecessary interactive features. For a great appearance, your website ought to use three or four colors at most. The website’s text colors should also contrast well with the background color. The animated images and graphics should augment the content not distract a visitor from it. Additionally, audio, Flash files, and videos ought to display captions and download times. If there is any need for media plug-ins, a well-balanced design ought to provide the links.
Well-Organized Content
Although the appearance of the website is what welcomes the visitors, the content is what keeps them there. A website can look good, but if it does not present the content in an inviting way, it is rendered useless. Ensure the font for the content is readable and avoid overusing the types of fonts.
Easy and Error-Free Navigation
Without easy accessibility and navigation, a website is just a pretty page. Navigation helps to direct visitors through the site depending on their interests. Ensure all the navigation hyperlinks are not broken. A good website layout has a navigation that utilizes social networks by adding links and widgets.
Good General Functionality
In addition to the above aspects, a good website layout also includes functionality. It means that all the external and internal hyperlinks function well, and there are no errors. Functionality also refers to how the site functions in different browsers, mobile devices, and operating systems. It should work efficiently and appear great both on old and current versions of browsers.
The 5 Things to Know When Learning to Set up a Website
When it comes to setting up a website there are 5 important things that one should keep in mind. It is important to know what your end goals are. Setting up a website can be a daunting task if you have never done it before. However, if you have a little information about what to do you should be able to figure it out pretty easily. Before we get into the 5 important things we need to talk about your end goals. Now what is the purpose of your site? This can be anything from helping local people and businesses find, to providing high quality information, to gathering emails or getting someone to buy something from you. Keeping these ideas in mind will help you decide your first stem in setting up your website.
Step 1: Choosing your domain name.
This step can potentially make or break your website. Now this might sound a little excessive but when it comes to naming your site you have several options. Take for instance, you, a business owner decides to name your site the name of your business. Lets call it Joe’s Business, Joe is a plumber in Dallas. So you go out and buy www.joesbusiness.com, great. Now this is what you need to keep in mind, if you are branding your website the name of your business that is ok if you are an established business. However if you are a new or a start up business than this is probably not a good idea. Hmmmm, why might this not be a good idea you ask? Well over 90% percent of people go to Google to find certain services. Now if someone is specifically looking for Joe’s business then they will find it. However, if someone is looking for a plumber in Dallas Texas, Joesbusiness.com might not show up in the search results in Google. Now if Joe went out and bought dallasplumber.com there is a much higher likely hood that he would appear on the first page of google.
Step 2: Choosing to take care of your website your self or pay someone to do it.
When it comes to taking care of your website most hosting companies are pretty helpful and if you take a little time to talk with them you will most likely get the hang of doing it your self. However if you pay a company to host and maintain your website you are looking at anywhere from 200-2000$ per month depending on what they do. Now there are many different companies out there who offer different services and all charge different rates. However if you are reading this you are most likely looking to do this your self. If you choose to take care of your website your self you need to understand the following things. Hosting: hostgator, liquidweb and siteground are examples of hosting companies. These companies can sell you a domain name, and host if for you for about 10$ a month.
Step 3: Deciding what type of content management system you are going to use.
There are several different types of content management systems out there. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Weebly to name a few. WordPress is by far the most popular of the above mentioned. For someone just starting out learning the ins and outs of WordPress etc is a daunting task. However if you are up for the task there are several good websites out there that can show you how to design and configure the site. Also most hosting companies offer web design which is quite convenient. If on the other hand you want no part of trying to design a website there are drag and drop options like Wix where you can easily customize a site to your liking.
Step 4: Search Engine Optimization
Now this step is one of the harder and more complicated aspects of setting up a website. SEO is designed to help optimize your website so Google and other search engines can quickly find your site and easily list/rang it according to its relevance to a particular search query. There are plugins for WordPress and most content management systems that help with SEO like YAOST SEO and All in One SEO. These plugins can help a site owner define what the site is about in order to help google know its relevance. Other aspects of SEO get a little cumbersome are are best left outsourced to a company that specializes in search engine optimization like Rank Advantage. Having good, quality, proper SEO done to your sight will drastically improve your rankings in Google and help local and national customers find your website.
Step 5: Adding fresh and relevant content.
This step is crucial these days. Google judges a sites worth a lot by how fresh and relevant the content is. It is always advised to add new posts to your site at least every month. By adding new and relevant content to your sight it shows the search engines that the sight is active and alive. If you have a sight that is just static it can potentially negatively hurt its rankings in google. The new content does not have to be extensive but should be relevant to what the site is about.