Website Design Customization

If you're just beginning to customize your web design, there's a shortcut which I found out suits my needs like a glove and allow me to finish designing faster than I can say "Cat in the hat." Want to know what it is? Here goes...

I am firm believer of 'I don't have to know everything to get going' BUT I know where to find the things to get me going. The same goes to designing my website. Initially, I design my own site using a demo guide that I found in a Computer mag using Microsoft Word.

Yup! I'm not kidding. Using THE Microsoft Words...

The only difference was, when saving the whole project, it's saved in '.html' extension and not the usual '.doc' file. I believe you can imagine how beautiful it is when I finished :)

And the thing I hate the most with doing my own design was it's time consuming. I said WAS because after a few trials, I decided that this was not the way to go. If I want to move forward, and move fast, I got to find a better. There MUST be a better way and from a "How to build your online business video tutorial" I bought from someone name Jim, I was introduced to David, the 'Designer'.

I look at David's portfolio and I was pretty impressed. They're not shabby at all! And when I look at the price he charged for his "design services", I was MORE impressed. Heck! I was chocked...

Do you have any idea how much a US dollar equivalent to my local currency at that time? And David start his 'basic charge' at $90.00. I'm lucky I was still alive when I reached that particular paragraph (and live to type this for ya ;)

For beginners, a well customize web design cost might look terrifying. And that's the biggest hurdle for them which without fail will make them settle for a 'free web design solution' instead.

But like other newcomers i.e 'newbies' I look for alternative. In my case, David offered 10 web templates in exchange for my e-mail address. And I'm more than willing to oblige.

But I didn't took up the 'back-end offer' though...

Just the free templates for the moment. And of course, I knew a little bit on "how to edit html". Just a bit. Not many. But it's enough.

I browse the 10 templates and guess what...one particular design with 'stars' and blue background stick in my head like shadow. Even if I'm looking at other templates, I end up comparing 'starry template' with them. Basically, I've made my choice -- the 'starry templates' (but it's not the actual name).

And I spend my whole evening 'customizing my template of choice' using a "free html editor", Nvu (pronounce: new view). And walla! My first customize template was born with a little hassle of course, minus the dreaded designers' cost.

I was so proud of myself. I'm still am now...

And time continue ticking. Calender changes from days to weeks. Weeks to months, and months to year. And today, beginners/newbies are even luckier. Why? They got this "push button web design services" or they can get more good looking pre-made templates like the ones offered at the Wholesale Ebook Store.

I wish I was offered such facilities when I first started...

And folks, if you just beginning with your web design customization then you now know that using templates or pre-made templates is the shortcut, and one of the best too.

In today's trendy world, people get very uptight when they do not look entirely presentable. This is also the case in customizing web designing.

Every individual definitely want their website to look good, if not, to be the best they can. Here are a few things we could look out for when wanting to design professional looking web pages.

Color Schemes and Themes.

When customizing websites design, always choose matching colors. An example of a matching color would be to have a dark background, with visible words and designs. With the dark theme, try not to mix too many bright colors into the design. What we should NEVER do, is to mix two very different colors, such as purple and yellow. Now, of course, it would depend on the purpose of the website, but those two colors are too striking for one who wants it to look more professional.

Themes must always suit the company. If the website was made to cater for a food company, it would be wise to stick to that particular category, rather than to revert to a different theme, such as machinery.

Fonts

Fonts should be used in regard to the formality of the website. A simple sans-serif font would suffice in most cases. Exceptional cases such as design and art groups might want to use fanciful designs and fonts. Of course, that's only if you know what you're doing.

Picture and Resolution

Finally, we must always think of our visitors, and see the way they see. The resolutions and file sizes of the pictures must not be too large in terms of size. This is to allow maximum compatibility and cater our visitor's needs.

So, planning is what we must always do, before attempting to customize website or webpage design.

No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

First, make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Second, make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Third, make your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn't load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Lastly, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site's theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

There you have it. All the important points of having sitemap for your website. This way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for everyone.

More and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, but 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 choose wisely.

Flash based sites have been disputed to be bloated and unnecessary. Where exactly do we draw the line? Here's a simple breakdown.

The Pros:

Interactivity

Flash's Actionscript opens up a vast field of possibilities. Programmers and designers have used Flash to create interactive 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 Cons:

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.

To sum it up, 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.