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Web Site Design



What is good Web Site Design? Easy Navigation? Short load time? Colorful Graphics? Comfortable Text Colors? Exciting Special Effects? YES! All of these are incorporated in good web design. Each is use to help the surfer feel good about being at your place. Like a guest in your home, you want the surfer to enjoy their visit, and "come back real soon." Unlike a guest in your home, the welcome is never wore out. Everything can be geared to your guest comfort.

Navigation

Think of a hotel. The more comfortable the hotel is, the less likely it is that the guest will leave, and spend their money else where. Can surfers find their way around your site? Site map, navigation menu, and specific return links help. Site maps are a page that link list every other page for that web site. If a surfer gets lost, he can go to the site map, and find the page desired. A navigation menu is a list of pages for the site. Many site have two navagation menus. One on the side, and one at the bottom of each page. This style seems a bit redundant to me, but if you have a very long page, it will be helpful with scrolling up and down. Specific return link, this takes you back to a particular spot on the web site. The spot is given a name, and an anchor. The ''#'' is the place where the surfer will return. A name="top" after the anchor will tell which anchor that link should return to. The return link is typed "faq.html#top" This is often used on FAQ pages when questions are listed at the top of the page, and answers are listed after. You will see a link that reads, "Back to the Top", or words to that affect.

Graphics

Large items take forever to down load to the surfers computer. Try sticking to small images. If you need a large image, try to break it down into several smaller images with the tag of border=''0'', Image slicing and image mapping can speed the process of down loading a large graphic.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but to a search engine, it's just a blank. Many handicapped people, who surf the net, often don't have browsers that display graphics. Pictures aren't of much use if you need a special program to read aloud all of the words because you can't see. Titles in the Alt Tag will show your graphics links as text links to these types of browsers and to search engines. Even if your picture is not a link, descriptive words in the alt tags will help provide information for both. You do want your site to be as user and search engine friendly as possible, don't you?

Text Color

Make sure that there is enough contrast between you text and background colors. Dark on light, or light on dark. Text colors that are to close in value to the background colors (i.e. dark blue on black) are hard for the surfer to read. Not only that, poor color choices could also cause search engine's spiders to think you are trying to hide too many unrelated keywords in the text. This was a popular trick (used by unscrupulous web masters) to bring more visitors to a site. Now, spiders will now penalize you for it.
Most web sites use the color blue for links. All links are underlined. If you change either, you could confuse the surfer. HTML Safe Text Colors are the same as graphic colors. All color TVs and Monitors have three color guns that shoot a color of light on to the screen, Red, Green, and Blue. Color control is how much color is sent to the screen. Each color gun has two figures. Safe ones are; 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, and FF. As long as each color has one of these six combinations, HTML browsers will recognize the color. An example would be the color red, FF0000. The red color gun is set at full hue, full saturation; green gun is no hue, no saturation; and the blue is no hue, no saturation. Every browser will read this as the best red it is capable of. Any chart that you find will show the various combinations of these six setting for the three color guns.

Special Effects

Special Effects can be awesome. The Flash Animation, and Shockwav effects can be impressive. Just remember that, like a color movie on a black and white T. V., not everyone will be able to enjoy these fun extras. Java appletts can add really cool Special Effects, but only if people trust that you are not downloading a virus along with the applett. One reason that I like java scripts so much is that their are provider end programs. The user doesn't need to have a special player or download to enjoy it. Java scripts can, (and often are) turned off. Like candy, these should be a rare treat, not the main course, nor a steady diet.

Professional Sites

A professional web site is not going to have the same focus as a personal site. If you want to build a professional, money making web site, then you need to know what to do, and what NOT to do. At www.WebPagesThatSuck.com, you can learn the biggest mistakes that web designers make, so you don't have to.

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