Web Design

Web Design: Basic Guidelines

The appearance of your web site is one of the most important aspects of your success. Your product or service will literally be judged by the appearance of your web site.

Poor web design is one of the leading causes of small business failure. There are literally thousands of home-based Internet businesses struggling to make a living online. Most, make very little or no money and end up closing their site in defeat.

I have received many messages over the years from struggling Internet marketers wanting to know if I could look at their site and tell them what they're doing wrong. Most of the time, I can tell them the problem as soon as their site has loaded -- poor web design. They failed to take the time to learn how to properly design their sites -- how to design a professional looking site specifically designed to sell their products and services.

If you really want to succeed, you must take the required time to educate yourself.

Creating a Template

When you begin designing your web site, your goal should be to create a template that you can use to create each page of your web site. This will give your entire site the same look and feel.

A template is simply a web page "shell" that contains your entire page design, logo, images, navigational links and a specific area for your content. However, your template won't contain any content, as each time you create a page with your template, you'll save it with a different page name.

Note: Web Design Mastery will take you step by step through the entire process of designing a basic web site template and an advanced professional web site template.

Formatting Your Pages

I highly recommend placing your entire page content within HTML tables. Tables will enable you to have complete control over your content and how it will be displayed.

For example, you can create three tables, stacked on top of each other, for each section of content. The cellpadding, cellspacing and border attributes should be set to "0" to enable your tables to seamlessly flow together. In addition, the widths for each table should be the same. The top table would contain your page header content, the middle table would contain your content and the bottom table would contain your footer content.

As placing your entire page content within a single table will significantly increase your site's load time, stacking your tables will enable you to benefit from the powerful formatting capabilities of tables, while at the same time, keep your site's load time down. If you've ever designed a web page without using tables, you know how limited you are as to how your content will be displayed. Your text will be displayed right up against the left border and will span across the entire width of your page -- certainly not a good way to design a professional looking web site.

Tables will enable you to display your content in sections like a newspaper, set up a specific number of rows and columns, and even place additional tables within your main content table to create special content sections with colored backgrounds.

Your Storefront

Your main page is the storefront for your business and should specifically let your visitors know exactly what you're offering. If your potential customer can't find your product or service, they definitely won't waste a lot of time looking for it. They'll go on to the next site and probably never return. They're visiting your site for a specific purpose. They want something your site offers. Provide them with what they're looking for and you'll reap the benefits.

Branding will play a major role in your success. Make sure you place your company logo and slogan in the top left corner of each page. This will not only assist your visitors in remembering your site, but it will also give your pages the same look and feel. Instead of trying to cram all your content into your main page, consider creating sections. These sections can contain highlights of your information with a link to further information. You can set your sections up in tables with colored heading sections for information such as articles, products or whatever you'd like.

It's much better to keep your main page down to the most essential elements and link to the detailed informational pages.

A good rule of thumb is "less is more." In other words, keep your main page as small as possible and include your most important elements.

Navigation

When you begin designing your pages, keep in mind, your visitors may enter your site from pages other than your main. Make sure you include good navigational links on every page. Place your navigational links together at the top, bottom, left or right side of the page. Use tables to neatly align your links and maintain a nicely organized and uniform appearance throughout.

Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page on your site down to three or four.

Fonts

One of the most important parts of a web page is text. The way in which you display the text on your web page will have a great impact on your success. It can make your page look very professional or very unprofessional.

When placing text within your web page, always be consistent with your fonts. In other words, don't use different fonts throughout your pages. The standard fonts used on the Internet are Arial and Verdana. The standard text size is 2.

Arial and Verdana are the standard simply because they are the easiest to read on a computer screen.

Headlines, which require a larger font size, are a bit different. A popular headline font used is Georgia, as it displays nicely in the slightly larger font size.

Background and Text Colors

Use caution when selecting your background and text colors. Busy backgrounds make text difficult to read and draw the attention away from the text. In addition, always be consistent with your background theme on each page of your site.

Select your colors very carefully, as colors affect your mood and will have an affect on your visitors as well.

Bright colors, such as yellow and orange, cause you to become more cheerful or happy. Colors such as blue and purple have a calming effect. Dark colors, such as brown and black, have a depressing effect.

A good rule of thumb is to use colors based on the type of effect you're trying to achieve. However, it's always best for your text areas to have a white background with black text.

Above all else, you must take the time to educate yourself before you begin. I can't stress this point enough. If you don't, you're honestly just wasting your time. Although it may take a little longer, it will be well worth it in the long run.

Note: Did you know, in order to display specific colors within a web page, you must use special color codes? Web Design Mastery provides you with a complete 256 Safe Color Chart to enable you to select your colors and copy and paste the codes into your pages.

The Best Tools & Resources For Professional Web Design

	Amaya 9.3 Amaya is a complete web browsing and authoring environment and comes equipped with a WYSIWYG style of interface 7.41 MB | Windows NT/2K/XP | Freeware
	Yahoo! SiteBuilder 2.2.3 New, improved software makes web site design easier than ever! 10.5 MB | Windows All | Freeware
	Blockstar Website Builder 2.0 Blockstar Website Builder - Create blogs, galleries and web pages with our website building service 5.39 MB | Windows All | Freeware
	WYSIWYG Web Builder 2.7.2 A What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get Web site builder. No HTML knowledge needed 521 KB | Windows All | Freeware
	Portello 1.05.0032 Portello is a plug-in to Internet Explorer that makes your web page editable online 5.16 MB | Windows All | Freeware
	BestAddress HTML Editor 2006 Professional 9.0.1 BestAddress HTML Editor 2005 Professional - Easily create Web sites with full-featured HTML editor 7.25 MB | Windows All | Shareware
	DHE Editor Site Builder 2.7 DHE Editor the Fast and Simple WYSIWYG WEB Editor! 6.85 MB | Windows All | Shareware
	Easy Web Creator 0.6 Easy Web Creator - create a small website as easy as 1-2-3. 564 KB | Windows All | Shareware
	Blueframe Web 3.9.1 Blueframe Web - For individuals and companies wanting to quickly create a professional website 5.69 MB | Windows All | Shareware
	Bitrix Site Manager 4.0.5 Bitrix Site Manager - Powerful tool for creating and managing of the modern web site 14.3 MB | Windows ME/NT/2K | Shareware
	Macromedia Contribute Trial Update content for any HTML website - even those built with Dreamweaver, FrontPage or other editors... 18.1 MB | Windows All | Trial
	WebLight 4.0.6 WebLight is a Website Link and HTML Analyzer 16.8 MB | Windows XP/Unix | Trial
	OverSite 1.0 OverSite allows you to easy define your web site's hierarchy 15.8 MB | Windows All | Shareware
	AzDGDatingPlatinum 1.6.3 AzDGDatingPlatinum - most powerful Dating script working on PHP and MySQL 794 KB | Windows All | Shareware
	Matchmaking Solution 2005 Matchmaking Solution is a convenient and effective web site for online marriage agencies 343 KB | Windows All | Shareware
	Trellian Internet Studio 2 Internet Studio is a range of tools for web authoring, ecommerce and searching 23.38 MB | Windows All | Shareware
	Professor PageCraft 2.0.2009 Professor PageCraft is used to generate content-heavy pages 1.07 MB | Windows All | Demo
	PayPal Shop Builder 1.5 PayPal Shop Builder - Sell your products anywhere with PayPal 5.78 MB | Windows All | Shareware
	Show.kit 2.11 A treat for everybody who needs to create a website in lightning speed 5.41 MB | Windows All | Shareware
	Easy Website Pro 2.01 Easy Website Pro - build high quality homepages in a few minutes 13.5 MB | Windows All | Trial
	WebSmartz 2.1 Website Builder, Flash Intros, & Website HTML Templates Software 9.61 MB | Windows 9X/ME/2K/XP | Shareware
	dbQwikSite PE 4.0.0.5 dbQwikSite is a Free Software to Create Database Web Sites in Seconds 11 MB | Windows All | Freeware
	SiteGrinder 1.0.6 SiteGrinder is a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop that converts Photoshop designs into whole web sites 7.35 MB | Windows All | Shareware
	PowerWebTools 2.0 An exciting new design interface with a collection of scripts 2.83 MB | Windows All | Trial