Many a times, a website redesign is just as important as designing a website itself. This is mainly because of the fact that once you design your website, over the passage of time, the concept and look of the website looks old when compared to other websites. So instead of considering starting a new website, you can create the same response and visitors to your website with a simple website redesign.

You can tell if your site requires a website redesign if you first look at it as a visitor and not as its owner. This way, you find out some disadvantages and improvements that have to be done to the website. Sometimes, you have to update your website’s information so that it can compete with other websites. Thus, a website redesign proves to be an important factor.

Your website redesign should make your website more attractive

When you upgrade your website, make sure it becomes more eyes catching to visitors with a compelling layout design. You have to use interesting and relevant graphics, images, fonts and colors in the website to make it as compelling to the eyes of the visitor as possible. This will ensure that you give some competition to the other websites on the internet.

Your website redesign should include all the factors that you wanted to include in the original web design, but could not do so. Make sure your homepage has all the necessary information that will entice the visitor to browse the other pages of your website. Take a look at your original web design to spot out the flaws and difficulties a surfer went through to access the other pages of the website. This will give you ideas to incorporate in your website redesign.

Make your webpage more navigable with a website redesign

Make sure you have manageable links placed in the website redesign by having a navigational menu that is easily visible to the visitor. Difficult to find links make visitors irritated while surfing your website as they will not be able to access the information they were looking for in your website. Thus, redesign your website to organize its information in an appropriate manner so that all these problems are taken care of and so that visitors find it easy to navigate the different pages of the website.

Of course, you get the best inspiration for your website redesign by looking at the different websites of your competitors. Aim to be ahead of your competitors with the latest in graphics and fonts used in the website. Remember that websites more than 1.5 to 2 years were created using old technology. It is only with a website redesign that you will be able to compete with your rivals.

Hence, it can be seen that a website redesign is very important to improve the profitability of your business by increasing traffic to your site. More visitors mean more sales. Moreover, a website redesign adds professionalism to your website that will be viewed by millions of visitors worldwide.

When it comes to websites, the details matter. Although many site owners believe the important thing is merely to get a website up, that’s only a small part of the job. Effective sites take a lot of planning and a lot of concentration on the details. Of course, there are some site owners who obsess over details that really aren’t going to matter to visitors such as crafting the perfect logo, deciding whether Verdana or Arial is the ideal font face, or deciding whether the background of the left column should be navy or burgundy.

In certain cases, each of those issues could be important considerations. But generally speaking, those aren’t the kind of questions to worry about. There are plenty of details, however, that do deserve much attention. For example: Is it crystal clear to visitors what they are supposed to do on your site? It’s critical to ensure that you’ve provided straight-forward directions to visitors as to what they should do on your site. Also, make sure your calls to action are properly emphasized and properly placed. In other words, don’t let them be overshadowed.

Have you answered all the objections visitors might raise? Visitors will have questions and hesitations at various points throughout the process of making a decision to buy. Are you answering those concerns at the points where they are likely to come up? It doesn’t count to just have the information on the site somewhere; it needs to be in the right place at the right time.

Have you emphasized the benefits of your services, not just the features?

Is your site organization clear and straightforward, and is it oriented around visitors’ needs and priorities? This is one question site owners continually fail to consider. The details of how you choose to organize the pages and information on your site will be very significant to your visitors’ experiences. Consider things from a visitor’s point of view, and organize around your visitors’ priorities not your internal company structure. The same goes for individual page layouts, not just the site organization as a whole.

Do the graphics on your site visually emphasize the most important items on each page? Take a long hard look at your pages and figure out which elements really stand out. Are you visually drawing attention to the important stuff?

Does your site draw along a path to an end goal? Every website should be a process geared toward getting visitors to take certain actions. It’s your responsibility as a site owner to figure out the details of how that process should work and which steps happen where. Have you specifically designed your site so that everything including all the small details that leads to your end goal?

Do you prod visitors along at appropriate points to motivate them to take the next step? Have you provided compelling calls to action at the points where visitors need to do something?

Have you made sure your copy is simple and engaging all the way through? This is an area where you should focus on details relentlessly. Make every word count.

Have you considered everything from a visitor’s point of view, not just a site owner’s point of view?

If you want to create an effective website, get intimately acquainted with your visitors’ mindset. Learn to identify with your visitors’ feelings all the way through from the very beginning of the process to the very end. Understand their specific needs, their concerns, and the benefits that speak to their hearts. Learn to tell when they have enough information and when they need more. Anticipate the points at which questions and objections are going to be raised and understand which questions and objections are going to occur when.

After you’ve done that, analyze the details of your site. The answers you’ve determined for the above questions will affect the fine points of your graphic design, of your page layouts, and of your overall site organization. Purposely evaluate why each element of the page is placed the way it is and identify what purpose every item serves. It’s not enough to just launch a website. You have to make the details count!

The first thing that we should know about the two most popular Internet Browsers, Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, is that they don’t display web pages in the same way.

To make matters even more confusing, neither do PC nor Mac computers display images the same way. In short, images created on a Mac appear much darker on a PC, and images created on a PC appear much lighter on a Mac. Pixel size differences (72 pixels per inch on a Mac and 96 pixels per inch on a PC at 640×480) make font sizes vastly different.

So, there has got to be ways around these differences, right? What we’ll cover in this article are a couple of tips to make sure that your pages are displaying nicely regardless of the system or browser, and to help your pages download as quickly as possible no matter what they’re being viewed on.

Step One: Compress the Graphics

Before we do anything else, we have to make sure that our graphics have been optimized for the web. Most graphic programs have an option under file called “Save for Web”. Once you have created the graphic you need, made sure you like it exactly as it is, and are ready to upload it for your website take a minute to open this original, great graphic in your software and click this option.

When you click Save for Web, you should be able to preview the end result before actually saving. In Photoshop, you will be given this option and a “slider” that lets you move from maximum to low quality when saving as a JPEG. As you move between qualities, you will notice that the file size drops or increases. Look even closer and you will see a spot that shows approximately how much time it will take to download that graphic on various connection speeds.

The actual method for optimizing your graphics will vary according to the graphics software you are using. The end result is the same, you need to take a minute and create the highest-quality vs. lowest file size image that you can. The two main Internet graphic formats, JPEG and GIF, have some compression built in. There are major differences between the two formats, as we’ll see, and there are always ways of compressing that image down just a bit more to squeeze as much time out of it as you can.

JPEG - Is a loose compression method. In other words, to save space it just throws away parts of an image. The JPEG algorithm first divides the image into squares (you can see these squares on badly compressed JPEGs - commonly called “pixellating”). Then it uses a math equation called Discrete Cosine Transformation to turn the square of data into a set of curves that go together to make up the image. Depending on how much you want to compress the image the algorithm throws away the less significant part of the data (the smaller curves) which adds less to the overall “shape” of the image. This means that, unlike a GIF, you get a say in how much you want to compress an image by. However, the loose compression method can generate unwanted effects such as false color.

GIF - Stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It’s a loss-less method of compression. This means when the program that creates a GIF squashes the original image down, it takes care not to lose any data. It uses a simple substitution method of compression.  The maximum compression available with a GIF depends on the amount of repetition there is in an image. A flat color will compress well sometimes even down to one tenth of the original file size while a complex, non-repetitive image will fare worse, perhaps only saving 20% or so.

One problem with GIFs is that they are limited to a palette of 256 colors or less. Also, because you have no control on the compression amount, download speeds will greatly vary when using a GIF. Personally, I recommend using GIFs only when you need them for animation and relying on the flexibility of a JPEG for anything else.

ANTI-ALIASING - Anti-aliasing is a technique used to make curved edges appear smooth on a computer screen. It’s mostly used with large font lettering but can be used with graphics also. The effect is achieved by using intermediary colors at the borders, which obscure the hard edges. Anti-aliasing is a clever way of getting around the low resolution of computer screens and making your text appear as smooth as if they’d just come from a glossy magazine. When using text in a graphic or using a graphic to replace text always anti-alias the text. In Photoshop, you are given this option right in your toolbar - just tick the checkbox.

Step Two: Take a look or two

Since there is such a big difference between platforms and browsers, make sure that you “test-drive” your graphics - and layout in general, for that matter - before you decide that you’re “done”. Try to view your site in as many different browsers as you can get your hands on, and then take a look at it on a different platform - If you use a PC, see how the other half surfs on a Mac, and vice versa.

Another step you should take to help reduce download speeds on your page is to use the Height and Width tags on your images. WYSIWYG Editors will usually do this for you. If you do your html by hand, make sure that there is a height and width specified for every image on your page.

Finally, the more that you recycle the images you use throughout your site, the better the visitor’s experience will be. Once an image is in the browser cache, the browser will not download it again. This means that if you use the exact same navigation bar image for ten separate pages, the browser will only download it once.

One of the single most important aspects of effective navigation is consistency. Why? There’s a simple reason and that is “Visitors want familiarity”. They are more comfortable and more trusting if they know things are going to remain the same from page to page. They have a certain sense of confidence from knowing what to expect. If a visitor can quickly become familiar with your navigation, it’s much simpler to actually navigate. And of course, that’s the whole purpose of navigation, right?

Besides familiarity, there’s a second reason to be consistent. It helps your credibility. Consistency in your navigation helps you present a unified, cohesive image to your visitors. In other words, you look polished, well-thought-out, and on top of things. Your visitors get the impression that you “have it together”. On the other hand, if your navigation is inconsistent, it reflects badly on you and your company. You’ll look disorganized and unprofessional.

Here are 3 ways to maintain consistency in your navigation:

1. Use global navigation (which is a set of your main links that appears on every page of your site in the same place).

Global navigation is an absolute necessity. It ensures that visitors can always get to the main sections of your website quickly and easily.

Global navigation options must be the same on every page. Many sites resoundingly fail in this area. Often, the order of the links varies from page to page, or some links are missing on certain pages. This confuses even experienced web users.

2. Keep the appearance and placement of buttons and secondary links the same throughout the site.

I recently ran across a site that used three completely different styles of buttons in as many pages. This variation blew any unified appearance they hoped to have. It also made it hard to recognize which graphics were links and which were not, since there was no consistently-used symbol for “clickability”.

On another site, secondary navigation options were on the left on some pages and on the right on other pages. That’s a no-no. Visitors will never be sure where to look for additional options, particularly since this site was visually busy. Don’t move links around from page to page.

Link colors, button styles, fonts, and placement should be the same throughout the site. The goal should be for visitors to instantly recognize a link when they see it.

3. Stick with conventional design standards.

In addition to being consistent within your site, you also need to be consistent with other sites. Don’t get too far out on the fringe in trying new things.

If you use a navigation scheme that’s completely different from what you see on most other sites, visitors will likely be confused. Make your navigation look and function like something visitors will be familiar with from other sites.

While designing a web site, importance of color is always overlooked by many web designers. But, keep it in mind that you depend on your company and your company depends on your website and your website truly depends on its color. So, color must be one of your very first concerns at the time of web site design. It’s harder to read text on monitor as compare to paper and you will have to choose colors that are going to work best. Through color you can make your visitor feel comfortable, relaxed, trusting and also tempestuous.

Web browsers can only view 256 colors and even some browsers can see only 216 colors. If you want the color you chose for your website, should appear to everyone, exactly as designed by you then go ahead with 216 colors pallet. Always use web browser safe color.

Color combination is also very important aspect. Some color combinations are very unimpressive such as Yellow text on Blue Background. That’s why black text on white background is the easiest color combination to read. What can be the intention of any web designer? Obviously, to make an interactive web page and interactivity comes with the colors you choose for web page. Color affects our feelings, our perceptions and our interactions.

What do colors say?

White: White is the best background color on a web page. White color shows truthfulness, Purity, devotion etc. It’s the most refreshing and superlative color.

Red: Red is the most emotionally vivid color and may cause a faster breathing. It symbolizes energy, action, confidence and passion.

Orange: Orange is very hot color to the human eye. Orange demonstrates warmth, cheer, strength and ambition.

Black: Black is the favorite color of web designers to display text but it effects very bad when used as background. It suggests excitement, speed and demands attraction.

Blue: Blue is the second most popular color between web designers. It is associated with stability and depth. It represents wisdom, confidence and loyalty.

Green: Green is the most compatible color with eyes and has a great healing power. It shows growth, harmony and fertility.

Yellow: Yellow is the color which enhances concentration. It shows wisdom, joy and happiness.

Pink: Pink is a quiet color and symbolizes sweetness, softness and innocence.

Brown: Brown color provides you the feeling to mix up with the background. It represents politeness and richness.

Think about your primary audience like if you are designing a website for selling toys, then using pink and blue will be productive. Don’t use more than two or three colors on a single page. Use the same background color on each page. It should not be like that ‘Home Page’ has a White Background and ‘Contact Us’ has a Yellow Background. Avoid making larger parts of web site with very bright colors. If the company for which you are designing website has already an established Logo, then make it sure that the color of Logo on the website must match with the real color. Maintain the consistency because it really works. Your visitor may be irritated with your stupid color choice.

Try to be color wise and color safe, you will be able to feel the color of success.

What makes a website successful? What increases the number of your visitors, making them coming back again and again? The answer is simple and surely, web graphics on your web site! If you have a professional web design you may consider having half the battle on the business battlefield! Bright and efficient graphics on your web pages will catch an eye, help to endorse your business, serve as your visiting card and generally make the first impression about your business and its owners. The elements of graphics on your web site must be loaded simultaneously with the page and then be reflected properly in the web browser.

All the graphics elements should be placed in the same folder named IMG or images. Then the IMG folder is copied into the html-pages catalog. Now the person involved in professional web design and web development may think about how to implement the image into the web pages. We use the attribute SRC to specify the location of the image resource. SRC stands for “source”. The value of the SRC attribute is the URL of the image you want to display on your page. In other words, the attribute SRC shows the file’s location. Here is how the syntax of a defined image should look like: <img src=”url” > where URL stands for image location (i.e. where the image is stored). However, besides this one, there are other attributes responsible for different additional features related to image placement on the web pages.

The ALIGN attribute serves to align the graphics on your web page. The attribute allows two values assigned - left and right. The value LEFT makes the web browser place an image on the left of the text as well as the value RIGHT allows to place the image on the right relative to the text. You should note that if the attribute ALIGN has already been used to align the text relative to the graphics on your specified page, you will not be allowed to set the parameters of text flow around the image. The attribute ALIGN allows to place the text between two graphical images. In this case the tags describing the image shall be placed over the text that is to be enclosed between them.

The ALT attribute helps to add comments that will be reflected if the web browser cannot load the graphics on your web page. The attributes WIDTH & HEIGHT help to assign the width and the height of the image you are placing. However, these attributes are not recommended to be used for the images in jpg format since an incorrect value assignment may result in deterioration of graphics quality. So before you insert any graphics on your web pages you should correct its parameters with the help of any graphics editor. If the while background of the page is not what you really want, you can put any graphical background on your page with the help of the attribute BACKGROUND of the tag <BODY>. Since the web browser automatically places the image copies the way they fill in the whole page, so the image you apply for your background may be done small in size.

You should remember that while creating a graphical background of your page you should use such images that provide interesting visual effects and at the same time that would not disturb your customers from reading the text itself. For example, placing a text on the page with tiger background would result in lost of interest to your content since the reading would be completely uncomfortable in this case. A good image being repeated multiple times looks “smooth”, without any seams or joints. Don’t forget to pay attention to the color and size of your font if you make a graphical background to achieve absolute easiness in reading. The attribute BORDER helps the designers to assign the frame’s size around the graphical image. Experienced web graphic designers recommend using gif format for graphics web site elements such as menus and banners and for jpg format for full-color images. Anyway, whatever you apply, keep in mind the fact that you are creating your professional web design for your potential customers and your web site should be easy to use from the point of web graphic design and web development.

This article talks about redundancy on the internet. Still, according to my “research”, there does seem to be a growing need for Web Design Tutorials as well as a surge in Blogging.

So what is a blog anyways? A web LOG is a website. It is written using a server-side programming language like PHP, ASP, or PERL. A Blog is a web site created in a way that enables the user to add content in the form of pages or posts. Pages are what you look at when surfing the net, DUH. Posts are web pages too but they are more like articles and they are displayed in reverse chronological order, the most recent articles first.

One of the most powerful features of the modern-day blog, be it from WordPress, Blogger or any of the popular softwares out there, is that they are a Content Management Systems (CMS) as well. This means that the would-be blogger needs no knowledge of HTML or CSS or any technical skills at all. If you can read and have an attention span greater than 8 minutes you’re all set.

Get Started

Before you get started making your own personal blog there are a couple things you should think about first. What is your blog about and what is it called? This has happened to me and I’m sure a thousand other people as well… I get my database created; I download WordPress and begin the install process, “Yeah it’s done!” Then there it is, the first thing your new blog asks you is “what is my name?” I’ve spent hours starring at this screen rummaging through hundreds of possible names. Which one is more descriptive, which one sounds better, which one gets searched more at Google? Of course you can always change the name later but, if you’ve been indexed by the search engines and you go and change the title, could get you bumped or sandboxed.

Next, you need somewhere to put it. You need a Domain Name and a Hosting Account.

The Domain Name is the word that is in-between http://www. and .com in a URL (Universal Resource Locator). You want this to be the same as, or close to, the name of your blog… good luck. You can search available domain names at a number of places including register.com, godaddy.com, and networksolutions.com.

The internet is saturated with hosting services. I’ll let you figure that one out. There’s always Go Daddy for a good place to start, note their pricing and supplemental offers then type in “Hosting” at Google and see what comes up. Search, compare, shop, I know you can shop. You may or may not notice that there are two types of operating systems when dealing with website hosting, Windows and UNIX (or Linux). This article is about how to build a WordPress blog so I will go ahead and recommend choosing a UNIX or Linux hosting account as opposed to a Windows account. WordPress is PHP based and though many Windows systems support PHP, the language it was created for the UNIX system. A lot of times the Windows accounts are more expensive anyways.

Third, how is your site going to be organized? Is your blog going to be a section of an existing web site or is your web site going to be the blog? If it is going to be part of an existing website then you should decide what the directory will be called. The most common would be blog, a folder named blog.

Get WordPress

Got your Domain Name? Good. Got your blog’s title? Good. Got a host? Good.

Next thing you need to get is WordPress. Go to http://wordpress.org/ and click the big red “Download” button. Save the package to your desktop. Hopefully you have WinZip, if not get it here http://free-gets.com/. Unzip (Extract in WinZip terms) the whole thing onto your desktop. More times than I’d like to admit, I’ve clicked on one of the files after opening the .zip file, to have a look at the readme or something, I then clicked Extract, when I look in the WordPress folder THERES ONLY ONE FILE. Crap, have to do it again, this time without selecting anything.

Now take the WordPress folder and put it where it belongs. If your blog is part of an existing web site, rename it to “blog” or whatever you decided, and FTP it to your hosting server. If the blog IS your website then FTP the CONTENTS of the WordPress folder to your hosting server.

Set Up Your Database

When you signed up for your hosting account you got access to the services “control panel”. This control panel, which you use your username and password to access, provides an interface to all the services offered by your host including Email. Here on your control panel, somewhere, it’s different for each hosting company, is a place to create new databases as well as users to administer them. Once you find it, it really is as simple as choosing a name and a password and clicking one button. Whatever you pick, write it down though, you will need it later.

For many hosting services using your control panel username works as the database username however, some hosts may require that you set up a separate username to access databases. No biggie, just pick a good one and write it down.

You will need three things from this step; a database name, a username, and a password. You wrote them down, right?

Go to your WordPress files. And find the file named wp-config-sample.php. Rename it to wp-config.php and open it up in a text editor.

Here you will see the following

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

This is fairly self-explanatory. As a matter of fact the WordPress site covers all this and much more so I understand if no one is reading beyond the point where I mention wordpress.org. Oh well, onward…

Fill in the blanks, dbname, username, etc… The last part DB_HOST, I always change it to whatever my hosting account tells me to. It will say on your host’s control panel what the address is, usually something like username.sqlhostname.com.

All filled in? Good. Upload via FTP.

Now get out your favorite browser and cruise on over to your website. Follow the directions and there you are. “What is the title of your blog?”

Set Up Your Blog

There you have it, a blog, now what. Find a nice theme, configure your sidebar widgets and add start blogging. Don’t get lost in the millions of themes and plugins and widgets, spend the time writing. Three months will have gone by and you’ll have gone through 50 themes and 20 widgets and plugins only to end up with the one theme and two or three plugins/widgets that really work for your site… and your blog still has “Hello World” as it’s only article. Get to the actual writing, the other stuff will follow.

Hopefully you’ve been able to log in to your admin area and have seen all the lovely things you can do in there. First thing you may want to do is choose a Theme. In your admin area click on the Design tab. WordPress ships with two fairly boring themes that you will see here, however, there are millions of them for download on the internet. Start here http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

Next, on the top right of the admin pages click the Settings button. Here is where you fill out some of the important things regarding your website. Take your time here and make sure any changes you make are changes you really want. There is plenty of documentation on every item here either on the WordPress site or out there on the internet.

The plug-in I start with are FeedBurner-FeedSmith, Sociable, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, and the All in One SEO Pack. You just download them from WordPress, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, then FTP the unzipped files into your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.

There are few things more important on the web than “usability,” because the Internet is an interactive space and not a one-way street. You want to improve the visitor’s experience, make choices simple, be pleasing to the eye and not overuse the flashy add-on du jour. In addition, your site will tell visitors a lot about your company just from the way it looks, loads and functions, before they even read a single word. The importance of creating an attractive, user-friendly website simply cannot be overstated.

For reasons that are almost too numerous to list - marketing, sales, psychology, trust building, perceived professionalism, etc. - the way your website is experienced by users should be foremost in your mind. The following eight important reminders will get you going in the right direction, but you’re the one who knows your customers (or should) so the finer points of personalization and “character” are up to you.

1. The importance of focus. You need to think like your visitors do. This is key to your site’s success. Your customers simply want to find what they need, make the payment and get back to real life (jobs, family, tennis, whatever). If you can make their lives a bit simpler and easier, they’ll reward you for it. If, on the other hand, you make their lives more complicated, they’ll “surf away” and stay away.

2. The importance of understanding the medium. You are not creating a slideshow, a YouTube video, a TV commercial or a PowerPoint presentation. You are building a website for commercial purposes. You need to provide easy, simple, clear navigation on every page, since you never know how people will link to your site and what they will see first. Visitors to your site, no matter how hard you try, will not always go where you would like them to go, or do what you want them to do. Remember that, and give them a few tools to move around the site, like a sitemap and/or internal search engine.

3. The importance of non-aggression. Most Internet users, especially experience ones, like to stay in control of their movements. Research suggest that your first-time visitors are “hunting,” not “deciding,” so do not make unnecessary demands for clicking, scrolling, resizing windows or anything else. Neither should you put up any roadblocks that will slow down their hunting, like time-consuming “Flash and splash screens.”

4. The importance of reduced load times. Tied into #3 is the notion of your site’s real and perceived “speed.” Carefully consider each page element and make each one earn its place, based on functionality, not “wow” value. Keep graphic file sizes small and do whatever else you need to do to have a fast-loading, easy to use site.

5. The importance of customer needs: Define all the kinds of people you expect to visit your site and consider what they’ll be looking for. Ensure that the navigation design helps the greatest number of people to find the most popular items in the least amount of time. Don’t “bury” essential information so that visitors have to dig down two or three levels to find it.

6. The importance of simplicity. Flash is powerful tool, especially helpful in demonstrating things that are difficult to describe in words, but it is so pathetically overused that it has turned people off. It can be a huge distraction, too, since animation and bright (moving) colors are exceptionally hard for our eyes to ignore even when our brains want to.

7. The importance of proportionality. Although Javascript is used on some sites to display all the links to the other pages, there is really no reason to do this when simple, straightforward, low-overhead HTML works fine. When you employ a “new, improved” or more complex means of doing something - anything - you have to take into account browser compatibilities, possible bugs and user resistance. Don’t use more technology than it takes to accomplish something cleanly, clearly and consistently.

8. The importance of avoiding surprises. You should use the expected, usual and standard placements for expected, usual and standard site elements. Site navigation is not something you want to be too creative with, as it needs to be immediately understandable and usable. Such consistency across the World Wide Web is actually a good thing, as it tends to make people’s lives a bit easier when they feel they are in “familiar territory.” Generally speaking, your various website components should look and work as people think they’re supposed to.

To borrow from Oscar Wilde, consider also the importance of being earnest. More specifically, you want to be seen as being earnest, meaning that you want every visitor to understand, implicitly if possible but explicitly if necessary, that you are doing everything possible to make their site visit a simple, straightforward experience. “No muss, no fuss” is a great slogan to remember.

Therefore, rather than get caught up in profound design metaphors or using your bandwidth to display every possible website trick and/or treat, you should focus on making your site into a solution for your customers. Make it easy for them to do what they need to do and then get on with their lives. Perhaps the most important thing you can give a site visitor, then, is respect and appreciation.

Modern websites are a far cry from the static text and graphics showcases of a decade ago, Today almost all popular and successful websites today, be it online shopping portals, lead management systems, surveys, event registration, reservation, and ticketing systems, social networks, entertainment sites, ecommerce websites implement web based applications.

Web applications are computer programs. These programs allow website visitors to submit and retrieve data to/from a database over the Internet using a preferred web browser. The data is then presented to the user within the browser as information is generated dynamically by the web application through a web server.

Web application development is not necessarily an easy task. A properly developed web application must undergo a series of actions to ensure success.

The 5 Step Software Development Cycle

The software development life cycle normally comes with some standard processes which can be managed by a well-trained development team. Like software, web site applications are also developed with a certain methodologies. Let us look at the steps involved in most any web site development projects.

1. Analysis:

As the web site is going to be a part of a system, it needs a complete analysis as, how the web based application is going to help the present system and how the site is going to help the business. Moreover the analysis should cover all the aspects especially what are the performance expectations of the finished product. Another key aspect of the analysis is identifying and understanding the targeted audience and their respective demographic.

2. Identify Specifications:

After the analysis, preliminary specifications are drawn up by covering up each and every element of the requirement. This specification document is then used by the design and development team as a master plan ensuring the ongoing understanding of the project requirements.

3. Design:

The Design step includes the creation and design of all the pages implementing the application features as design elements to be programmed later by the coding team. In most of the cases customer may be interested in viewing two or three design versions. Revisions are displayed via the web project board for the customer to view. In optimum project management processes, customer comments, feedback and approvals are submitted to a project management board for easy review and retrieval by all relevant parties. Throughout the design phase the team should develop test plans and procedures for quality assurance. It is necessary to obtain client approval on design and project plans. Once approved the approved coded designs are provided to the Programming team for development.

4. Development:

In parallel the Database team will develop the database with all the data structures. Unlike traditional design the coder must be familiar with the interface as the code should not change or alter the look and feel of the site or application. It is important the programming team and the designer interact and communicate well in order for the programmer to thoroughly understand the design. The coders should always produce necessary testing plans as well as technical documentation. The end-user documentation can also be prepared by the coding team, which can be used by a technical writer.

5. Testing:

Unlike software, web based applications need intensive testing, as the applications will always function as a multi-user system with bandwidth limitations. Some of the testing which should be done are, Integration testing, Stress testing, Scalability testing, load testing, resolution testing and cross-browser compatibility testing. Both automated testing and manual testing should be done without fail. For example its needed to test fast loading graphics and to calculate their loading time, as they are very important for any web site.

There are ideal testing tools which assists quality assurance testers. After the testing is completed a live Beta testing is necessary for web sites and web based applications. After uploading the site a final testing is conducted.

Successful businesses have made intelligent use of web application development to enhance their business prospects. However web application development should be handled only by firms who have the experience and technological understanding to undertake challenging application development.

Once your company requires an online application look for a web development with a strong portfolio of clients that have an industry reputation. A strong website development company can make any website effective.

A Few Good Programs

The Bottom Line Choosing clip art that is well-designed, not too busy, and has a pleasant color palette helps make web pages or publications design look professional.

You can buy inexpensive clip art software at any office supply store these days. Lots of people are satisfied with this kind of clip art, the kind that advertises “10,000 Images” on the box.

But think of how many of those images may be too ugly to use, and how many more of those images are simply variations on a theme. When the final count is tallied, you might actually have 500 to 1,000 unique, attractive pictures.

There are plenty of variety and style in various Microsoft programs, such as Publisher. These programs have some beautiful illustrations that look like fine art, “retro” designs in sepia-tones from the 1940s and 1950s, funny cartoons, loads of symbols and dingbats that you can color or enhance, and still thousands of more images that can be accessed and downloaded on the Microsoft site.

Images to Avoid At All Costs

Being very sensitive to colors, preferably avoid lime green combined with red, bright blue and stark yellow, and illustrations that have a pixelized “coloring book” appearance. Any of those elements spell “cheap” to me.

Any clip art that choose for flyers, publications or web pages must come from the same family, or look as though they were created by the same artist. A hodge-podge of clip art always pinpoints a hack from a pro.

Even if you decide to use 50 images of bad clip art, it will look a hundred times better if it’s consistently bad and seems to be drawn by the same person. And good clip art looks much better when consistent. Don’t mix different styles, even if you can’t find exactly what you want in one family, and exactly what you want in another family. Keep in mind that not every point you want to make with a graphic needs to be associated with a graphic, less is more!

Try to See The Program and It’s Art Gallery Before Buying

Before you invest lots of money in clip art, ask friends what they have and if you can take a look at it. Browsing through the categories of images offered is fun, and you should be able to tell at a glance if you’re going to like the looks of the entire library.

Choose clip art packages that contain images, symbols, and stock photographs. Be sure the hairstyles and clothing of human characters is classic and up to date, but will continue to look good in a few years.

Some clip art packages are woefully outdated. If you’re looking for images of a modern spaceship, you might find 50 or 60 Sputnik-like drawings, circa 1960, and a few dozen little Martians peeking out of a glass-domed flying saucer. Unless that’s exactly what you’re looking for, you won’t be happy.

And there’s nothing worse than looking for a drawing of a woman to illustrate today’s working mother, only to find June Cleaver, complete with pearls, or Carol Brady with her darling little shag cut and a mock-neck sweater.

Be Sure Your Images Match Your Web Page Colors

One of the fastest way to spot a solid web business is by the graphics they use on the website. If I see garish colored animated GIF images of e-mail envelopes, globes, hands holding pens, mailboxes and little houses (to take you to the “home” page), I think “here today, gone tomorrow.” Especially if the images are overlaid on a hideous woodgrain or tile background that clashes.

Keep experimenting with the images and the background until you have an overall, eye pleasing color combination. Don’t cause your web page visitors to have vertigo.

And even if your clip art is free, keep in mind that this doesn’t mean you have to use lots of it! Use your clip art sparingly, and make sure it has a purpose.