Web Page advantages for Businesses

A company’s presence on the World Wide Web is an indication of its aim to grow and keep abreast with the world around. The benefits of a website for a business just can not be neglected. A business with an amazing web site has a lot more to offer than those with a poorly designed site or no site at all, since their package when presented to a prospective client looks and feels great. Most of the consumers today log on to websites before actually making a purchase. For the tech-savvy people today, any activity, be it a purchase, job search, acquiring study material, to name a few, calls for a thorough research activity through different websites. Thus making it all the more important for business houses, educational institutions, recruitment services and others to have a good website catering to their present and future needs in order to sustain and grow. A good web site will garner the interest of the surfing population since it gives information and also neutralizes prejudiced notions of the people. It will clearly specify the objectives and more importantly, the vision of the company.

One of the primary reasons that business houses need a winning website is it gives a wider, in fact the widest geographical coverage, without the barriers of government regulations and language. It also gives companies an economic advantage that the print or any other medium can hardly provide.

In the early years, the web pages did not have a lot of graphical content due to the limited scope available for development. But now the scene has changed completely! A webpage should be appealing to the users i.e. visually engaging and mentally stimulating. And the websites today do exactly that!

Elementary web designing has a few pre-requisites. The registration of a domain name like .com, .org etc being the most important first step.

A good web site has characteristics like easy navigation through various tabs on the website, high graphic appeal, relevance of content, access to related sites and hits, clarity wherever the web page provides information through images and drawings (Drawings, specially on engineering and architecture related sites) among others. The web page colour scheme should be pleasing along with easy downloads and quick information retrieval. The purpose for which the web page has been developed should be achieved satisfactorily. The frequency of a website being viewed or accessed depends mainly on its visual efficacy and information accuracy.

The designing methodology includes animation, photography, graphic designs, information build-up, picture galleries, logos, and other multimedia among others.

A website in itself can be divided into two categories, one is a Static Website and the other is a Flash Website. A Static Website is one where the information can be circulated to a wider population at lower costs. A Flash Website, on the other hand, uses high-end web development techniques like animation and sound effects.

Keys to Design a Web Page

• Procuring a domain name
• Decide on the look and feel of the site through analysis of the basic purpose and the ideas that need to be covered. This will be a predecessor of the content development and graphics stages.
• Preparing a list of keywords required in association with the site in question.
• Deciding on the links that will be provided on the website for further navigation.
• Making suitable page setting enabling proper alignment of information in correspondence with the images, if any.

Web Designing Tools

There are numerous designing tools available, a few listed below.

• FrontPage and Dreamweaver
• HTML, DHTML
• Photoshop
• Flash
• Graphics Editor
• Coral Paint Shop
• Other softwares like Bluevoda, Webplus, Coffeecup
• SmartFTP
• Web Studio 4.0
• UltraEdit 14 Text Editor
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Dreamweaver 8
• JavaScript
• ASP
• .NET
• Cold Fusion
• PHP, SQL

Latest Features for Powerful Web Designing

There are various readily available templates on the internet that can be used just to begin with till there is enough awareness to design something unique and completely saleable!!! Using tools that help you design a site without even having to learn HTML coding. There are various other tools, a few of which have been listed below.

• Colour Converters for the graphics on a web page.
• A Pull-Down Menu Generator is also one of the latest ways of keeping the site hassle-free. This option makes navigation within the website easy.
• Gif Optimizer reduces the load time of a website, simultaneously reducing the impatience of the users while they wait for the site to load.
• Designing the web page with tools that allow your web site to be hosted by any server thus ensuring full compatibility.
• Designing and hosting are the main activities when uploading a web site. Hosting can be defined as the service that is required to put up a site on the World Wide Web.
• Hotlinking is one of the new techniques of embedding images directly on your website. There’s just one catch in this method, the designer will have to get permission to use those images, without which it may considered stealing of private pictures.
• Direct Linking to Specific Points on the webpage is also one of the new methods of making it easier for the surfers to navigate within the site.
• There are novel ways of Formatting a web page so that it takes lesser loading time through usage of external scripts and other web development techniques.
• Using a Favicon (Stands for Favourites Icon) is a great way to make users remember your web site since it shows a graphical reminder of the web site.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to refine a website to make it flawless. It takes care of images, graphics, animation, colour schemes and text, to name a few.

Note: The above mentioned techniques are just an introduction to the new ways of making a web page more attractive and user-friendly. To actually do it, one will need to understand the technical details important for the same.

What should you avoid when designing a Web Page!!!

A web site visit can be an absolutely frustrating activity for a surfer, if the design of the web page is not up to the mark. It may eventually result in loss of business for a company.
Here is a list of vital things you should avoid while designing a web page, mainly visual mistakes that does not make it user-friendly.

• Including irrelevant material instead of the expected information.
• Not providing search tools to surf within the web page.
• Information that is full of grammatical and construction errors, thus drawing attention to mistakes rather than the purpose of visit.
• Using varied fonts and font colours, affecting concentration and making it tiresome to read.
• A web site that gives boastful information about the entity, not acknowledging the importance of other stakeholders especially the clients.
• Putting information that is copied from popular sites, thus exposing the users to the low standards followed during the content formation stage.
• Excessive usage of textual information where images would serve the purpose better and vice versa.
• Absence of contact information in case a surfer gets interested in any of the aspects of the web site either for procurement of more information or to buy a product or service.
• Putting in pop-up advertisements, useless quiz questions, unnecessary animation, forceful and in-your-face sign up appeals, so that the visitor instead of reading will want to log out at the first opportunity.
• Providing link on the website that do not take the surfers anywhere except out of the web page!
• Intolerable music that the user does not have an option of turning off!
• Too many ‘This part is under-construction’ signs, that the make the user wonder why the site is uploaded in the first place without completion.
• Not providing the essentials on a web page. For example, prices or special features of products on a site that is dedicated to selling pricey articles.
• Navigation panes should not be concealed links at not-so-easy to find locations.

Now that we know what we should not be doing while developing a web page, let’s take a look at what needs to be done to get it right. It is pretty much like hitting the target, especially for business houses aspiring to make it big through their web sites.

A list of to-do while creating a web page.

• Creating a site that brings out the core competencies of the entity concerned.
• A user-friendly site that gives links and hits which actually work!
• Use of white spaces and other formatting techniques needs to be comfortable to view. Since sufficient white spaces enable better reading comfort.
• Updating the web page regularly with further relevant information and requisite graphical material as well as making it as interactive as possible will ensure repeated visits.
• Good appearance and visibility.
• Providing SEO services.
• Designing the page such that it gives relevant information in a precise manner, with a futuristic feel to it so that there is a feel-good factor about the future.
• Using JPG optimizer that optimizes the images thus making the user spend more time reading.
• Meta tag generators wherever required also prove of great help to users.
• Creating a favorable impression through the use of a tool called Link Popularity Checker, which links other web pages to your web site. It gives a clear picture of how frequently is the site called in to service by the surfers. This will most definitely increase the popularity of the site.

(The basic use of optimizers is to reduce the loading time, as one of the special features to enable users of slow internet connections, access the same web pages easily)

With several futuristic technologies expected, web designing will assume a more and more important position leading to still better web development tools and finer web sites.