Creative Website Design

A Design is an individual display of headers, columns and footers used creatively to create a distinct identity for a website. It involves an aesthetic arrangement of objects on a single page.

There are certain elements that result in creative website design – these elements are the different objects used to create the final layout. Two many elements, too many colors can leave the design looking cluttered. Identifying the elements that are to be a part of the layout is important before proceeding with the design itself.

A complex design is not necessarily a useful design. A design should be useful and straightforward – defining at a glance what the site is about. Get the user to find what they are looking for – at a glance.

Some design elements that can make a significant difference to the performance of a web page are:


1. The position and color of the primary call to action

2. The number of elements on a page

3. The images used on a page

4. Use of text or image links

5. The amount of white space used in the background



There are some factors that should be taken into account before designing. These are mentioned below:

CSS

CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. By using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) all pages within the website can have the design elements changed as the designer just needs to edit the style sheet. Using CSS can keep both the style and the content separate. This allows for easier updates and revisions. Because a separate Style sheet is created and linked to all the web pages, you get better control over website edits. So if you want to change a certain aspect of your page, you only need to alter one file, as a single CSS file can contain positioning, layout, font, colors and style information for the entire web site.

When used along with HTML it results in less code hence a faster page load. Since table layouts are not used for positioning elements, text loads really fast, resulting in a fast page load. The Style sheet is downloaded only once, and automatically reused for every page. On an average a website will load four to five times faster if it makes use of cascading style sheets.

For designing a website, make sure that you hire Design Professionals who are well-versed in CSS as well as HTML and can provide you an affordable and creative website design.

Thirdly since the HTML code is a lot cleaner search engines will crawl faster resulting in faster indexing of the webpages.

RESOLUTION

Resolution is the term used to describe the number of dots, or pixels, used to display an image. The higher resolutions mean that more pixels are used to create the image, resulting in a crisper, cleaner image.

When it comes to screen resolution no matter how perfect the design is, if the viewer needs to scroll to the side or the bottom - chances of the viewer leaving are high. Your pages should work at any resolution, from 800x600 to 1280x1024 and beyond. Typically you should design for a 1024x768 setting and ensure that the page contracts properly when viewed in an 800x600 setting.

LAYOUT

There are certain criterions that you can keep in mind when designing a page layout.

Make sure that the key information to be presented is above the fold so that viewers can see the information at a glance without scrolling. Bigger screens show more content above the fold and require less scrolling. Ensure that the absolutely critical information remains visible at 800x600.

Use a liquid layout using percentage widths to control layout. This allows the layout to adjust to the size of the browser window and different screen resolutions. All the web page elements rearrange themselves to suit the browser window or user’s screen resolution, if done correctly.

STYLE

There are no standards about creating any Web 2.0 elements but certain features like clean colors, many gradients (so as to bring about depth and dimension), larger, bolder fonts and greater contrasts in color combined with a lot of white space to create a fresh, clean look are common to most styles. Sharp edges have given way to more rounded corners. Images with reflections and drop shadows are used to give a 3-dimensional finish.

BROWSERS

Common browsers used today are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. Each browser has a different way of interpreting code to display the webpage and design.

How the design is displayed depends a lot on the real estate available on the browser. To ensure that the design does not stretch on different browsers, use
a fixed-width and percentage-based design so that the display can be managed well. For a fixed-width design it is better to have an 800 x 600 resolution.

COLOR

Color can contribute to effective and attractive web designs. If your web site has a solid colored background, make it a Web Safe color so that if the site is displayed on computers displaying 256 colors, the display will be clean and and colors will not break up.

Colors represent the site's message and should remain consistent throughout the site. Choosing the colors as per what the website is serving can go a long way in creating the right identity. Try not using more than 5-6 colors on a single page as multicolored websites tend to have the fewer visitations.

Warm colors tend to be more exciting and aggressive. Using them in small doses can be inviting and an attention getter. Red is attention grabbing and makes a loud impression; therefore use it in moderation if necessary.

Cool colors (blues, greens,) tend to be more soothing and calming. Creating a site with a combination of warm and cool colors will confuse the visitor. It may make the site look busy and result in quicker exits.

Use colors that represent the theme of your website. For eg. a site dealing with a younger audience can be use more warm colors, sites with a theme of nature would be better using green rather than purple.

FONTS

Fonts that look good on print and fonts look good on a monitor are different. Using a font that is not common and not installed on most computers will end up rendering distorted text when the page is displayed. To improve the readability of your text makes sure that there is a contrast between the color of your text and the color of the background on which the text is displayed. Black or grey on a white background works the best.

When selecting a font check the font for simple strokes, good height, good spacing between the letters. This makes readability easier on the eye. Some of the most widely used fonts are:

Verdana

This font was designed for the screen and is the most common sans-serif typeface used on the Web today. The ample amount of space between each character, as well as the amount of white space within the characters makes this font legible on screen.

Trebuchet

This is another popular font designed for the screen. Trebuchet's strokes are blocky and clear, it has a good height (large x-height) thus increases legibility even at a smaller size.

Helvetica

With large x-height this font transfers well on screen.

SEARCH ENGINES

Taking a little care that the website being designed uses search engine friendly web development allows the site to be reachable by search engines and will make a difference to the numbers that a website can reach. Following search engine design guidelines that keep the site on the right side of search engines will help in getting better search engine placement and better returns.



-Source: Sabinder

Website Building Tools

After reading this article you will be able to identify the steps required to build your own website. You will be aware of the different options available to get a website up and running. You will know about some of the different kinds of website building tools available to the new or experienced website builder/owner. We will also discuss some of the things you must do after your website is built.

The first thing you should do is decide what your website is going to be used for. Will it be used to convey information or to sell products? If it will be used to pass on information to family, friends or others with whom you share similiar interests, product/market research won't be a big issue. If on the other hand, your website will be used for making money, product/market research is very important. Will your choice of product or service be based on an area that you have expertise in or will it be in an area that interests you? In either case, you must determine if there is a demand for what you are trying to sell. To many people decide what they are going to sell first, then wait to see if anybody wants to buy it.

The next thing we have to decide is how we are going to build our website. There are many options available and each of them have advantages and disadvantages. You can build your site completely from scratch using for example html and css. This will give the most control over your website, but will require a longer learning curve. You can purchase website templates and fill them in with your own information. You can sell tangible products or information. You can subscribe to services that provide you with a website preloaded with products. Some of these websites will allow you to customize the look of your website and what type of products that you will sell. These types of sites will allow you to get going quickly and still provide you with some control over what your website looks like. The choice is up to you.

After building your website is completed, there is still work to do. Some of the things that must be done are search engine optimization (SEO), search engine submission and of course marketing, to name a few. We will discuss some of these tasks in the rest of this article. There are many website building tools available to help you with these tasks.

Search engine optimization or SEO relates to any task that seeks to improve the number or relevance of people that find your website through performing a search on any of the many search engines. Google, MSN and Yahoo are examples of search engines. The goal is to rank as high as possible on the list of search results. The reason is that the higher you rank, the more likely it is that people will find your site relevant and click on your link to see what you have to offer them. The search engines goal is to provide its users with the most relevant and useful results. Your job is to learn what criteria the search engines use to rank their search results.

There are two main categories of SEO. They are onpage and offpage. Onpage SEO is anything that you design into your website to make it more search engine friendly. Some examples are your page titles, meta keywords, meta description and headlines. It also includes making your websites content relevant to the keywords you are trying to target. A large part of offpage SEO is improving our linking strategies. We want as many links to and from websites that have a high page ranking in areas that are relevant to our website as we can get. Offpage SEO will have the most impact on our search engine ranking.

If we want our website to come up in search results, we must submit our website to or be indexed by the search engines. We can manually submit our website's url to the search engines or we can pay a service to do it for us. This can take a long time to go in to effect. We can also get our link onto a website that is already indexed by the search engines. The search engines will follow our link to our website and it will be indexed. The higher the page rank of the website linking to us, the sooner we will be indexed. There are several ways we can do this. We could purchase links to our site, we could exchange links with another website or we could submit articles to directories with our website url in the author resource box.

Internet marketing is a huge subject all by itself. Basically we need to get the word out about what information, product or services that we provide and convince people that we have what they need. Some examples are article writing, participating in forums, creating your own blog and publishing an ezine. Always include your website url where appropriate. There are many other methods to accomplish this, both paid and unpaid.

All of the activities that we have discussed are a continuing process. We will always be trying to improve our websites appearance, search engine ranking and the amount of traffic to our websites. There are many website building tools available to help us accomplish these tasks.

-Source Terry Loomis

WiMAX: The Educational Broadband Services Solution

The Obama administration will spend billions of dollars installing new or upgrading existing wireless broadband services for public schools. These provisions are in stark contrast to Federal Communications Commission regulations, which will seize school WiMAX (2.5 GHz Educational Broadband Services) licenses where school districts do not comply with build out requirements for their licenses.

This paper will make the case for WiMAX as the most effective wireless broadband technology for educational services enabling school districts to keep their 2.5 GHz licenses. In a time of economic downturn in the private sector, industry players would be well advised to "follow the money" into major public sector initiatives related to broadband internet services in education.

Major Points in Publication:

* Educational Broadband Services licenses (2.5 GHz) will be forfeited by school districts and other license holders that do not build out networks by May 01, 2011
* School districts holding those licenses are not protected by subletting to large commercial operators (Sprint, Clear, etc)
* Understanding the education technology market (its not the same as enterprise or mobile)
* Why WiMAX is the best technology for this application
* Why WiMAX is the best complement to a one*to*one computing program
* The "3 A's: Access, Applications and Affordability" of WiMAX in Education
* Breakthroughs in video over WiMAX: HDTV on 1 Mbps WiMAX
* "The 5% Solution": one*to*one computing and WiMAX for 5% of a school district's annual per*student allocation

Target Audience
WiMAX vendors: This will prove to be a very lucrative niche market for those willing to focus on it and adjust their sales and marketing strategy accordingly
Laptop vendors: They will sell many more laptops more quickly if the laptops can be networked to the school intranet orInternet via a low*cost WiMAX network.
Computer chip vendors: 45 million public school students using WiMAX*enabled laptops will sell a lot of chips.
Network devices vendors: WiMAX deployments to schools will sell a lot of routers, servers and other devices.
Carriers: new technologies such as WiMAX may disrupt their traditional business and how to "turn the retreat into a parade"
Educators: How can the instructional yield from one*to*one computing be multiplied using WiMAX?
School administrators: What is WiMAX and why is it so important to instruction?
State/Federal/School finance professionals: provides strategies in paying for multi*million dollar WiMAX deployments

-Source: Aarkstore Enterprise