Business OnRamp » Web Design http://www.businessonramp.com Start your business! Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:17:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 How to Design an Effective Site for your Startup with Custom Web Designs http://www.businessonramp.com/how-to-design-an-effective-site-for-your-startup-with-custom-web-designs/ http://www.businessonramp.com/how-to-design-an-effective-site-for-your-startup-with-custom-web-designs/#comments Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:17:39 +0000 jashall http://www.businessonramp.com/?p=89 To truly give your startup web business a professional appearance, custom web designs can help elevate your brand.  Whether you are working with a graphic design professional or want to learn custom web design as a personal skill, this guide will help you map out the process from planning to deployment. Custom web design gives you an opportunity to map out the visual layout of your brand from a user experience, customizing the layout, images, fonts and navigation. With careful ...]]> To truly give your startup web business a professional appearance, custom web designs can help elevate your brand.  Whether you are working with a graphic design professional or want to learn custom web design as a personal skill, this guide will help you map out the process from planning to deployment. Custom web design gives you an opportunity to map out the visual layout of your brand from a user experience, customizing the layout, images, fonts and navigation. With careful attention to detail you can build an effective site that improves brand equity, increases conversion rates and gets your new company started in the right direction.

Developing Your Design: Layout Elements

Think of yourself as an artist with a blank canvas. When building a custom layout you want to start by answering a few basic questions. Think about your goals for the site, the target audience, the conversion objectives and branding aims. Start by asking yourself: what should my site convey and what do I want visitors to do? Whether your startup is seeking to generate new leads from clients, make sales of products or build loyal readers, you should design according to your conversion objectives.

Let’s suppose your startup markets local business professionals and you’re generating leads for your partners – in order to optimize your site layout and design, you should think about visual elements which appeal to the demographic. Your website should have a unique visual persona which is conveyed through professional fonts, logos, quality images (whether you take your own or purchase stock photos), properly balanced color, accessible navigation and an intuitive layout.

Start by mapping out a user scenario based upon how your site is presented. In this case, a user might visit your home page from a search engine looking to inquire about local accountants. After reading the content and mission statement on your site, he then begins to explore the site to gain a sense of how you can help solve the problem. In the example on the left, you can see the visual map of a potential conversion and should design each element to make the navigation to the conversion outcome easier.

Of course, branding and visual elements are important for ensuring the user remains on the site and establishes trust with your brand.  Adding visual elements such as testimonials, trust seals and a clean layout can encourage further action. You should emphasize the conversion and navigation aspects of your site so users are encouraged to interact with the site.

Coding Your Design: HTML / CSS and Testing

Working through various drafts of your design in Photoshop, you should get feedback from colleagues, partners or friends. Get a sense of which visual elements work best. Once you have narrowed it down to a design and layout structure, you should then proceed to code the design in HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets which controls fonts and layout elements.) If necessary you should hire a programming to code your design, and should consider implementing it within the software that best suits your purposes. For example, a corporate or blog layout should be coded for Wordpress or another CMS (content management system) while an e-Commerce cart should be written in the proper template style. With a quality coded design you can proceed to testing and analyzing the various visual elements based upon feedback.

]]> http://www.businessonramp.com/how-to-design-an-effective-site-for-your-startup-with-custom-web-designs/feed/ 0 Web Design http://www.businessonramp.com/web-design/ http://www.businessonramp.com/web-design/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:46:35 +0000 admin http://businessonramp.com/?p=30 Web Design – templates vs. custom designs

If you are beginner and would like to have a quality looking website, you have two options, which are using a template or custom designing a site. There are numerous was to design a site. The most common used format for designing a website is html. These sites are very simple and are limited in visual effect. However, with the integration of CSS, you can create a professional looking site. ...]]> Web Design – templates vs. custom designs

If you are beginner and would like to have a quality looking website, you have two options, which are using a template or custom designing a site. There are numerous was to design a site. The most common used format for designing a website is html. These sites are very simple and are limited in visual effect. However, with the integration of CSS, you can create a professional looking site. CSS stands for cascading style sheet. Think of your website like a house. The html is like to frame of the house. With a quality built foundation, you can add all the extras with little effort. CSS is the code that will add the extras to your site. To discover the usefulness of CSS, search the internet for tutorials as well as templates to try.

Template Sites

These sites are designed with non-developers in mind. You can find many templates over the internet as well as in most of the website creator programs. Many template site providers charge for the use of the template or to purchase the site design out right. The costs of the using the site is usually significantly cheaper the buying the rights to the template. Once you have chosen your template, you will need to load the CSS and html files in to a web-creating program. Image editing software will be needed if you are planning to use different image than the ones provided on the template. It will be very important to keep the image size the same as the ones on the template or edit the template to fit your images.

Custom Designs

A custom design website will ensure that you have a site that is unique to your company. It will require some knowledge of the coding as well as graphic design. One of the easiest ways to design a site is by using an image creation program to layout your site design before you start coding. Photoshop is one of the best programs to use for this process because you are able to integrate the files into Dreamweaver (the most popular website creation software). You will be able to use the sections you create in Photoshop by splicing them into Dreamweaver to create clean and easy to edit CSS and html code.
Beyond CSS and html

Other formats can be used to create website including Flash and Content Management Systems (CMS). These very robust formats require more skills then html and CSS sites.

Flash

Flash sites are becoming more and more popular because the visual ability of the sites is unmatched. However, there are many disadvantages to using flash to create a site including the lack of search capability, and the skill level needed to create and edit Flash sites.

CMS

Web content management systems are used on many of the most popular sites today. They use a database format to gather and maintain content for websites. Using a backdoor for administered use, content can easy be added and removed from the site by users with little to no experience with coding. The main disadvantage to a CMS is that it takes much more skill and time to set it up. However, with the growth of CMS platforms like Wordpress and Joomla, how to guides, tutorials and class, CMS websites are becoming more and more popular.

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