SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING - SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - WEBSITE DESIGN
Website Design Questions
InDesigns Studio is a Website Design, Web Development and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Company based in Houston, Texas. I specialize in cutting edge website design development solutions, custom web application development, web-based software innovations, search engine optimization and Internet marketing, graphic designs, multimedia development and many other rich web application services. Read More...
InDesigns Studio is a complete Website Design and Web Development Company offering customer oriented, high quality Website design and Web development services & delivering them effectively. Whether you are a small or medium size business, InDesigns Studio can help you achieve a unique online presence to give you a cutting edge website design solution for your online business.
How long does it take to build a website?
The timescale of a project is generally dictated by the client. If you have a deadline in mind we will endeavour to meet it for you. The most common delay in the creation of a site is waiting for content (text/images) to be sent to us by the client.
Questions before the design process?
Website Design Process from the beginning!
1. I don't know where to start. Whats the first step? One of the first steps would be to obtain a domain name (www.yourname.com). You can use the Domain Name Checker on the left side of our website.
2. I found a domain name I want, now what? Use our contact form and we can reserve it for you.
3. How much does a domain name cost? Most domain name pricing varies depending on where you purchase it but basically the are only around $14.95 per year.
4. What is web hosting and why do I need it? Web hosting is the server space where you website is located. This is required so your site can be accessed by anyone on the web. Web hosting is paid each month, but you can save by prepaying for an entire year.
5. I have a domain name and hosting now what do I need to do? You will need to email text for your website. Try to use as many key words as possible so that your website get good indexing with the search engines. Also email any logos and photos that you would like to use on the website.
6. Will I be able to update my own website after it's designed? Some of our CMS (Content Management System) website allow you to edit text and some photos.
7. Who will promote my site? We believe that a company wants a website to increase their return on investment (ROI). This belief leads u to include promotional costs within your contract.
8. Do you offer maintenance of my website? Yes, we offer website maintenance to all our clients
Questions after the design process?
Questions after the Website Design Process?
1. How can I view the activity or traffic of my website? Upon request a hit counter can be added to your website. There are also tools accesible from the admin panel of most of the web design software. You can also request for a monthly statistics report to be emailed to you at any time.
2. How do I optimize my website so that people searching for related keywords will find my site? One way to do this is to use keywords in the text on your home page. For example if you own a dog grooming business in Greenville SC, you would want to make sure that you use the keywords dog, grooming, greenville and sc someplace in a sentence when talking about your business. You can work keywords into your page without it being obvious.
3. What other things can I do to help optimize my website with Google and Yahoo? There are many different ways to increase your rankings. One thing that helps is to have other reputable sites link to your website. For example if you sell ABC Dog Food, then perhaps they have a page on their site that lists and links to dealers that carry their product. This is a great way to pull business to your website. I will also help you optimize your titles, metatags and other technical things that will help you along the way. Although I can't guarantee any particular rankings, I will do my best to help you optimize your site.
A Web site is a collection of information about a particular topic or subject. Designing a website is defined as the arrangement and creation of Web pages that in turn make up a website. A Web page consists of information for which the Web site is developed. A website might be compared to a book, where each page of the book is a web page.
There are many aspects (design concerns) in this process, and due to the rapid development of the Internet, new aspects may emerge. For typical commercial Web sites, the basic aspects are:
1. The site design is defined by the topic and content.
2. The content, substance, and information on the site should be relevant to the site and should target the area of the public that the website is concerned with.
3. The site should be user-friendly, with the interface and navigation simple and reliable. If the site is large enough and contains enough information, a site browser may be needed so that information can be found quickly, without using the navigation tools.
4. The appearance should include a single style that flows throughout, to show consistency. The style should be professional, look good and most of all be relevant to the users and site content.
5. The visibility of the site's text and information should be paramount as that is what the users are visiting for.
6. The site must also be easy to find on the internet and if possible should be listed on most, if not all, major search engines.
A Web site typically consists of text and images. The first page of a website is known as the Home page or Index. Some websites use what is commonly called a Splash Page. Splash pages might include a welcome message, language/region selection, or disclaimer. Each web page within a Web site is an HTML file which has its own URL. After each Web page is created, they are typically linked together using a navigation menu composed of hyperlinks. Faster browsing speeds have led to shorter attention spans and more demanding online visitors and this has resulted in less use of Splash Pages, particularly where commercial websites are concerned.
Once a Web site is completed, it must be published or uploaded in order to be viewable to the public over the internet. This may be done using an FTP client. Once published, the Web master may use a variety of techniques to increase the traffic, or hits, that the website receives. This may include submitting the Web site to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, exchanging links with other Web sites, creating affiliations with similar Web sites, etc.
Liquid versus fixed layouts
Some web designers come from a graphic artist background in print, where the artist has absolute control over the size and dimensions of all aspects of the design.[citation needed] On the web however, the Web designer has no control over several factors, including the size of the browser window, the web browser used, the input devices used (mouse, touch screen, voice command, text, cell phone number pad, etc.) and the size and characteristics of available fonts.
Some designers choose to control the apperance of the elements on the screen by using specific width designations. This control may be achieved through the use of a HTML table-based design, or through the use of CSS. Whenever the text, images, and layout of a design do not change as the browser changes, this is referred to as a fixed width design. Proponents of fixed width design prefer the control over the look and feel of the site and the precision placement of objects on the page. Other designers choose a liquid design.
A liquid design is one, like Wikipedia, where the design moves to flow content into the whole screen, or a portion of the screen, no matter what the size of the browser window. Proponents of liquid design prefer to use all the screen space available. Liquid design can be achieved through the use of CSS, by avoiding styling the page altogether, or by using HTML tables set to a percentage of the page. Both liquid and fixed design developers must make decisions about how the design should degrade on higher and lower screen resolutions. Sometimes the pragmatic choice is made to flow the design between a minimum and a maximum width. This allows the designer to avoid coding for the browser choices making up the long tail, while still using all available screen space.
Similar to liquid layout is the optional fit to window feature with Adobe Flash content. This is a fixed layout that optimally scales the content of the page without changing the arrangement or text wrapping when the browser is resized.
Flash
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a proprietary, robust graphics animation/application development program used to create and deliver dynamic content, media (such as sound and video), and interactive applications over the web via the browser.
Flash is not a standard produced by a vendor-neutral standards organization like most of the core protocols and formats on the Internet. Flash is much more restrictive than the open HTML format, though, requiring a proprietary plugin to be seen, and it does not integrate with most web browser UI features like the "Back" button unless a hyperlink is programmed to link a new html page from the Flash file, in which case the animation of the previous page would reset. However, those restrictions may be irrelevant depending on the goals of the web site design.
According to NPD study, 98% of US Web users have the Flash Player installed [2], with 45%-56%[3] (depending on region) having the latest version. Numbers vary depending on the detection scheme and research demographics.
Many graphic artists use Flash because it gives them exact control over every part of the design, and anything can be animated and generally "jazzed up". Some application designers enjoy Flash because it lets them create applications that don't have to be refreshed or go to a new web page every time an action occurs. Flash can use embedded fonts instead of the standard fonts installed on most computers. There are many sites which forego HTML entirely for Flash. Other sites may use Flash content combined with HTML as conservatively as gifs or jpegs would be used, but with smaller vector file sizes and the option of faster loading animations. Flash may also be used to protect content from unauthorized duplication or searching.
Flash detractors claim that Flash websites tend to be poorly designed, and often use confusing and non-standard user-interfaces. Up until recently, search engines have been unable to index Flash objects, which has prevented sites from having their contents easily found. This is because many search engine crawlers rely on text to index websites. It is possible to specify alternate content to be displayed for browsers that do not support Flash. Using alternate content also helps search engines to understand the page, and can result in much better visibility for the page.
However, the vast majority of Flash websites are not disability accessible (for screen readers, for example) or Section 508 compliant. An additional issue is that sites which commonly use alternate content for search engines to their human visitors are usually judged to be spamming search engines and are automatically banned.
The most recent incarnation of Flash's scripting language (called "actionscript", which is an ECMA language similar to JavaScript) incorporates long-awaited usability features, such as respecting the browser's font size and allowing blind users to use screen readers. Actionscript 2.0 is an Object-Oriented language, allowing the use of CSS, XML, and the design of class-based web applications.
CSS versus tables
For more details on this topic, see Tableless web design. Back when Netscape Navigator 4 dominated the browser market, the popular solution available for designers to lay out a Web page was by using tables. Often even simple designs for a page would require dozens of tables nested in each other. Many web templates in Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG editors still use this technique today. Navigator 4 didn't support CSS to a useful degree, so it simply wasn't used.
After the browser wars were over, and Internet Explorer dominated the market, designers started turning toward CSS as an alternate, better means of laying out their pages. CSS proponents say that tables should be used only for tabular data, not for layout. Using CSS instead of tables also returns HTML to a semantic markup, which helps bots and search engines understand what's going on in a web page. Today, all modern Web browsers now support CSS with different degrees of limitations.
However, one of the main points against CSS is that by relying on it exclusively, control is essentially relinquished as each browser has its own quirks which result in a slightly different page display. This is especially a problem as not every browser supports the same subset of CSS rules. For designers who are used to table-based layouts, developing Web sites in CSS often becomes a matter of trying to replicate what can be done with tables, leading some to find CSS design rather cumbersome due to lack of familiarity.
For example, at one time it was rather difficult to produce certain design elements, such as vertical positioning, and full-length footers in a design using absolute positions. With the abundance of CSS resources available online today, though, designing with reasonable adherence to standards involves little more than applying CSS 2.1 or CSS 3 to properly structured markup.
These days most modern browsers have solved most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts possible. However, some people continue to use old browsers, and designers need to keep this in mind, and allow for graceful degrading of pages in older browsers. Most notable among these old browsers are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5, which, according to some web designers, are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that holds the World Wide Web back from converting to CSS design.
How it Looks vs. How it Works
Since so many web developers have a graphic arts background, some may pay more attention to how a page looks, without considering how visitors are going to find the page via a search engine. Some may rely more on advertising than search engines to attract visitors to the site. On the other side of the issue, search engine optimization consultants (SEOs) obsess about how well a web site works technically and textually: how much traffic it generates via search engines, and how many sales it makes, assuming looks don't contribute to the sales.
As a result, the designers and SEOs often end up in disputes where the designer wants more 'pretty' graphics, and the SEO wants lots of 'ugly' keyword-rich text, bullet lists, and text links. One could argue that this is a false dichotomy due to the possibility that a web design may integrate the two disciplines for a collaborative and synergistic solution. Because some graphics serve communication purposes in addition to aesthetics, how well a site works may depend on the graphic designer's visual communication ideas as well as the SEO considerations.
Another problem when using lots of graphics on a page is that download times can be greatly lengthened, often irritating the user. This has become less of a problem as the internet has evolved with high-speed internet and the use of vector graphics. This is an engineering challenge to increase bandwidth in addition to an artistic challenge to minimize graphics and graphic file sizes. This is an on-going challenge as increased bandwidth invites increased amounts of content.
Accessible Web design
Main article: Web accessibility
Accessible Web design is the art of creating webpages that are accessible to everyone, using any device. It is especially important so that people with disabilities - whether due to accident, disease or old age - can access the information in Web pages and be able to navigate through the website.
To be accessible, web pages and sites must conform to certain accessibility principles. These can be grouped into the following main areas:
1. Use semantic markup that provides a meaningful structure to the document (i.e. web page)
2. Semantic markup also refers to semantically organizing the web page structure and publishing web services description accordingly so that they can be recognised by other web services on different web pages. Standards for semantic web are set by IEEE
3. Use a valid markup language that conforms to a published DTD or Schema
4. Provide text equivalents for any non-text components (e.g. images, multimedia)
5. Use hyperlinks that make sense when read out of context. (e.g. avoid "Click Here.")
6. Don't use frames
7. Use CSS rather than HTML Tables for layout.
8. author the page so that when the source code is read line-by-line by user agents (such as a screen readers) it remains intelligible. (Using tables for design will often result in information that is not.)
9. However, W3C permits an exception where tables for layout either make sense when linearized or an alternate version (perhaps linearized) is made available.
Website Planning
Before creating and uploading a website, it is important to take the time to plan exactly what is needed in the website. Thoroughly considering the audience or target market, as well as defining the purpose and deciding what content will be developed are extremely important.
Purpose
It is essential to define the purpose of the website as one of the first steps in the planning process. A purpose statement should show focus based on what the website will accomplish and what the users will get from it. A clearly defined purpose will help the rest of the planning process as the audience is identified and the content of the site is developed. Setting short and long term goals for the website will help make the purpose clear and plan for the future when expansion, modification, and improvement will take place. Also, goal-setting practices and measurable objectives should be identified to track the progress of the site and determine success.
Content
Content evaluation and organization requires that the purpose of the website be clearly defined. Collecting a list of the necessary content then organizing it according to the audience's needs is a key step in website planning. In the process of gathering the content being offered, any items that do not support the defined purpose or accomplish target audience objectives should be removed. It is a good idea to test the content and purpose on a focus group and compare the offerings to the audience needs. The next step is to organize the basic information structure by categorizing the content and organizing it according to user needs. Each category should be named with a concise and descriptive title that will become a link on the website. Planning for the site's content ensures that the wants/needs of the target audience and the purpose of the site will be fulfilled.
Planning documentation
Documentation is used to visually plan the site while taking into account the purpose, audience and content, to design the site structure, content and interactions that are most suitable for the website. Documentation may be considered a prototype for the website – a model which allows the website layout to be reviewed, resulting in suggested changes, improvements and/or enhancements. This review process increases the likelihood of success of the website.
First, the content is categorized and the information structure is formulated. The information structure is used to develop a document or visual diagram called a site map. This creates a visual of how the web pages will be interconnected, which helps in deciding what content will be placed on what pages. There are three main ways of diagramming the website structure:
1, Linear Website Diagrams will allow the users to move in a predetermined sequence;
2. Hierarchical structures (of Tree Design Website Diagrams) provide more than one path for users to take to their destination;
3. Branch Design Website Diagrams allow for many interconnections between web pages such as hyperlinks within sentences.
4. In addition to planning the structure, the layout and interface of individual pages may be planned using a storyboard. In the process of storyboarding, a record is made of the description, purpose and title of each page in the site, and they are linked together according to the most effective and logical diagram type. Depending on the number of pages required for the website, documentation methods may include using pieces of paper and drawing lines to connect them, or creating the storyboard using computer software.
Some or all of the individual pages may be designed in greater detail as a website wireframe, a mock up model or comprehensive layout of what the page will actually look like. This is often done in a graphic program, or layout design program. The wireframe has no working functionality, only planning.
InDesigns Studio will increase your sales and profits through its industry expertise in addition to giving you a great looking website that works! If you would like more information on these services contact us today.