So, after you have considered your options and decided you are not in the mood to make a website template, you have decided to take the easy way and purchase one. There are a bazillion sites on the web that have them for sale or free, some are packed in to bundles of different sizes from as few as 10 to bundles in the hundreds. These lovely packs have one thing in common; they all want you to BUY! Sure, you can buy them, but do they come with instruction booklets? I think not. Once you buy them, you are on your own my friend. None of them will tell you how to create your perfect site for your little niche. So how to choose a professional website templates? Here are some tips.
Nicely made does not always mean professional! Moreover, like in the rest of the world, looks are not everything! You will have other concerns like functionality, content and search engine optimization. Make sure the templates you are looking at have everything else that has been mentioned above.
- Look at the theme of the template you are considering, most have a general theme. The can look great to you. Nevertheless, will your customers love it? Take a couple hours to research colors and how they apply to the sites. Hot Pink says HEY, Blue is cool, think about the presentation and what you want to say to your customers. Notice, how sections are separated and the colors used, how does it grab your attention?
- A professional website designer uses colors to the advantage of the products and customers they are trying to reach. If the colorful additives on the site are decorative only, it is not a professional site. Snappy colors make the site. They attract the eye to the places that need attention. The colors should show off the theme of the site. Pictures, flash presentation and all the information on the site is optimized for the user. If they take an hour to load then surfers will not stick around for the finished product even if it is totally presentable when fully loaded. What you need is a fast loading, search engine optimized template that makes the customers come back for more!
Therefore, when you are shopping for your template, check carefully and make sure you do your research thoroughly if you are not into making your own. And make sure you are satisfied with it before you publish it to the Internet!
In the world of web design today, there are many different types of web design, from those built using website templates and ‘build your own’ site building applications to complex content managed and e-commerce web designs such as those used by big brand names like Amazon, eBay and Tesco. Which one is better ? And how can we make a good web design ?
Some companies, even some big name companies, have unprofessional looking and badly designed websites. Some have amazing looking websites but because of their high graphical content and minimal text content can take an age to load, are not user friendly and do not provide what the visitor wants.
Good Website DesignThough many aspects of website design differ from site to site, many things remain the same throughout the majority of websites on the internet. Most notably is the navigation or menu.
The way in which a website’s menu works and looks is very important, as ultimately, visitors to a website are looking for certain criteria that will make them either stay and interact or leave. This ability for a website to keep visitors interested is sometimes referred to as stickiness. Visitors want an attractive visually exciting experience, but perhaps more importantly, they want ‘ease of use’.
Website usability is a key factor for websites that want their visitors to stick around, make an enquiry and ultimately complete a transaction and order a product or service.
Easy to Use Web Design
Internet users tend to prefer easy to use websites, because they do not want to have to learn how to use a website every time they find a new one. They should be able to use a website after only a few seconds of looking around a homepage, any more and they will leave and browse elsewhere.
The need for fast user interaction is vital and therefore having a fast loading website is also important for a website to succeed. Even with faster internet connections such as broadband, internet users don’t want to wait around.
Just imagine, if you go to a shop on the high street and are totally ignored by shop assistants at the counter for 5 minutes, even after you have made it clear you want help. There is a correlation here to how an internet user may feel, when they arrive at a website that has been poorly designed, is difficult to use, unfriendly and slow to load.
Making sure that a website has been well thought out and designed with the user in mind, displays a company’s unique selling points within easily recognisable eye catching calls for action and has a clear, easy to use menu is key to its success.
Flash Web Design
With recent web design advancements, such as the introduction of Flash animation and high definition video content, impressive websites have been produced to take advantage of much higher levels of visual effects and interaction. However with this ‘high end’ web design, comes a price, more often than not, web designs which rely heavily upon Flash content are often ridiculously slow to load. They often have a progress bar, which slowly goes across the web browser to signify when the website will finish loading.
This is much like the progress bars that you may be familiar with if you use video editing or 3D rendering software, or if you use games consoles where they are displayed whilst you wait for games to load.
Internet users on the whole do not want to wait 3 - 5 minutes for a web page to load even if it does feature high resolution images, animation or video. They want fast informative content rich websites. If they wanted to watch an animation or video they would watch TV.
Good Flash Web Design
This is not to say that Flash animation is all bad news and shouldn’t be used in web design. If used subtly and in small amounts it can make a website more visually appealing without slowing the load time down too much. Suitable uses for Flash animation in web design are things such as; Flash banner advertisements, Flash video and interactive Flash forms for online questionnaires or business presentations.
Using Flash for a whole website design however, is not such a good idea. It slows the user’s experience down because they have to wait for elements of it to load. Also, sites totally developed in Flash tend to use unfamiliar menu structures and features. This can confuse visitors who just want to quickly interact with the website and not be amazed by the way the menu animates.
Just because you can do these things in Flash, it doesn’t mean they have any real working value in the real world. They may look pretty, but if they are not functional and only irritate the visitor then they have no real value.
Flash Web Design & SEO
Another argument against using Flash to create a whole website is that it dramatically reduces the effectiveness of your websites’ Search Engine Optimisation. Flash web designs are made up of one main file within a web page which search engines find difficult to index. This is because the text within them is usually graphical text and therefore is not usually accessible by search engines.
Some recent developments allow some text to be displayed for search engines in Flash websites, but this is nowhere near as effective as text content within traditional HTML based websites.
Don’t Write Off Flash in Web Design
Although Flash does have its limitations it also has its good points if used correctly. For instance; Flash animation is usually smaller in file size than traditional gif animation and because of the way it is made the animation flows smoother than gif animation too.
Having said this, I would recommend only using Flash in small areas within a site to compliment other imagery that makes up the overall design.
Finding a balance between minimal graphical elements, imagery, Flash and good quality informative text is the key to a successful user friendly website. This isn’t to say that web design needs be boring. By working with quality web design companies there’s no reason why you couldn’t have a visually exciting, well designed, easy to use and successful website.
Visually Stimulating Web Design
When visitors first arrive at a website, they want to be impressed and engaged with what the website has to offer. This will be determined by the ways in which the web designer has laid out the website’s content text, images and features.
Arranging elements such as imagery, text, graphics, flash and video in such a way as to keep the visitor interested in the website is the key to good web design. If a website has poor design and doesn’t grab the attention of the visitor in the first few seconds, then it may well be dismissed as just another average website. This ultimately means the visitor will go elsewhere to spend their time and, more importantly, money.
Good Web Design Layout
A lot of time and money is spent making sure that the right elements of websites are positioned in the right places. Companies spend large amounts of money conducting research into how internet users use their websites.
This type of research shows where their visitors’ eyes concentrate the most, which elements of the website they click on first and generally how they interact and use their websites.
Most internet users will look primarily from the top left either across the page, or down the left hand side of the web page through an internet browser via a computer, mobile phone or TV set.
I would hazard a guess, that they are looking for the company’s name or logo, their main selling points or slogans and then what the website has to offer in terms of what is featured in the menu. After which their eyes are probably drawn across the page content and over to the right hand side. Successful web design usually takes this into consideration and will ultimately affect the way a website looks.
There are of course rather famous exceptions to this rule for instance one rather well known search engine has a web design which is quite different. The main focus and core functionality in their web design is located right in the centre of the page. This however, isn’t any ordinary website with tens or even hundreds of pages of products and services to display, its main focus is its recognisable logo and of course its search box. It does however feature a small minimal menu across the top of the web design, which flows from left to right. So even they have taken onboard some of the research undertaken into internet users’ habits.
If you go looking at websites after reading this article, I can guarantee that most of the web designs you’ll see, will have a left hand menu and a defined header bar with a company logo and slogan across it.
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If you're building your very own website it will really serve you in the long run to pay special attention to website design from the outset. Sure you can go back and fix things at a later date, but a lot of damage can already have been done to your online credibility by that point - and that credibility may take a very long time to build back up again, so why take the risk? Here are five do's and don'ts to ensure that any Website you design lives up to a basic level of good usability from a visitor's perspective :
- Splash pages are not a good idea. What's a splash page? It's the first page you see when you arrive at a Website. The specific ones that are bad are those that say something like 'Welcome!' and then have you waiting for several minutes while some audio or video presentation loads - not a good idea. Remember, your Website visitors will typically have a very short attention span. Your site is competing with millions of others and making your visitors wait around will only make them want to hit the back button in their browser and go visit somewhere else. The first page, the 'Home' page, of your Website should be a genuine content page with a fast load time, i.e. not excessive in the graphic department, where all of the other pages and sections of your site are easily accessible from.
- Don't overdo it with the banner adverts Excessive use of banner adverts will tend to give your Web pages a slow load time and, particularly if they flash and pulse in a kaleidoscope of color, will irritate and annoy your visitors rather more than they'll entertain them. But they'll make you money, I hear you say? Will they? Most experienced Webmasters will tell you that the days of successful banner advertising are pretty much in the past. Most Web surfers these days have learned that banners are advertising and obvious advertising tends to get tuned out. You can get away with one or two banners per page that look in context with the general look and feel of your Web pages but overdoing it will only make you look like an amateur. Banner farms are so old hat and don't impress anyone these days, if they ever did.
- Make your site's navigation menu simple and easy to understand How many Websites have you found that left you completely bewildered when it came to finding your way around and locating the information that they appeared to promise and that you were looking for? Probably more than you care to remember, sadly. And how many of them did you choose to revisit after having been bamboozled first time around? Not many, right? Well, learn from your own experience here and make sure that you put a lot of time and effort into planning your site's navigation menu so that it is logical and easy to understand. It's a good idea to test it on a few friends to see if they can find what they're looking for without any help from you. If they can't, it's back to the drawing board.
- Choose your Website color schemes wisely If you give your visitors a headache when they're at your site they'll a) leave quickly and b) not come back. One of the best ways to achieve those two undesirable effects is to choose some sort of garish color scheme that even your Website's Mother would not be able to love. Pay particular attention in this regard to text. Make sure that your text is of a size that makes it comfortably readable and that it stands out clearly from its background. This is best ensured by sticking with normal black text on a white background.
- Get rid of that annoying music. You don't have cheesy 'tunes' playing in the background on your Website do you? If you do, please get rid of them. It really won't do you any favors, you'll just come across as a complete amateur who really doesn't care about annoying their visitors, and if you want a successful Website, that's not something you should be going out of your way to do. That's not to say that audio and, indeed, video don't have a place on a successful Website. With the ever-increasing use of broadband Internet connections it is perfectly possible to integrate informative and entertaining audio and video presentations into Web pages that might even be more acceptable to your target audience than plain old text on its own. Just make sure that the audio and video you provide can be turned on and off by your Website visitor and has easily-adjustable volume.
It's really very tempting to just jump right in and start building your Website without much planning but it really is more sensible to spend a reasonable amount of time working things out on paper first. Doing this will almost certainly save you time in the long run by minimizing the number of mistakes you'll have to correct that jumping in with both feet without thinking will inevitable lead to.
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