Archive for September, 2009

The Five Basic Elements Of Web Design

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009


The basic elements and principles involved in web design are true for all other types of design. These principles will show you the most effective way to put together the various design elements to come up with a good and effective site. A good web design company emphasizes the fact that web design is not simply about slapping all those HTML tags on the page, but it involves the use of web design principles to build a pleasing and useful web design. Your web design company will need you to make the most aesthetically attractive and effective web design, so make sure you keep these elements in mind:

Web design Balance is the equal distribution of the heavy and light elements on a singly page. Balance in your web design is concentrated in your page layout. You must achieve visual balance in your web design all throughout the page, not only in the initial view. You web design company might commonly suggest you to center the text and all the other elements on your page. It is also very common to set your page on an invisible grid system to create the balance that you need. There are three types of balance that can be achieved when designing a page.

1. Symmetrical. This is achieved by placing all the elements in an even fashion – a heavy element on the left is matched with another on the right. Be careful with symmetrical balances as you do not want your site to look flat or plain boring.

2. Asymmetrical. These are more challenging to build, but there are strategies to achieve this which can include the varying texture, color and image positioning and size to arrive at a pleasant looking page.

3. Discordant. Web sites that are off-balance suggest action or motion, so you can create a discordant design on purpose. This type of designs make viewers uncomfortable or uneasy, so they are best used for sites that are intended to make people think.

Web design contrast is more than just about colors and black or white, but also involves contrasting shapes, sizes and even textures. You can take full advantage of contrast by changing font size, weight and family to provide textual contrast and varying sizes of images and elements. However, be careful not to blast your readers or scare them off with contrasting colors which are way too loud. The links on your content should be contrasted well to draw most attention.

Web design emphasis involves the main points where the eye is drawn into in a design. One of the mistakes that your web design company may warn you not to make is to have everything in the design stand out. Keep in mind that if everything in the design has equal emphasis, the entire page will tend to appear too busy for comfort and may end up unappealing. What you should focus on instead is to create a visual hierarchy in the web design – to put emphasis only on the right elements. You can use semantic markup to provide emphasis even without the use of styles; change the font size of image size in order to emphasis or lessen emphasis on them; or you can use contrast in colors for added emphasis.

Web design rhythm, also known as repetition, brings the much needed internal consistency into your web site designs. Almost all elements in your design can be repeated in order to create pleasing rhythm into your design. For instance, you can repeat your headline a few times for more emphasis, repeat the same image across the page, create a background that is tiled and patterned with repetitive elements, or repeat a particular style to provide site design consistency. It is also a good idea to repeat the navigation elements in your site design across the pages of your web site.

Web design unity, also regarded as a site’s proximity, is the what keeps all the similar elements in the site alike and those diverse further apart, and pulls everything together into one integrated whole. Unity when it comes to web site design is mainly achieved through the proper placement in your layout. You can implement this in many ways. You can, for example, adjust the layout of your elements to put them close or far away from each other. In the body of your page, you can change the spacing around the text in your page contents. You can further achieve unity by playing around the box properties and change the margins and paddings.

A good web design company keeps in mind all the basic design elements with each and every page they design and collaborate with. This way, you and your web design company will come up with web sites that are pleasant looking, effective and attractive. As the website designer, it is important that you keep these elements in mind and apply them appropriately to your web page design.

World’s Top Search Engines

Monday, September 28th, 2009


Search engines are the most important source of new web site visitors. Almost 50 percent of site visits begin at the search engine and a lot of traffic is generated. Search engines are the path makers between the web pages and the web users. Any new visitor to a particular website comes through a search engines whether it is Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine. About 80 percent of people, going online planning to shop for something or subscribe for any of the services start with any of the major search engine. Some of the major search engines serving World Wide Web are as follows:

Google

Google is the most prominent one all across the globe and its empire is still expanding. It is believed to be the most trusted source of information similar to any of the government agency. More than a dozen domains by Google we are able to perform each and every daily task, business related queries or any nook and comer of our life. Google has an omnipresent existence.

Yahoo

The second major search engine to receive search queries. Yahoo is specialized receiving more business related queries as it is specialized providing business oriented results. Yahoo uses a combination of web crawlers compiled and indexed results to rank the websites that are registered on their search engine. Services offered by Yahoo are Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Maps and Driving Directions, and Yahoo! Messenger.

MSN

It is believed to be the third most popular internet biggies on the web. MSN messenger is the most successful web application to hit the internet over the last decade. Optimization for MSN is equally important when it comes to website SEO. IT has major emphasis on using on page optimization techniques.

Dogpile

It compiles all the major search engines result in to one. It gives us a piled web results from all the major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. Known as meta search, Dogpile powers all the leading search engines together in one search box to deliver the best combined results.

MetaCrawler

MetaCrawler says, “Search the search engines” it means it provides the best results from the combined pool of the world’s leading search engines. MetaCrawler uses innovative metasearch technology to search major search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves, About, MIVA, LookSmart and more.

AltaVista

AltaVista is committed to provide advance Internet search with new technologies and features designed to improve the search experience for consumers. It is known for delivering Internet’s first Web index, first multilingual search capabilities on the Internet first Internet search engine to launch Image, Audio, and Video search capabilities.

There are other search engines like LookSmart, WebSearch, Ask, LiveSearch and others which are continuously supplying immense information to the internet community.

How about if you are able to get all these major search engines result on a single screen? Searchboth.com is now launching website providing all the major search engine results at the once. One can compare two major search engines displayed results without opening multiple browsers. Yahoo and Google are the default results displayed but one can chose the other search desired search engine.

The Best Web Hosting…

Sunday, September 27th, 2009


The best web hosting isn’t one that has a load of goodies but rather one that you can fully deploy. That’s the key to web hosting, along with not paying out your bun for one. Some things to consider when shopping for a hosting package is control panel, web space, band width, and domain allowance. Theses things, along with the company’s T O S (terms of service) should be considered before you buy a web hosting package.

To further determine what you need you first have to consider what it is that you are going to try to do with the new website. If you’re just going to use your site as an affiliate site to promote products than you won’t need very much space as if someone using it to load a lot of pictures. Pictures, videos ex. take up space, so at this point just try to settle on what you’re going to try to do with your new website. This gives you a better idea as to what you are going to need.

The first thing to look at is your control panel. The control panel is what you will manage your site settings along with your site builder. While it’s not collaborated very well see if you can find out what the company offers for a control panel. It should be user friendly and accessible. Me myself, I always liked Cpanel, it gives me something that I can work with. Some sites have there own while other have WHM which a lot of people like. The thing that you should be looking for is something that works for you. In order to deploy your web site properly you need to be able run it and know what it can do.

What the price determines more or less is the amount of disk space, bandwidth, domain allowance and e-mail accounts you‘re given. Disk space isn’t a real biggie as your monthly bandwidth transfer. Your disk space is easy, just figure out how much info you will be plugging into your web site and that will give you an idea. (Note; most web hosting accounts give you more than you will need.) The monthly bandwidth is determined by how many people have visited your site. If you are going to have a few hundred visitors a month than chances are you will not need very much? If you’re planning on have a few thousand than you might consider a better package. As for your e-mail accounts just know how many e-mail accounts you need and compare it to what the company offers. Domain allowance is one it which the amount of sub domains and parked domains that are allowed per account.

The thing that is nice about most web hosting companies is that you usually can upgrade or downgrade depending on your needs. Just try not to sign up for two or more years at a time that way you can change hosting accounts if that company doesn’t work out for you. It pays to shop around so take your time to look. And remember, the best web hosting is one which you are in control.