Is your Web Design Driving Traffic Away From your Website?

By Kyle Newton

Web-design does not mean designing art pieces with our websites. In fact, it is designing something useful that the clients needs; whether it is an e-commerce site, or a simple branding site. The primary goal is to get your clients message out there. The web design field is maturing and now we know which website structures work and which ones don't. Keeping this in mind, there is no need to go hog-wild with your designs - you know what works already!
The 80/20 principle works in just about any field - web design is no different. A classic definition of the principle states: that a small number of the causes (20%) are responsible for most (80%) of the effect. With respect to web design, we can say that 20% of the work takes up 80% of the time. So the approach should be to identify that expensive 20% and do something about! In a typical web design project,this 20% is:

1. Figuring out the Client Requirements and efficiently dealing with them. 2. Thinking and creating the basic structure of the website.

The best idea for web design may be to have "Predefined web site structures - templates" with different themes and covering all the area like e-commerce site, or a simple branding site. The designer must always keep in mind that he is the web designer; he is going to tell the client how the website should be laid out, not the other way around!

Web design becomes a pain when one start it by tinkering -- when you sit down in front of your computer and you start building the website with no plan. You just start 'tinkering', trying different layouts, changing positions of images or your navigation etc ... This is a recipe to disaster and pain. This should be avoided. Some points that need to be taken care of while designing are:

1. Do not put too much text in one big block. Separate them out into paragraph and put white space between paragraphs. This makes your text look more readable. 2. If you check the websites of big companies (Microsoft, Yahoo, etc), you will find that they still prefer a white background with black text for their main text. If you must have a colored background, make sure you try out your page by viewing it in resolutions like 256 colors to see whether the page looks acceptable. 3. Reduce the size of the individual graphics files on your pages by using the following methods: a. reduce the number of colors in the graphic b. reduce the size of the image, if possible c. in animations, reduce the number of frames d. in animations, don't duplicate the background in every frame; make the first frame a background without any objects that will move, and put all your moving objects in separate frames with transparent backgrounds.

About the author
Kyle Newton is a professional internet marketing specialist and can launch and manage your complete web presence from Web Design to SEO with professional results that make your projects, services, or products a success on the web.

Source : seoarticles4u.com