Web Designing: Basics and Essentials
The process of good website designing entails the following:
- Web designing is the creation of web pages and sites fundamentally with the help of HTML( which is the underlying structure of all websites), and additionally with CSS, PHP, XML, information architecture, SEO, website marketing and strategies, content, speed, and design. Hence, it helps to be a knowledge-bank to be a successful designer.
- Next, one needs to create a site plan, setting goals, that should clarify the purpose of the site and determining target audience.
- One should then have a workable wireframe and layout in place. A wireframe is a simple visual representation or guide suggesting the entire site structure of what a website would look like, without the text and graphics. It may include headers, sub-headers, simple layout structure, text blocks, calls to action buttons, etc.
- Design takes off after having a foolproof plan in place. Alongside a strong wireframe, one must carefully select the color-scheme and theme of the website.
- Next is creating site content with compact and grammatically correct text (which includes blog posts, featured articles, reviews or testimonials), graphics and multimedia. However, the definite spoilers for any site are lavish use of pop-ups, blinkers, videos/ music / images with automatic sound, difficult navigation of the ‘off' button of these features, flash, misplaced ads etc. Excessive use of multimedia also increases loading time besides distracting the user, thereby, driving away traffic. Here, one stands to lose visitors. Also, multimedia must be used sparingly and only where there is a need on a page. Indiscriminate use defeats the very purpose of such in-built technology. Designers should use small images as larger ones annoy users, and avoid lots of text. Use of multimedia should be website-specific. It is not meant for all sites. The cleaner the look, the better are the chances of increased usability.
- Designers would do well to keep pages short. This would minimize scrolling and increase staying power on the page.
- Navigation of a good website is easy, fun and rich in terms of user experience. It is a sure shot way of ensuring that a visitor would choose to return to it again and again, besides recommending the high-quality features and services to third party visitors. If people can't find what's on a website, they just won't stick around. A difficult navigation is a design-error.
- After designing a website, a designer needs to maintain it. Out-bound links need to be checked periodically to see if they still take the users somewhere for sometimes these websites disappear without trace. Maintenance should also be for blog-posts, articles, and other written text that need to be refreshed from time to time to ensure recency, so crucial for Google ranking.
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