Website Planning …Plan your Venture

A well made website gives your business a corporate identity in web. Hence website should be interactive, communicative and user friendly. You need to keep track of several points before creating and uploading a website, it is important to plan as per the customers demand. It needs a meticulous approach to construct a good website. Following are the few important points which you should keep in mind before constructing a good website.

Objective
Websites provide you an internet presence. It is essential to define the exact objective of the website before planning the course of action. Your objective should focus on what the basic requirements of your customers and how can your website assist them. The objective should define what the website can achieve and what benefits users can get. As well beginning is half done; a clear purpose of the website can give you the fuel to construct a website. With your defined objective, you can easily identify your target audience. Setting short term and long term goal for the website will help you to make clear plans for the future when expansion, modification, and improvement will take place. You can also track your progress if you draw a clear goal setting objective.

Target Audience
You make website for the people, your customer, and audience. It is essential to know who’s going to visit your site and how can they benefit you. Defining the right target audience is the foremost step in the website planning process. Your audience or visitors will visit your site for a specific reason and, you need to understand the requirements of your visitors. Whether it’s a business site or informative site, you should always identify the target audience for your site. You need to hold the attention of your visitors so that they will stay longer in your site. From visuals to appropriate content, you should know the specific preferences of your audience.

Content
Content management is an integral part of any website. Your visitor judges you through the glasses of content and technology used. A well written content represents the authenticity of the website. Content evaluation and organization should be well defined while plotting a website. Building necessary content then organizing it according to the visitors need is a major step in website planning. Content has to be crisp, brief and right to the point. Ambiguous content may deter the audience’s attention. Hence content should be well edited and it should accomplish target audience objectives. It is always better to conduct in depth research before putting the content in your site. Content involves every alphabet featured in your website. You need to categorize content with brief and descriptive words which should be lucid and attractive.

Compatibility
To become a familiar name among viewers, you need to create a website which is compatible with majority of web surfers. In today’s situation, market share of browsers, as depending on your target audience, the compatibility of your website with your audience is restricted. There’s only one way to be certain about a particular platform that is to test it on that platform.

Storyboarding
Storyboarding is the final process of website planning. In this you take care of the purpose, audience and content to design most suitable format for the website. In storyboarding, you make a site map of your website. Storyboarding creates a visual portrayal of the web pages. There are different ways of making a storyboard for any website. It basically depends on the content and the pages involved in the website. Storyboard can be called a prototype model for the website.

Conclusion
Websites are never finished. It needs constant upgradation and fine tuning to get the best search engine listing. While building a website, your prime concern should be to make it feature rich and informative for the viewer. It should have the pertinent information which is desired by your visitors and search engines. To make an active site, you should plan accordingly and make every page attractive and informative. If your site features empty pages and is disorganized then it is just a failure. So, you should make your site look professional and effective and for which website planning is just the first step.

Guidelines to Accessible Website for visitors

Website decides your market presence. If you get numerous visitors a day then your site is said to be a well placed website, but what if your site witnesses very few visitors a day? What could be the reason for this low amount of visitor, when you have made a good informative website? Here the question is about accessibility. In today’s scenario, where there is an abundance of websites, visitors look for sites which are more accessible and easy to use. But you must be thinking, why emphasize on accessibility when your website is already there? Hmm. if you are here to make big bucks and your competitors are at your every clumsy step, then you should not take even a small chance. Now your visitor might get you but what if you will find millions of e- commerce pages on the web and where your page is just one of millions? If at that time your site will be accessible then only you will get maximum visitors.

Websites are a communication mode between you and your customer. Hence, all you need is to be clear in your approach so that the visitor will be able to understand your offerings. Following are few guidelines to make your website more accessible and user friendly.

Easy Alternatives to audio and visual content
Your site’s accessibility depends on the system where it is being viewed. It is possible that some systems cannot interpret your audio or visual, hence your website should provide similar alternatives to your image or audio. It should make the system interpret the auditory and visual content. You should put enough text explanation and links to help your visitors interpret your website

Adorn it but don’t put over make up
Getting a beautiful website is easy but what makes you unique is the professional approach you put in your website. Use expressive visual clues rather than just hues to convey your information. Colors are good to make two dimensional images but when the medium is a web then visual interaction is must.

Apply proper style sheet
Following a proper style sheet in your HTML page can make your site more accessible. You should maintain the proper specifications to make a faultless HTML page. Every HTML tag should be placed properly. Internet Explorer won’t display your page if you fail to notice even a single table tag.

Use proper language
Identify proper HTML language tags, to specify the language used in your website. Be lucid while using abbreviations. Make sure you specify acronyms within your content when they occur first.

Make transforming tables
Don’t make every representation diagram purely for design. Put enough information inside the diagram which can easily lure the attention of the visitor. If you use tables, then place information inside the table. Don’t insert tables which make no sense. If you wish to emphasize your text then present it in a tabular format. Provide a proper table to text convert in your website. These small details make your website more users friendly.

Ease of use
If you write HTML then you should always take care of the version you are using. If you use a specific version then it might not work in all the systems. So to make your page more accessible make sure all the versions should work when viewing your page.

User friendly visuals
Visuals can not always be pleasant to your visitors. If your website has animations, moving visuals then it might annoy your visitor. To avoid this, you need to give your visitors ways to stop these animations or insert options where your visitor can get animation free page.

Provide guidelines for interfaces
You might insert many embedded interfaces like applets, plug ins in your website, which may not be familiar to your visitor. Hence, your web content should provide user guidelines for these embedded interfaces.

Have clear navigation system
Be consistent in your navigation system. Use proper words to explain your links. Do not make ambiguous statements while comprehending something important. For example, if you are an online store, you should give links showing buy or add to cart in your product catalogue for visitors to navigate directly to order page.

Ensure faultless documentationThis is applicable for all kinds of writing. Whether you want to be accessible or not, if your information is understandable then you will be easily accessible. Don’t put jargons, spelling or grammatical errors in your content this distracts your visitor’s attention. Make your site impeccable and comprehensible for your visitors.
Accessibility comes easily if you take care of few things while making your site. Above written things are just introductions to make your site more interactive. But, it’s always you who can understand the need of your visitors in a better way.

Myths and reality of Website Designing

Web designing doesn’t follow any particular rule book. It’s like any designing format which should be expressive, appealing and informative. But it’s not that easy to understand your visitor’s choice. Something which is appealing to you might not appeal your visitor. Hence, there are certain guidelines which you should always try to follow while plotting a website. These guidelines basically talk about the content and graphics.

Before designing your web page, you visit numerous web sites; some with good content, some bad and some with a balanced content and graphics. But you must have liked those sites which successfully hold your attention and curiosity. Following are the two web designing myths which are widely followed by the web designers.

Content Supremacy
A well known adage says ‘Content is the King’, and it is true to some extent. But can content alone hold attention? What if visitor is in a hurry, or don’t want to give time to read the content? Then all your content supremacy will be unwanted. Visitor might look for animations or other interfaces to explore the site.
However, it’s better to put enough information in the site, but it should not look dull to the visitor. Applets and interfaces can be used to make your site more attractive. Only content lacks the needed appeal in your site, which can deter your visitor. Your website should have a perfect balance of animation and content to become popular among your target audience.

When are these applets required? Sometimes these interfaces are required to establish the relation between the brand and the target audience – for example, the Yahoo Mail’s latest beta version that shows a dummy slender lad interacting with the audience. This becomes more interesting when the page shows loading, the constant boxing practice with the shadow of the lad holds interest. This is easily downloaded and it gives an extra zing to the normal mailing WebPages. Similarly, interfaces, applets can be used in comic, gaming and other interactive websites, where you want your audience to adhere to your site.

Web design, like any other designing, has no hard and fast rule. It follows a simple philosophy that is the taste of the target audience. You may have a static or a dynamic website, but it should aptly cater to the target audience.

Graphic Dominance
There is another school of thought, who believes that a website looks attractive only when you put lots of graphics in it. They believe all the applets and interfaces make your site look spectacular and attractive. You might often come across these kind of sites, for example, if a newcomer or web designing student makes any website, who is almost unaware of the real market, will put all his book knowledge and technology to make a website, result, a heavy and adorned site. This makes the site heavy to load, and you might loose your visitor because of this. Hence there should be a balance between the graphics and the content.

You certainly can’t afford to have hundred kilobyte animated graphics in your website, which is certainly a useless adornment. Large graphics take longer to load because the download speed depends on your modem. If you have a hundred kilobyte graphic and your visitor has a low modem, then your graphic can take ages to load, which is certainly a strict no for your website’s popularity. These graphics are purely decorative and you should restrict yourself while using them. Graphics should be place at the appropriate place; they can enhance the text but, without content graphics is like body without a soul. Undoubtedly, graphics make a page interesting and more desirable, but heavy decoration can destroy the gist of your site. Hence your site should have a blend of graphics and content. Decorative and small pages are always desirable but if your page has too much graphics and takes long to be loaded then it can be unbearable.

Guidelines For Infallible Website

Your website is like your child, carefully nurtured by you. You always wanted to have the best website for your business, the best looking site anyone have ever seen anywhere on the planet. Business site should look authentic and professional. Many a times a very good website fails to increase traffic. Although the website has very good content and graphics but it records less visitors. This could be a case with any business website where your website means your business. Hence you should be extra cautious while plotting your website. In this article you will find some common website mistakes, which if avoided can give stonking results.

Hit Counter
Many webmasters recommend page hit counters, which shows the number of hits a day. These counters are certainly unproductive. Visitor stats involving adding code don’t present accurate and actual number of visitors. For a progressive online business you shouldn’t allow hit counters in your page. Hence, avoid using these methods.

Special Effects and Applets
Unexpected graphics always distract your visitor’s concentration. The sudden use of music or video played without warning makes site look adolescent, at least not professional. If your site involves special effects then provide the user with options to start and stop the player.

Web Browser Choice
Many websites have a disclaimer statement at the bottom of the page regarding the web browser on which the site has been designed. This message also shows that the page will be best viewed on that specific browser. There statements might annoy the visitor because there are several browsers and by being specific you might offend other browsers.

Horizontal Scroll
Horizontal scrolling is the most annoying factor during website viewing. A professional website shouldn’t have horizontal scrolling in any screen resolution. Horizontal scrolling makes it difficult to read the content in the page and visitor might lose patience and leave the site.

Slow Page Loading
A majority of web surfers use dial up connection. They can’t spare much time on a single site (unless it is of their interest), if your site takes long time to load then you might lose the visitor. Never make your site heavy to download, this makes your site dull and least desired. If the visitors won’t view your page then they might look for other websites, which is certainly a set back for you.

Image Optimization
Horizontal scrolling is the most annoying factor during website viewing. A professional website shouldn’t have horizontal scrolling in any screen resolution. Horizontal scrolling makes it difficult to read the content in the page and visitor might lose patience and leave the site.

External CSS
Your website should not look stagnant; it should be updated time to time. CSS (cascade style sheet) can be used to update your site intermittently. The time you can save in updating is amazing when you use CSS. This adds shorter download time to your webpage.

Disabled Right Click
Many sites disable right clicking in order to protect their copyright images. But this can irritate your visitor, because right click not only provides copy but other command also like bookmark, print and refresh.

Free Email Address
Avoid using free mail services for your website or business correspondence. Using free mail services can damage your website credibility. Always use your business domain web services.