Many a frustrated website developer wonders what makes browsers lose interest in his site quickly. There may be a couple of causes to this problem. Here we will touch on a few.

Stop and look over the pages on your site. Does each page have something valuable to offer its visitors? Presentation of a page won't matter if there is no valuable content on it for the reader. Your visitor is browsing your site for a reason. Try to fulfill those reasons before spending time dreaming up successful designs. You need to have the basic content in place first. This will give your visitors reason to continue browsing through the rest of your site.

In addition, many sites try to make money by posting advertisements for other businesses in their sites. How many of us would bother turning on the TV if it were just commercials? In the same vein, a site developer needs to ensure that the advertisements don't take over the whole page and that there is more content than ads available. Try for a 25/75 ratio, 25% ads to a 75% site content.

Many websites use pop-ups to relay messages to their visitors. If you look from the perspective of a visitor, pop-ups are annoying and distracting, hindering attempts to complete conversion or acquire information. There are many creative ways to get messages across other than springing them in them face of the screen reader. Many times a frustrated reader will just click off a pop-up filled site without finishing his task, vowing to get what he needs from another pop-up free site.

An organized site breeds happy consumers. Ensure that your site is easily navigable and that your content is organized neatly. Besides for a generally more attractive interface, browsers will find their way around and be able to successfully accomplish what they need to on your site. This is at least as important as the overall web design of your site!

Including a menu bar and a way to return HOME on each page. The HOME icon will allow for a lost visitor to redirect himself easily. Posting a menu bar is helpful so that visitors can find their way around without having to return HOME each time they want to reread the menu or available options.

This is but a tip of the iceberg of the many ideas available to keep your browsers loyal and returning. Most of them are applicable in some way to all sites. The great thing about them is that they generally don't call for major site renovations, just a bit of tweaking here and there.

The newest trend in the world of web design is paper design. Paper design is just as it sounds, using the good old-fashioned paper and cardboard look for your website design. This lends a warmer more personal touch to a generally colder computer look. its a fun and creative way to personalize your website and add in a bit of personality.

Some sites may opt to use the notebook paper look. Its definitely a very different look than the traditional computer screen we are used to viewing. Adding in text 'written' in pencil scrawl or precise inked words is a wonderful complement to this innovative idea.

Others may try out the layered scrapbook look. This will usually involve a combination of colors or contrasts displayed in a more haphazard though eye catching way. This concept is wonderful For Camps or extra curricular programs building a website who are looking to successfully transmit over the fun they want to advertise. Browsers generally find a page with a bit more personality to be more compelling to look into further.

The clipboard or spiral look is another interesting idea. This basically involves an image of a clipboard or spirals of a notebook and the main theme of your site displayed on the 'paper' attached to the clipboard. It lends a bit of informality and camaraderie between the website designers and the site visitors. The actual design of the website has an effect on the [future] relationship between developers and customers!

Posting images, graphics, or pictures, in the Polaroid camera look is another twist on the usual ideas. For a business that wants to advertise their services, for example a paint company or mold removal service that would like to display 'before' and 'after' pictures promoting how wonderful their services are, this is a fantastic option. The real life pictures are a wonderful way to show your browsers the miracles you can perform. the space underneath the picture allows you to 'pencil' in any comments you would like, for example, 'before and after' or '3 days after and two months after,' etc. there are numerous possibilities available.

Understandably I only covered a couple of ideas because ultimately your creativity and feelings are what will shine through on the site you design. Using paper inspired design is a wonderful way to blend the physical world with the world of computers.

One of the most important facets to site optimization is optimizing your images. Images greatly enhance a site by making it more exciting and attractive to browsers. Problems can arise though because high quality images can greatly increase a page's loading time. The trick is to optimize your images so that they remain great in quality yet small in file size. In addition, image optimization is very important in SEO . There are many wonderful Internet tools available to help you best optimize your images.

Smush.it is a program dealing specifically with image formats. With its optimization techniques it removes all unnecessary bytes from your image files and improves performance. A big advantage is that it won't alter the visual quality of your image during its cleansing process. Smush.it can run through five website images at the same time! You can expect up to a twenty percent reduction of site size after 'smushing' the images on your pages.

SiteReprtCard Image optimization Tool is a free utility that is able to compress any GIF, JPG,and PNG image. Its easy to use this program. Just copy and paste your image's URL into the blank space or upload your picture onto the program and the SiteReportCard will consolidate your image into a given size or quality.

RIOT which is an abbreviation for Radical Image Optimization Tool is unique in the sense that it can optimize images with uncommon extensions. The tool is able to optimize different image formats by reading its magic number. It's a fast processing tool so you have instant results. It uses well known re-sample filters like Lanczos3, Bicubic, and others. Many people like using this tool because both the revised image and the original are displayed side by side to easily compare quality. The resulting image is a cleaner user interface.

The JPEG cleaner is a simple yet powerful implement useful for ridding JPG files from anything that is not picture data. Many popular graphics programs such as Adobe, have been writing additional heavy information into the JPG files that isn't necessary for the proper display of the image. It just makes the image much larger and slow-loading and it's not enhancing the quality at all. This tool will successfully dispose of that unnecessary information leaving your beautiful high quality image a much smaller file size.

There are numerous other tools available for you to try out on the various images in your site. You're the best judge when it comes to this. No matter what too other people vote on, you will see for yourself which tool is the very best for YOUR site optimization.

In order to properly design a web page that will attract visitors to your site, you need to create a site that is pleasant and eye appealing. There are many softwares and tools available to assist you in designing a successful website. The Adobe softwares are highly recommended to use. Based out of San Jose, California, the Adobe software company was created way back in the 1980s. Since its inception, Adobe has primarily has focused on the creation of multimedia and creative software products and recently it has branched out into developing rich Internet applications softwares. There are a couple of cool Adobe programs easily available to enhance the creation of your web site.

The best website development tool available now is the Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 (Creative Suite). It is a rapid application tool used for designing professional websites. This device also generates the HTML codes for you so you don need to be an expert in HTML programming to successfully develop a website! Dreamweaver also comes with other exciting functions such as rollovers, templates, CSS, and a lot more!

Heading into the designing factor of websites, Adobe Photoshop CS4 is highly acclaimed. Photoshop is great for designing layouts and playing around with images. It can easily optimize and export your images in the gif or jpeg modes. Customizing image sizes and colors, implementing contrasts and cool effects are easily accomplished via Photoshop's multitude of neat applications. Once you get the hang of the program its fun to use and easy to deal with.

Some websites use animations to further enhance their web design. Adobe Flash is a fantastic animation software. One reason that Flash is so popular, is because you can create incredible animations in small files so it doesn't increase the loading time of your page. This ensures that your customers don't leave your site before it opens out of frustration for the time consuming process. In addition there are plenty of helpful tips and tutorials about how to successfully set up Flash, readily available on the good old World Wide Web.

Using all these programs together or even just one or two of them is sure to create you the site of your dreams. Having a professional web designer design your site when you first set it up is a great idea too until you get your site up and running and really get the hang of how to use all the available applications. Let your creativity shine forth in the creation of your site!

More and more government agencies are making it a law to cater to all audiences. As a marketer, this applies too. You need to create a website accessible to all users. The goal in accessibility is to make the website content readable and comprehendible to all readers, regardless of ability. It's important to consider the possible physical disabilities of a visitor. Nowadays there is an astonishing number of people with disabilities. Many of these disabilities don't affect website browsing in the least, say a paraplegic or foot amputee. The most common disabilities that would affect website accessibility are visual and hearing impairments. Approximately between seven to twenty percent of the US population fall into this category. (Of course the numbers climb with age.) Accessibility is about access. Likened to installing a ramp alongside the stairs leading into your office building or adding Braille lettering to the signs for the restrooms, it's a courtesy to help those with disabilities maneuver through every day life as easy as possible.

Accessibility is equally as important as any other facet in your website's design . All web developers need to keep in mind that people with visual impairments or who have difficulty grasping a mouse will most probably be among their site's visitors and they need to build their site accordingly. A screen reader is a technological advancement that reads out written text on the screen for the users who can't read for themselves. Creating an image-heavy site in this case isn't so conducive for the screen reader to properly convey your content. A screen reader is able to pull out all links from a page. It has the ability to scan a site to determine what it's about too. It's generally a good idea to include some links at the top of your page that give users the opportunity to skip right over to the main content or navigation of your site. This is referred to as 'Skip Links".

Another common phenomena are people who have difficulty with small fonts or contrasts that are not clearly defined, or even colorblind users. Many times they will employ the assistance of a screen magnifier which magnifies the text and images on the screen. When constructing your website make sure that the images will remain clear and complete even when zoomed in on. Instituting scalable fonts on your site are also a big plus. Many web pages sport combinations of background and foreground colors that cause extreme difficulty for colorblind users to decipher the content. There are a bunch of creative techniques available to implement into your site to make it easier for those who have difficulty, like features that will change the colors or define the contrasts on the page.

With regard to auditory impairments, most times the usability of a site remains the same with the sound turned off. However with the trends veering more towards multimedia, it may become a bigger issue. A way to help the situation may be to place subtitles on the video clip ( which will benefit foreign viewers too). In general, anything with sound that is important for the content of your site should be transcripted to enable those with hearing difficulties, equal comprehension.

The great thing about accessibility is that it is universally appreciated! Even for people who have no impairments, it's a major help. Accessibility ensures that viewers using a cellphone, laptop or any other medium, see the content and images displayed clearly and derive the effect that you were looking to create!

A website is like a road system. There are paths, trails, and highways leading off in all directions. Its quite easy for a visitor to get lost and confused when exploring your site. To combat this, it's important to implement good website navigation in the web design, acting as a road map in the web of passages.

The first thing to do is to set up a home base. The home page should act as the epicenter for all site traffic to start out from. It should state clearly what options your site offers and have clear directions how to get to them.

There are a couple of different formats of navigation. A hierarchical site is a rich, informative site that is best organized as a large tree, similar to a library. Many hierarchical sites use the "bread crumb trail" approach which means that as the reader proceeds from page to page, going further and further into a specific topic, the page will inform you what steps took you there and how to return to the original place. This is ideal when trying to organize large amounts of information.

A global approach is one where the site's information is presented in a few broad categories, and the navigation here would allow easy cross traffic. It is best if its easy for the reader to easily skim through all points on the site.

Local navigation is somewhere in between the above mentioned. An approach like this would apply when there is deep information found within broader areas. Local focuses on a specific area of the site as opposed to global which is more all site inclusive.

A navigation bar lists the top level categories that a site boasts. The main concern with a navigation bar is that it takes up space that could otherwise be used for content. But it is important to ensure that your readers are focused and confident when browsing your site. You can place the your navigation bar wherever you like on your screen. Most sites set it up on the left side of the screen though some place it on the right too. Placing the bar at the top of the page has the advantage that it stays out of the way, though if its too big you may risk it blocking your readers from important content when they first reach your page. Since the navigation appears on every page, take care that it doesn't come to distract or annoy your visitor by taking up too much space. Your navigation bar should appear the same on each page to better familiarize people with your site and how it works.

Styles of navigation vary. The most basic form is embedded links, where text is linked within the body of the page. This is wonderful in areas where one wants to supplement a topic with information found anywhere on the web, though its not so efficient for attracting new browsers. Tab navigation is used when breaking into a few primary categories. Similar to the way one would arrange a binder, the website navigation links appear as tabs organizing the site into sections. A site map or table of contents is a commonly used technique because it provides your visitor with a one stop location to reach anything on your site. Its usually a page listing all the sections(if there aren't too many) located in your site with links to get to them. The disadvantage is that your visitor needs to get there first. It's is a wonderful technique to use as a supplement to your primary navigation but shouldn't be used as the primary form.

In summary, in order to be effective your navigation system should be consistent throughout the whole site, the main navigation links should be kept together,and the website should be organized with not too many links for each section. This is all to ensure that the visitor will learn how to effectively maneuver around the site and access all that the site has to offer.

Nowadays many people are not very patient, especially when sitting in front of a computer screen waiting for a selected page to load. In order to minimize customer frustration and to ensure that visitors don't turn elsewhere in the interim, we need to do all what can to create quick loading pages.

A page that is too large or heavy will obviously take time to open. A page with a lot of content is heavier than a less informative page. Keeping page size to at most about 30 KB (including images) will probably make for a shorter loading period. A page measuring 30 KB is pretty large and will take a bit of time though not too much, to load. 50 percent of web pages fall into this category too! Less KB will obviously load quicker. Images themselves shouldn't be larger than 10 KB. This can be hard to achieve especially with cool, animated images, but if it can be done you will have great and quick loading images.

Switching from a table-based website to cascading style sheets (CSS) is a great way to minimize excessive code which causes loading time to be greatly reduced and offers wonderful SEO benefits too! The CSS formatting can greatly reduce the need for excessive images.

Interestingly enough placement on a page matters! Putting CSS at the top of the page rather than further down will give the appearance that the page is loading quicker. In the same vein, placing JavaScript towards the bottom of the page compels the reader to first render content above it before calling the script. It makes a lot more sense to render the visual content before the interactive content...

Consider splitting a page with a large amount of content into a couple of pages. This will decrease download time and create a more organized site. It will be easier for browsers to pinpoint the information they want and be able to go back and retrieve it. Its much easier to remember page 3 of 4 than remembering to scroll down til the approximate 3/4 mark...

Many pages host advertisements for other sites. Some of these ads are served from a Web server different from the server of the web page it is displayed on. If the ad's server is slow or disabled it will affect the loading speed of the display page. This applies to images too that are served from different servers than the page it is viewed on.

Another point to check out is you site's own server. If you optimized your page as light as possible and kept your page size to the minimum and yet you still are having difficulty with the loading time it may be a server problem. If your server is getting more hits than it can handle it may be time for an upgrade.

Quick loading pages are a must for every site developer. It is the first step in creating a user friendly site. If you want to keep your users you need them to get past the initial loading. The only way to do this is by optimizing your pages to load up at a decent speed.

Web design is a thought out art. There are many small yet necessary factors that go into designing an appealing and consumer friendly website. It is important to create an easy and clear design and smooth navigation through your site.

Though you may thing the bigger the better in the image you portray on you page, this is not always true. A bigger image causes pages to load much slower which may frustrate your browsers. A neutral size is like 10-12KB per image. Graphics that move around, flash wild colors, rotate, etc. should be avoided or at least used VERY sparingly. Studies have shown that many browsers find these images annoying and distracting from the real page content. Sometimes browsers will even physically cover the image on the screen in an effort to understand you page's content clearly!

Images that don't have what to do with the content should be eliminated. No matter how beautiful or eye catching it is, if it's not relevant to your content, skip it. One exception may be for "design" images. Design images are photos or graphics that are included in the design of the page and are not there to portray your content.

When building the layout of your page try to stick to something simple. Many newspapers and web sites employ the three column layout and though you may think it boring and typical you will definitely keep more visitors by using readable and understandable content. A funky layout or something with a twist like a horizontally wide page that you just scroll to the right instead of down to read further, may seem more enticing and fun to build, but generally readers don't appreciate it. It's definitely more confusing and hard to figure out just how to navigate around, who would have the head to process the content too?

When it comes to choosing fonts, again the less the better. Having multitudes of different fonts is one of the best ways to create an amateurish look. Limiting the number of fonts on your page and throughout your site is easier to read and gives a much more professional look. Try to stick with just two or three. Another thing to keep in mind is choosing fonts that most browsers have too. Chances are your browsers will have the more standard fonts, though there may be a select few who will also be equipped with the more wild ones. Choosing a standard font will ensure your designs will show up properly and that your page will come across as neat and professional to all viewers.

Some websites display other businesses advertisements on their pages (to make money...) As stated earlier concerning images, be careful that the advertisements aren't too big and too flashy and don't distract readers from YOUR content. After all if they came to your website they may as well notice what you have to offer too! Additionally it may be worthwhile to only post advertisements relevant to your content. A relevant ad is more likely to get the clicks that it's there for.

There are many ideas, graphics and layouts to choose from when designing your website. Though it is possible to do it on your own it may be to your benefit to enlist the help of a Website Design professional. They are in the business, know the ropes, and most important they know what gets you the traffic and profits you are looking for.

A splash page or splash screen is a page or image that appears as the introductory page/ pre-home page to a website, or an image that appears while a program is loading up. A splash screen will typically have some kind of visually appealing graphics or animation. Splash pages have a variety of purposes. Some site developers instate them to impress their visitors with their graphics and to allow them to choose the site technology that works best for them. Other companies use them to let the user know that the content is in the process of loading.

Unfortunately most users and search engines don't have positive feelings towards these pages. Many times splash pages causes people to leave the site before the home page even loads up; it increases loading time and it confuses the search engines. Because most splash pages employ the use of flash there isn't much content for the search engine to crawl through. This gives you the unlikelihood of ever achieving top placement. It's also difficult for the search engine to navigate effectively through it. And even if a search engine is successful in its navigation, its hard to place a word value on the pictures shown. Additionally readers who are not newcomers to your site and have seen your animations already, really don't want to view them again, but if there is no skip option then they are forced to. This can discourage visitors from returning to your site.

If you must use flash like for someone running an artistic site , build your page with caution. Install the "skipping feature" so that people have the option of bypassing your splash page. Place relevant text on the page so that you have a chance of being indexed, because having only words like 'skip intro' really won't get you anywhere in rankings. Create a linking campaign to bring in inbound links with your main homepage words. Additionally, create a static site map to link your splash page to the site map on the home page.

When deciding between a splash page or just immediate redirection to the homepage it may be in your best interest to seriously reconsider discarding the splash idea altogether. A home page unifies the site and displays useful, relevant information that the browser is looking for. Good content can encourage people to explore the rest of the site. A splash page often has redirects which search engines do not value too much because they wants to help people get the information they're looking for. A home page will most probably provide that information while a splash page will not. And again, many users when faced with a splash screen will just click off the site rather than wait until it's finished.