8 Tips for Designing a Great Website

Square buttons, round buttons, flashy buttons … will they match my shoes, my handbag or my tie? Are you stuck in a maze of buttons, headings, bullets, sub-headings and colour schemes?

STOP!!!!

Take a deep breath and read some practical tips for professional looking websites.

1. Select a colour scheme and stick to it.

If your company has a logo or preferred colours on its stationery that’s a good start. For those of you starting from scratch, choose two or three complementary colours and stick with them – don’t change colours on every page.

The most common colour schemes include:

- Red, yellow and white
- Blue and white
- Red, grey and white
- Blue, orange and white
- Yellow, grey and white.

If you’re not sure what colour scheme to choose, surf the internet and find a website that you like. You can then model your colour scheme on what already exists.

2. Use templates.

Can’t find a website you really like? Another option is to choose a template. There are many templates or pre-set designs. These come as part of your web design software (such as FrontPage) or you can check out some websites that specialise in designing templates.

Visit:

www.web4business.com.au emplates1.htm
www.newtemps.com
www.website-templates-resale-rights.com
www.123webtemplatesandmore.com

3. Provide an easy to use navigation system.

This is one of the most important issues to consider when designing a website. You need to ensure your visitors can find what they are looking for easily. Most websites either display their navigation bar on the left or at the top. And since most people are used to this type of navigation, it’s best to stick with it.

It also helps to include your navigation bar at the bottom of each page to save your visitors from having to scroll back to the top.

4. Don’t go overboard on special effects

Whilst it is ok to have one or two special effects to jazz up your website, spinning graphics and logos often distract your visitor from the content, not to mention they can take too long to download. Your visitors may click away even before your spinning logo finishes loading.


5. Backgrounds

Ensure your visitors can read the text on the background, ie. no black writing on dark blue background or yellow on white. Also be careful that your links are visible before and after being visited. The default for links in most programs is blue (before being visited) and burgundy (after being visited), so if you have a dark background, ensure your links are light.

6. External Links

It is a good idea to open links to other websites in a new window. That way your visitors can easily return to your site when they are finished browsing the external link

7. Site Map & Search Feature

If you website is more than 15 pages, it is useful to have a site map or a “Search” feature to ensure your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.

8. Content is King

While it is important that your website looks clean and professional, it is far more important that you concentrate your efforts on the content and promotion.

If you want a professional website, things to stay away from include:

1. Flash intros, revolving globes, bevelled line separators, animated mail boxes
2. Loads of pop up or pop under boxes
3. Autoplay music. Allow your customer to play music only if they choose.
4. Hit counters of the free variety, which say “you are 27th visitor”
5. Date and time stamps, unless your website is updated daily or weekly
6. Busy backgrounds.

What is bandwidth and how much do I need for my web site?

Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from your account at the web hosting server to visitors of your web site. It is, therefore, also known as data transfer.

You should note that visitors to your web site not only refer to fellow human web surfers but also search engine bots (programs sent out by search engines to index web sites). In fact, the data transfer by you using FTP (for web site maintenance purposes) is also counted in your bandwidth.

Web hosting companies generally mention a per day or, more commonly, a per month bandwidth in their hosting packages.

It is difficult to predict the bandwidth requirements for a web site because there are many variables involved.

1. Number of visitors
   The more the visitors the larger the bandwidth amount required.
2. Web page size
   A larger web page size would need more bandwidth. And by web page size, I don't mean just the size of the HTML but also the file sizes of embedded images, external javascript files, external style sheets, Flash movies, music/sound files, video etc.
3. Large file downloads or uploads
   Obviously, web sites with small number of pages but offering downloads of very large files (such as music and video files) would have higher bandwidth requirements.

Any way, let us look at some figures to gauge the requirements of an average web site. Consider a web site with 200 web pages where each page is 100KB in size (including images and other external files). If this web site gets 400 visitors each day and each visitor views 3 pages on an average, the web site would be transferring 400 (visitors) X 3 (number of pages viewed by each) X 100KB (file size of web page) = 120,000KB or 120MB each day or 3.6GB per month.

We would all like to believe that your web sites would be the successes of the century but to dampen your "vaulting ambition", it is unlikely that a new web site would get 400 visitors, unless you start with a lot of funds for online advertising like Pay-Per-Click ads. But if you have so much moolah to begin, you would not be bothered about the amount of data transfer anyway.

Coming back to the discussion, you can only get a correct estimate of your web site bandwidth requirements once you put it online.

In any case, the data transfer offered by most web hosts would be more than sufficient for you to start operations and if your web site crosses the set data transfer limit, you can always purchase additional bandwidth.

The truth behind unlimited bandwidth

There are several web hosting companies offering unlimited bandwidth. However, there is more to it than what reaches the eye. Based on their experience, such web hosting companies know it is unlikely that web sites hosted on their servers get high levels of data transfer. Hence, they go ahead and freely advertise unlimited bandwidth. I would recommend that you read the small print and confirm this with the web host. But like I said above, the bandwidth requirements of a new site would be negligible compared to the data transfer offered by web hosts. For example, at the time of writing Lunarpages web hosting company was offering 2500GB monthly transfer.

If you want more information, you can read about unlimited bandwidth and where to get it (?) in a separate article.

Top Five Tips to Secure Website

A secure website is always essential ingredient of peace of mind for both web-master and the end user.These days hundreds of website come alive on the Internet because of high competition and >web hosting that comes with cheap price tag.But, what people do not understand is value of hack-proof website.Recently, according to a survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in the year 2009, companies are reducing their security related costs primarily due to recession.But, the number no. of victims is growing without any hurdle.This clearly indicates immense need for security.This post describes few most basic yet powerful ways to curb any hazard to your websites.

1)Vulnerability Assessment
A vulnerability scanner is a tool that searches and maps a system or network for different possible weakness and report it with feedback for the use of administrator.They can give you possible web application vulnerabilities like sql injection, XSS and firewall security breach.Nikto is a very useful open source scanner and also you can use Acunetix Web Vulnerability scanner.

2)Penetration Testing
This is part of security testing in which a deliberate and simulated attack is carried out to circumvent security of a system.This is a must to be deployed step for commercial websites.Security can not be full-proof, as secured wordpress web hosting can be compromised with c99 madshell script written in php.

3)Web Application Firewalls
Web application firewalls are essential for larger and advanced websites as these can not be affordable by everyone.These firewalls are specifically designed for fine tuning web application by keeping a check on HTTP traffic and data leakage by residing in between client and server.

4)Client Security Tools
A web-master can do everything from his part to secure a server.But, risk management has to be one of the most important priority.One can never predict about security in the future.So, clients have to advised by web-masters to use some of browser security tool to save themselves from any loss.Such a tool can be XSS me FireFox add on or Internet Explorer 8's in built XSS filter.

5)Application Whitelists
It is a policy that is employed by administrators to document congiguration pf applications put in the whitelist.This way they can detect any unauthorized changes to the server environment.

These are the five ways to put a secured website on the Internet.But, all these are not affordable by everyone.You must be aware of Internet mobs.While choosing a CMS for your website go for something that gets updated quickly with larger user base like Joomla, Nuke, drupal web hosting etc.

How to increase Alexa rank

Alexa rank is a measure of how much traffic your site gets when compared to other websites.But,the only problem with Alexa ranking is that, it only considers traffic from visitors who have installed Alexa toolbar onto their browser.Though many people do not care about Alexa, still it's nice to have good looking stats .Alexa ranking can come into play while selling websites.I used few things on this website and got results.In this post I'll be sharing those tips.


1. Alexa Sparky : The Alexa toolbar

Use Alexa Sparky addon onto your Firefox browser. I'm sure you have open up website frequently. Whenever you visit your site it will be valid count. Eventually your ranking will also increase.

You can ask your friends to install the add on and visit your site on regular basis.

Click Here for Alexa Sparky.

2. Alexa widget

You can add an Alexa widget to your site and this will increase your statistics for sure.

The widgets are of different types. They show your rank,back links,traffic analysis.

Click Here for Alexa widgets.

3.Update Site information

Update the information about your site on Alexa.

Click Here to update information.

10 reasons for using custom domain name with Blogger

When it comes blogging huge number of people use Blogger blog during early phase.Same is the case with me.Blogger.com is very popular widely used free blogging platform.The simple and easy interface of this Google product adds to its values.According to Alexa the traffic rank of Blogger.com is 8.But,Wordpress is the premium blogging platform of this era with its robust plugins and unmatched flexibility.But,I won't get into the comparison in this post.In this post we'll be concentrating on use of custom domain with Blogger blogs.

10 reasons why you should use custom domain with Blogger blogs

1.Branding::

With a custom you will no longer be under the whim of Blogspot.You can use your blog to brand yourself with for niche the area with a unique template,nice favicon and logo.This can provide you entire new look

2.Monetization::

The custom domain gives you professional image.This will bring you more affiliate sales,more crowd to advertise on your blog and review offers.Besides this it is far more easy to get your adsense account approved with a custom domain.

3.Social bookmarking::

Various popular social media site like digg don't give hearty welcome to blogs with blogspot or wordpress subdomain.

4.Blog tracking::

The custom domain gives you back the diluted ranking of your blog in Techorati,Alexa,etc.The blogs having blogspot or wordpress subdomain may confuse the tracking sites to recognise them s individual blog.

5.Seriousness::

You love blogging .So,just spend few dollars for something which is your passion.I bet with a custom domain you be more serious towards blogging.

6.Pagernking::

Don't worry about page ranking.I won't change drastically.Just keep updating links from directories and other blogs.Page rank will gradually soar.

7.Traffic::

All your traffic will not get lost.With the option available with Blogger you can easily forward all your links to the new address.Absolutely no change with your feed.

8.Google Apps ::

With Google apps you can have your own professional email id.Like I've info@techfuzon.com or preetish@techfuzon.com.

9.Bandwidth and storage ::

Google won't charge you for bandwidth usage and you will get unlimited storage space for all your texts,images ,etc from multiple profiles.It is that easy.

10.Cost::

It is not that costly to get a domain name.You can get it with around 10$ and it'll become even less with coupon codes.The domain name .info will cost you around 2$. Refer my post to get domain name with 1.99$ from Yahoo! small business.Write a review and you will get back your money.It will be win-win situation.

Get Indexed Quickly by Search Engines

After building a brand new website, it becomes irresistible to get indexed quickly.Well, with little effort a website can get indexed quickly by search engine crawlers.All we have to do is to push our site to a place where search engine bots hit frequently.Here, there are few techniques to get your brand new site listed by search engines.

1.Webmaster Tools

First of all register with webmaster tools provided by search engine giants like Google, Bing, etc.Verify your website ownership and submit your site with a sitemap.

2.Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web tool from Google.It is used to track visitors to your website.Register there and add your website by inserting a nice little javascript into your website.

3.MyYahoo
Register a MyYahoo account and submit your site RSS feed .Then use services like pingomatic to ping every time you update your blog.

4. Digg
Digg is social bookmarking website with a huge traffic. Search engine bots usually crawl websites featued on Digg.So, register an account with Digg and submit your site.

5.NewsVine

This is news oriented website and important fact is this site is loved by search engines.you can register and submit your site.
Some other sites to be used for same purpose are :

SlashDot

StumbleUpon

Propeller

Mixx

Squidoo