Website Design & Support Solutions

Archive for the ‘Building Your Website’ Category

Selecting the best background color and font styles for a web page is a very important part of quality web site design.

When selecting a background color for your web page, make sure you select a background that will compliment your text and overall design.

Selecting the Best Background for a Web Site

• Busy backgrounds make text difficult to read and draw the attention away from the text.
• Always be consistent with your background theme on each page of your web site
• Colors affect your mood and will have an effect on your visitors as well. Bright colors, such as yellow and orange, will cause you to become more cheerful or happy. While colors, such as blue and purple, have a calming effect. Dark colors such as brown and black may cause you to become depressed.

A good rule of thumb is to select colors based upon the type of affect you’re trying to achieve.

Selecting the Best Font Style for a Web Page

When selecting fonts for your text, keep in mind, reading on a computer screen is much more difficult than paper. Try to use a true type font, such as Arial or Verdana, and avoid fancy fonts that are difficult to read.

The appearance of your web site can mean the difference between your success and failure.

I’d like your comments on the topic above. Let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day.

Let’s make the web Faster,
- by Timothy Caron

Hey Guy’s and Gal’s and future website designers, we all know the importants of search engine optimization, but do you know about webpage optimization?

We all know the importance of first impressions, which we have mentioned several times in past posts, but did you know that if your webpages load too slow, it’s just as bad as poor copy?

Ahmad Permessur

In a recent article by Ahmad Permessur Newsletter Editor for Hot Scripts.com he states that webpage optimization is the 1st things that you should look to improve.

The rest of his article is listed below. Don’t forget to get out the links in his article for more information from Google Code and the Yahoo Optimization Center. Enjoy.

Here’s the article…

Imagine going to your computer and finding that every web page loads instantly. Imagination may become reality — webmasters and organizations around the Web are constantly coming up with solutions to make the Web faster.

The connection speed of the end user, the browser, your hosting environment and the different elements of your page all affect web page load time. Google’s recent initiative to showcases several optimization techniques that you can apply to your site.

My rule of thumb to make a page load faster is to reduce the number of browser requests. Each time a web page is requested, your browser makes several HTTP requests to the server to fetch HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images and other elements. When you reduce the number of requests, each user’s browser spends less time downloading and rendering these elements, and you’ve greatly improved the load time of your site. One easy way to do this is by combining all your scripts into a single file. For more ideas, please visit the Yahoo’s Web Optimization Best Practices center.

Finally, a tool that works best to measure page load time and HTTP requests is webpagetest.org. It allows you to not only choose from which location you’d like the test to be run, but also to configure it to emulate different connection speeds such as dialup and DSL.

Don’t forget, I welcome your comments and suggestion, please make a comment below.
The best comment below will get a Free Website Makeover….

Until next time, have a wonderful day.
Tim

What CMS Program do you use?

- by Timothy Caron

Hey Guy’s and Gal’s,

With the advent of CMS (better known as a Content Management Systems), many new comers to the web are still having website designers and programmers develop static websites that need constant updating by the website designer or programmer.

And this cost you alot of money. The average website designer may charge you in excess of $50 to $150 for a simple update. And there is no need for this, let me show you the advantages of using a CMS program for your website.

1) Ease of use
2) You can add or edit all the content yourself, this puts you in control of your website.
3) Interaction, visitors to your site can interact with you by posting their comments on your articles.
4) Adding Plugins or Modules, these plugins or modules can totally transform the functionality of your website.

For example:

Plugins for shopping carts
Plugins for Audio and Video Streaming
Plugins for Support and Message Boards

and the list goes on.

Plus there are hundreds if not thousands of free templates that you can use for your CMS Program, especially if you use some of the most popular programs like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or even Blogger.

Let me know what CMS you use and how it helps you with your business. If your not using s CMS program and your interested in more information just let me know.

Until next time, have a wonderful day.
Timothy

Should you Hire a Pro or Do It Yourself

-by Timothy Caron

Whether you should design that website yourself or hire a pro web designer depends on several very significant factors. One of the most important things to consider is the degree of expertise that you or your employees have in the necessary web degree needed to create an attractive, professional looking website that functions the way you want it to be. Read the rest of this entry »

Can Website Usability Hurt your Business?

Research has shown that your website usability many times will affect how well you do with sales and keeping customers coming back.

Most people think that putting up a website and adding a few different things will make them a success. It does not work that way. In fact, the usability of your website can make or break your business and there is no doubt about that.

No one wants to try and find their way around a site that is hard to find things. Most people will disappear and never come back. Follow some of these tips listed below and you should see better increased conversion results from your traffic. Read the rest of this entry »