8 Tips to Improve Your Web Design Skills

Are you going to design your business website? Have you not been able to come up with great ideas? If so, you may want to follow our tips, tricks, and general advice to help you create a compelling website design. Read on to know the tips.

1) Adding colors

You may want to avoid "overdesigning" your website. You may want to know the importance of beginning with shades of gray. What you need to do is try a grayscale design and then add color to the design elements one by one.

2) Use Keynote

For website prototypes, home pages or call to actions, you don't necessarily need to learn Photoshop. You can also check out Keynote for the same purpose, especially if you want to create mockups. You can also check out a web repository that contains quality UI design templates for prototyping, wireframing and testing cell phone apps in Keynote.

3) Web fonts

If your business style guide includes nothing about web fonts, you need to change your mindset and add some fonts in order to improve your website design. For this, we suggest that you check out Google Fonts.

4) Social media icons

You are doing your best but you are still not getting enough visitors. If you have this problem, you may not be putting the social media icons on the right place of your website. What you need to do is place the icons in your website footer.

5) Ger rid of the carousel/slideshow

The purpose of the landing page carousel was to put a lot of information on the home page of a website. However, the catch is that not everyone stays on the home page in order to read all of the messages.

On the first visit, the visitors should be able to find that the stuff on the home page is relevant. Just keep things concise and it will work.

6) Simplify navigation

You may want to simplify the navigation of your site by eliminating dropdown menus and the multi-tier menu since they are accessed by only the most experienced users. Aside from this, you may also want to cut down on the number of links in the sidebar or header of your site.

7) Increase your font size

As far as web design goes, typography is really important. On a computer screen, it's hard to read a text. Therefore, we suggest that you make important things more prominent by increasing the font size. This is important for important texts, especially the headings. You may also want to up the size of other text as well.

8) Use white space

You may want to use white space on your site. However, you don't have to fill every area that is blank on your site.

So, If you have been in search of some good website design tips, we suggest that you check out the 8 tips given in this article. With these tips, you will be able to design your company or business website a lot better.

If you have been looking for some help to improve your website design skills, we suggest that you check out Optimise Online.

Website Creator - Google Page Creator

A great new service called Google Page Creator helps with the creation and publishing of good looking web pages with intuitive tools built into the browser. This system is extremely useful for website creators that have little or no technical website development skills to establish their own websites in a WYSIWYG style copy editing tool that is very much like developing a WORD doc. If you require more controls in using your website, the pages can be edited in html, as well.

After you have completed any alterations you wish to make, a single click on your mouse will make your new masterpiece available to the world. Every individual that signs up with the service is given space to use however they see fit. If you have chosen to keep things easy, the software can make your user name the banner on the first page of your site. Remember, it is necessary to be registered with the service if you wish to try it out. If you are unfamiliar with the icons presented, each represents a function, and is described in detail in the documentation.

Controls along the left side provide functions for inserting an image, inserting a web link, fonts, paragraphs, headings, subheading, "minor" headings, and editing the Web page html itself. Beside, Google Page Creator has Auto-Save feature to minimize changes of accidental loss.

Page Manager allows you to upload information to your website. You will have the ability to make as many pages as needed and upload any files as long as you have the space. For each image uploaded a thumbnail is created for your page. The change layout button allows you to modify your page design. The website creator helps you edit your layout. The dashed rectangle areas are the areas on the page that can be modified.

Page Look can also be changed by clicking on Change Look, which will lead you to available designs and looks. Currently there are no ads on the web pages that users have created. The page is saved and published accurately despite the service still in Google Labs. Google Website Creator also copies features from other sites.

Despite the fact that you may be using HTML editor to create and edit your web page, when saved it may have some of the HTML elements removed. This is the significant downside to Google Page Creator.

By using Google Page creator, you will be able to create and publish your own attractive web pages. Google Page Creator is perfect for people who are non-technical and not familiar to website creation. You'll soon be a website creator with their easy to set up websites. A single click can publish your page when you are done editing it. Each account comes with 100MB of free web space and storage. When creating a web page there are many tools to assist you. Google Page Creator has tools to assist in changing fonts, inserting images or web links, creating paragraphs or headers or editing the page after creation.

Gmail Labs - An Innovation From Google Labs

If you are a Gmail user, soon you will find a tab on your gmail page to access a new part of the service called "Gmail Labs".

Gmail Labs, a product from Google Labs, will initially provide 13 features to the Gmail users to add to their service. It is a part of the nifty development model followed by Google. Any engineer having a new idea for a Gmail feature can publish it on the Gmail Labs site, and users can test it out and provide feedback directly to the engineer who wrote it.

Let's take a tour to the new features of Gmail Labs.

Here are the features that looks most beneficial to me:

* Superstars: It provides additional star icons as in standard Gmail. You will be able to mark your messages with different colored stars and other icons like a check mark or exclamation point.
* Quick Links: It is a way of bookmarking any page within Gmail. You can do a search and bookmark that search. Go back to it again and the link will display any new messages that fit the search criteria.
* Signature Tweaks: This feature enables you to put your automated signature above the quoted text while responding to a message, in spite of displaying at the bottom of what somebody else wrote.
* Email Addict: It is like a break time that will lock you out of gmail for 15 minutes. You can get back in to your account anytime you want, just by clicking a button.
* Random Signature: It will append a random famous quote to the end of your email.
* Mouse Gestures: You can navigate your mouse with gestures. Hold right click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view.

Other features in gmail labs:

*Pictures in Gmail chat
*Custom keyboard shortcuts
*Hide unread count
*Fixed width font
*Custom date format
*Muzzle (hide the status of your contacts in Gmail chat)
*Play Snake inside Gmail

What if you face probs?

All the gmail users would have to just click on a button to enable these features. In case if any user don't like them or they don't work well, another button is provided to disable them. They'll be available through the settings tab at the top of the page. While using the new features, if one of the labs feature breaks and you are facing trouble getting into your account, then there's an escape hatch. Simply go to [http://www.mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0] and Labs with be temporarily disabled.

I am working as an industry analyst in the electronics and electrical industry for last five years. You can get a lot of information on electronics industry, news, innovations, tradeshows, etc.

Fresh Content For Google

Google is always looking at your website for fresh content and when Google sees fresh content it tells the whole world. It's been proved that when websites change content, their position in Google improves.

To keep your website content fresh you can:

* Pay web designers for updates, or
* Learn HTML and CSS coding and update it yourself, or
* Use a good online Content Management System.

To pay web designers is the easy way, but they have their own timetables, so your website may not get updated as quickly as you like.

You can learn HTML and CSS to update content yourself, but will it look good on all browsers? You need to keep yourself up to date with HTML and CSS as Browser versions change the rules. Will you need to buy and learn to use software like Dreamweaver?

There are many good Content Management Systems, but some are costly to install. Is there any free CMS?

Yes. Most Linux hosting plans using cPanel provide FREE installation of utility software including blogs, site builders and content management systems. Just a couple of clicks, set a password, and the system is installed ready to use.

We have tried most of these installations and found that the easiest to use is WordPress. Popular for a long time as blogging software, WordPress has been improved over time so that now the blogging can be disabled and a static page can be chosen for the home page of a website. An advantage that WordPress seems to have over some other CMS is that it constantly being updated to maintain its security. We know of other systems that get hacked.

New themes (layout and styles) are continually being written for WordPress and some of these themes have hundreds of options to change layout and style. The beauty of WordPress is that you can change themes without losing any data. Inside WordPress admin is a section for browsing and installing new themes.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is taken care of in WordPress with its Permalinks, a system of automatically making the web address of each page look search engine friendly. Instead of the URL of a page looking like yourname.com/?page_id=1234 which is bad SEO, it can look like yourname.com/mexican-vacation which is good SEO.

Some web hosting providers, like us, will install WordPress free with a theme to suit a client's website. The client then can just type in, or copy and paste their text into a WYSIWYG box, just like in word processing. To change an existing website to WordPress, the hosting provider can copy the website to a temporary location like host.com/yourname, setup WordPress at yourname.com, then you just copy from host.com/yourname and paste into yourname.com.

The WYSIWG text area has two tabs, "Visual" and "HTML" so that you can see the HTML coding of what you have entered. Of course you can even enter your own HTML.

When you add new pages you can choose to have them as main pages or subsidiary to main pages, and you can decide on the order in which pages are listed. You can set a hierarchical system of subjects and sections.

There are also icons for uploading and positioning images and other media. One trap is that you are allowed to upload images of any size and let WordPress optimize the image to fit the place where you want to display it, while storing the original image. That's OK, but if you upload hundreds of poster sized photos of 2 megabytes each you can quickly fill up the disk space of your hosting plan. We advise using your graphics program to optimize your photos to the best size for your web page before uploading them to your website.

The WordPress theme that we use allows two left and two right side-bars, which with the center area makes a five column web page, although we don't know any one who uses four side bars.

Other layout options include fixed width pages or percentage width pages, font families, font colors, font sizes, font styles, link effects, background colors, background images, header images, alternating header images, text over header images, logos and favicons.

The navigation can be across the top before or after the header image, down a side bar, or both. Colors and borders and hover colors of navigation buttons can be set. Widgets (items in the side bars) can include text links, image links or both. Links can be divided into categories, some with images, and some without.

SEO options include setting title, description and keyword tags, and whether the page title shows before or after the website title in the title tag. The title tag can be one of the most important areas of a web page for search engines.

For the keen there is also an option to add your own lines of CSS. In brief, the theme is totally customizable.

The biggest advantage of WordPress as a content management system is that in a few minutes you can add fresh content to your website. Search engines like Fresh Content.

Suddenly, Looks Matter

Improve Your Graphics - If you are still using freebie clip art on your website, it's time to upgrade your graphics! Using photos and/or professional graphics can make your site look more sophisticated and credible, especially in the smaller Preview image.

Use Large-Fonts for Headers - For headers and sub-headers, be sure to use a web-standard font (such as Arial or Verdana) that renders correctly in all browsers. Also, use a font size that is large enough to be read in the Instant Preview window. Try to write catchy, attention-grabbing headlines that capture attention and entice searchers to click on your site.

Layout Information in sections or columns - In Google's Instant Preview, your page layout has to look useful, readable, and attractive. Try to break up the page layout with graphics, sidebars, info boxes, or call-out quotations, rather than using margin-to-margin text. Text-heavy pages without a good layout can look overwhelming - especially in the small Instant Preview image.

Use an Integrated Approach - In addition to organic search results (non-paid), Google also has specific search results categories for images, videos, news, shopping, books, Places, blogs, real-time results (social), and discussions. Be sure to optimize your other marketing efforts (e.g., video, blog, social, etc.) so you can be found in these additional search categories as well. The more you show up in Google's results, the better your chances of getting clicks and new traffic to your site.

Google's Instant Preview

Before Google Instant Preview was launched in November 2010, studies reported that users took less than 4 seconds to decide whether to stay on your website or to click the "Back" button and move on. But with Google's Instant Preview, users no longer need to actually visit your website to preview it, and the decision to click on your site could be based on nothing more that the overall look of the site and/or the headers that can be read from the preview image - which may take even less than 4 seconds.

If users are not initially drawn to your site based on what they see in Google's preview, there is little chance they will visit your website at all, especially if the other sites listed on the results page have previews that are more interesting, seem more useful, or are more eye-catching than yours.

Now more than ever, every page of your site must be well designed and look professional (not outdated or amateurish), and must be appealing and interesting enough to motivate web searchers to actually click on your link in the search results. Now, your site not only competes on keywords, title tags, and description tags (which used to be the only items displayed in the search results), but must also impress searchers visually as well. With Google's Instant Preview, the overall design and appearance of your site suddenly matters more than ever before.

Tips for Google Instant Preview

Google's Instant Previews give you another opportunity to attract searchers and persuade them to click on your website instead of the competition. Plus, there are also some additional strategies you can use to improve your chances of getting that all-important click now that Instant Previews are here. Below are some tips to help you make the most of this new Google feature:

Upgrade Your Design - The overall "look and feel" of your website is the first thing most searchers notice when they preview your website. Your site must have an attractive layout with plenty of white space, readable headers, eye-catching use of colors, and it must look professional and credible. It is unlikely that "home-grown" or DIY sites can win many clicks when displayed in the search results beside professionally developed sites. The way your site looks in Google Instant Preview will now be the first impression of your website, and may determine whether it gets clicked on at all.

Suddenly, Looks Matter - Google's Instant Preview

If you are a Google user, you have probably noticed the latest new feature from Google called Instant Previews.

After performing a search, users can mouse-over a small icon beside each listing on the search results page, and a mini-version of the web page pops up beside the link.

The previews also display highlighted areas that identify where on the page the search term was found.

Since the preview image is not a full-size image, not all of the page content is visible or can be read in the preview (because the image is fairly small). However, headlines and sub-headers are typically readable in the preview, and users can instantly see the general look of the website (layout, graphics, design, colors, depth and type of information, amount of useful content, etc.).