by: Mario Sanchez

Tips to brand your website

Include your logo in all pages. Position it at top left or each page. Complement your logo with a tagline or catchy sentence that summarizes your business purpose. For example "Always low prices" is tagline for Wal-Mart. Create a favicon. A favicon is that small graphic that appears next to URL in address bar. Have a consistent look and feel in all your pages. Use a color scheme and layout that are clearly recognized across your site. Have an About Us section, that includes all relevant information about you and your business. Include a copyright statement at bottom of each page.

Tips on website navigation

Design your pages to load in less than 10 seconds (50Kb maximum size, including pictures). Group your navigational options in relevant categories. Use common names for your menu options: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Help, Products. Avoid "clever" or "trendy" alternatives. If your site uses Flash, provide also an HTML version for users who prefer a less fancy, faster site. Provide simple text navigation links at bottom of long pages, so users don’t need to scroll back up. Link your logo to your homepage, except in homepage itself. Put a link to your homepage on all your internal pages. Display a "breadcrumb trail"; it is basically path from homepage to page where you are. A breadcrumb trail looks like this: Home > Section > Sub-Section > Page, and it greatly facilitates navigation. If your site is too big, provide Search capabilities. Include a search box in upper right corner of your homepage, and a link to a Search page from your interior pages. Freefind ( ) offers you a free and powerful search engine for your site. Set your search box to search your site, not to search web. Create a custom error page that displays a simple site map with links to main sections of your site. That way, you will not lose visitors that have followed a bad link to your site or who have misspelled your URL.

Tips on Layout and Content Presentation

Save top of your page for your most important content. Remember: good content must flow to top. Lay out your page with tables, and set width in percentage terms instead of a fixed number of pixels. That way, your page will always fit screen, without need to scroll horizontally. Optimize your page to be viewed best at 800x600 (the most popular resolution at time of this writing). Use high contrast for body of your page: black text on white background, or white text on black background work best. Don’t use too many different fonts in one page. Also, avoid using small serif fonts (like Times Roman): they are difficult to read from a computer screen. Verdana is most web-friendly font, since it is wide, clean and easy to read. Avoid long blocks of text. Use tools that facilitate scanability, like bullets, subtitles, highlighted keywords, hyperlinks, etc. Avoid amateurish features like: numeric page counters, wholesale use of exclamation points, all caps, center justified blocks of text, excessive animated gifs, busy backgrounds, etc. Don’t use pop-up windows. They distract your visitors and are immediately dismissed as ads. Test your site so that it looks good in different browsers and resolutions.

Tips on Writing for Web

by: Martin Lemieux

In this article, I will attempt to cover basics of creating a great quality web design template for your site. Now it's a known fact that layout or "eye candy" as I put it will determine whether your visitors will stay more than 15 seconds or they will just become another statistic.

That's right, if you don't catch your visitors attention right away, statistics shows us that your visitors will come and go within 15 seconds or less.

That doesn't leave you with a lot of time to grab someone's attention!

Some of you may be asking yourself:

Well why does this happen????

See when you think about it, 15 seconds to "browsing eye" is like an eternity. In other words, it takes about 15 seconds for average person to browse your main page and determine whether they will explore your site further!

So with that being said;

How do we grab your visitors attention????

Every new client of mine is asked to perform same tasks. I ask them to explore their competitor’s web sites and look for specific triggers that would make them want to click on or buy right away. More times than none, my clients will notice specific "Headlines" or "Graphics" that really peek their interest. In doing this, you'll have 1st hand knowledge on what you expect your visitors will see and possibly expect themselves.

Step 2, I'll ask my clients to do one more process just like previous one. I'll ask them to make a list of all "eye candy" that really caught their attention and write me a little note as to why it caught their attention. In doing this, it will give your web designer a 1st hand knowledge on what to implement within your site!!!

With these great tasks, you've made your job and job of your web designer a lot easier to target your audience.

Sites that sell "Web Site Templates" :

You may have seen some sites that sell your right for a specific "Template Style". There are 100's of resources out there. I need to clarify something for you, these templates are targeted at web designers only!!! Reason being, files that you receive will no doubt require some expensive and time consuming software just to open them.

Now being a designer, I’m not about to "knock" pre-made templates but there's a couple of things you may want to consider:

1) Although templates you may encounter are very impressive, you will be sharing your layout template with 100's, maybe 1000's of other sites. The reason why they are so cheat is because those "specific templates" are sold and re-sold as much as possible!