Web Design Issue: Color vs. No-Color

Posted on November 7, 2009 by Claremont Design

What would make a website look professional and attractive to your visitors? Is it a design that flaunt more color or a design that possess just one or two colors? Color is a powerful tool for the web designer in influencing the buying trait. When applied appropriately, color provides many potential benefits to the overall impact of the website.

Several researches have been made with regards to the effect of color in influencing the buying behavior and task performance. The general findings of from these researches were that the use of color had positive effects on the buying behavior and task performance. Color is also beneficial for gaining greater understanding from a display or chart.

The important conclusion of those research was that mixture of colors was not universally better that those of having monochrome color. The main benefit of using color only seem to apply if the information is first provided to the user in the most appropriate presentation format. Color is use to supplement the information being displayed. If the information is displayed in inappropriate format, color has a little or no effect on improving understanding and appeal.

There are also several problems associated with using too many colors. Most of these dangers are related to technical capabilities of display and the aesthetic value of the website. Profession website designer from Claremontdesign.com suggests that you limit the number of colors and where they are applied. It is also suggested that the color should be use emphasize and highlight important information and display.

The Key To Successful Website is Keyword

Posted on November 5, 2009 by Claremont Design

Designing a quality website is important in establishing a successful online business. But a beautifully designed website is NOT everything. I have seen fancy websites that don’t make sales. Creating a quality website takes more than just simply making the site attractive, although the look of website is important, the key in building a successful website is to target the right keyword. You must create a website that will be of interest of your target market.

Selecting a niche or area of market specializing in one type of product of service is the first step in creating a successful website. Then, finding the right keyword for your niche is one of the most important ingredient in Internet marketing or e-commerce. Internet is as whole functions around keywords, the search engines rely on keywords for their search results. Failure to apply relevant and valuable keyword to your website is a critical flaw in your marketing strategy.

Selecting keywords for a niche website is critical to the success of the website and should be considered an important part of the Internet marketing strategy. The keywords you select for your niche should be relevant to your website. This is important because, through search engine optimization (SEO), these keywords will drive your target audience to your website. It means, you have to be careful in choosing the right keyword or keywords, it should be the interest of your target market and make then want to visit your site visit your website over and over again.

It is also important because your website will be ranked by search engines according to these keywords and if they are not relevant to the content of your website you may be penalized with poor search engine results. If that the case, the visibility of your website will suffer. This in turn would affect the sales of your website.
For a successful e-commerce site, Search Engine Optimization, professional Website Design and right choice of keyword should go hand in hand.

Website Maintenance Issues

Posted on November 1, 2009 by Claremont Design

Maintaining a website is a fact of life, a part of a web development cycle. This means that maintenance can begin as soon after the website goes online. Maintaining a website is quite different than maintaining application software. There are some special issues and procedures needed for Websites, due to their nature and operational status.

24x7x365: A website should be fully functional 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. Websites, especially an e-commerce site should be of continuous operation. Maintenance of e-commerce site should be done without taking the site off-line. However, there are some instances that it may be necessary to lock out use of pages in a portion of a Website while changes are made to those pages. This can be made by placing a “Temporarily Out Of Service” or similar notice on the main page of the section being maintained and disabling all links within that segment. This gives the page visitors an indication of the change, which may reduce confusion.

Check for broken links. Most common maintenance issue for any Website, besides changing the content of the site, is validating the links if they are still working and accurate. Periodic checks are needed to be performed to make sure active pages are found from all links, this can be done manually or by the use of software created for that purpose.

Code Validation. Before publishing modified or new pages, it should be processed by a code validation routine to insure that all the code is working. If you are using HTML, XML, Perl or other editor, such a feature is likely built into the software.
Re-registration. It may be necessary to re-register a Website with search engines when the content of your site significantly changes. Re-registration may be necessary for visitors to find your site based on the new or changed content.

Future editions. One of the most important issues to address to insure effective Website use is to avoid confusing visitors. Especially, frequent visitors can be confused if the site is constantly changing. To avoid confusion, you can post indications of future enhancements to the site and, as with all information systems; you can batch changes to reduce the frequency of site changes.