Web Design for Your Site
What should your site look like.
Many Internet marketers are not computer programmers, but still manage to design great-looking websites. In fact, you don’t even have to know any HTML coding to create your site, thanks to the magic of templates and page design programs.
Most web hosts feature page design programs that allow you to drag and drop pictures and text on your web pages. Many also come with templates: pre-designed page layouts with a unified look and customizable blocks of text, web buttons, and image placement.
You can also use a program like Microsoft FrontPage or Dreamweaver to build your pages with an easy user interface and upload them to your server. Using one of these programs, you can save and make changes to your pages on your computer’s hard drive.
What makes a good website design? When planning your page layout, keep these considerations in mind:
• Clean, clutter-free pages. Websites with too much text or too
many images are confusing and difficult to read. Most Internet users won’t
bother trying to sort through clutter; they’ll simply look for another
site.
• Easy navigation. Most websites have many different pages. It should
be easy for your visitors to navigate from page to page on your website.
The best way to do this is to include a navigation bar on every page that
links to the rest of the site, either down one side or across the top.
• Unification. It’s a good idea to use the same color and
font scheme for all of your website pages. This makes your site look professional
and helps to reinforce your business image.
• Fast loading. Lots of images and flash animation can make a great-looking
website—but if your pages take too long to load, many Internet users
won’t wait. Instead of loading up on the graphics, choose a few
powerful images that represent your business or products.
Even if you use templates or page design programs to build your website, it’s a good idea to have a passing familiarity with the basics of HTML code. For instance, if you plan on using affiliate programs with your business, you may have to be able to paste snippets of code into your page to display the links.
HTML—hyper text markup language—is the underlying computer code that generates websites. You may have seen examples of HTML code in your e-mail. If you’ve ever gotten a bounced message from another e-mail server, you probably noticed a long block of nonsense text and characters following the server message. That’s what HTML code looks like to non-programmers: one big mess.
However, with a little bit of knowledge, you can demystify some of the code. Here is the HTML code for a link to the Google main page that displays the text “The ‘net’s number one search engine!”
<li><a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">The ‘net’s number one search engine!</li>
When this string of code is embedded in your website’s template, this is what appears on your page:
The ‘net’s number one search engine!
This particular code opens the link in another window, leaving your page open in the visitor’s browser. Once you become familiar with the basics of HTML coding, you may be surprised at how easy pasting code into your template can be. To learn more about HTML coding, check out the Resources section in this book.
Get your Business Online
Hosting - Fee or Free
The Domain Name Game
Your Website Design
Simple Solution - Blog
Money is really in the List
Communicating with your clients
Money from someone else's Trees - Affiliate Programs
Have a Question??
|
