The 8 Most Important Website Design Principles

Building an Innovative and Effective Website, by making fulluse of available technologies, is crucial for the future success ofyour current or future online business. There are literally 1000's ofgreat ideas out there, but finding the right ones and applying them toyour website, is where the real trick lies.

Applying the besttips, tools and other design principles to your website, can bring youuntold success on the internet. At the same time, using powerful andinnovative ideas in the design and development stages of your website,will level the playing field for your business, and raise it'scompetitive edge on the internet.

We have been doing webdevelopment for more than 7 years now, and during this time, manyimportant design and development principles have come to light. Don'twaste valuable time by making the same mistakes many other webdesigners and webmasters do. The following 8 powerful website designprinciples will assist in helping you make the right choices for youronline business :

1. Do-it-yourself OR outsourcing ?

Beforeyou start compiling your new website, you have to establish your skilllevel to tackle the specific project. If you have sufficient htmlunderstanding, a good idea of graphics and colors, plus fair writingskills, you mostly can do the website design yourself. If, however, youdon't have a fair understanding of html, it would be advisable tooutsource.

2. Dynamic vs. Static web pages

Do you wantyour site to be static, i.e.. no input from visitors, or dynamic, i.e..fully interactive, with visitors being able to log on, take part inforums, post information, etc ? Many new and fantastic scriptinglanguages are available to make your site more dynamic and bring it tolife.

3. Web Site Title vs. Domain

Before registering adomain for your site, take some time to think of related words or namesthat best describes your business. Compile a few possibilities and thencheck for availability on the internet. The best ones would normallyalready be "taken", but innovative thinking can get you very far !!When compiling you main page, use this domain name and extend it toyour website's main page title tag. This is step 1 in getting futuregood search engine rankings.

4. Build your site around important keywords

Whenbuilding the content part of your site, remember to include a fair doseof important keywords and phrases that best describe your business.These keywords, the words and phrases people use when searching forrelevant information on the internet, should also be extended to allthe important tags of every web page of your site. Be careful thoughnot to overdo it, as search engines penalize "keyword stuffing". Alsouse full sentences and make them sound natural. The clever searchengine algorithms have recently just become even more advanced, and cannow track unnaturally sounding sentences !

5. Optimized Title, Description & Keyword Tags

Eachpage of your website should be individually optimized in terms of themessage you want it to carry. Every page is different and there for aspecific reason. If the page info and page tags do not match in termsof keywords, the page will not show up in search engine results. Searchengines want to give searchers relevant results, and by not applyingthis principle, your site will not rank well.

6. A Site Map with links to all pages

Assistthe search engines by making it easy for them to index your site. Ifall pages can be reached from a central point like a sitemap, you willfirstly make sure that the search engine spider finds all your sitepages, and secondly help visitors to find relevant info and pagesquickly. Sites with good structures and fresh content gets spideredmore often.

7. All pages back-linked to the Site Map and Home Page

Visitorsto your website will not necessary land on the index page or sitemap.It is therefore imperative to give them a way to get to your index,site map and other important pages. A well structured informativewebsite also receives more return visitors.

8. Standard background & fonts on all pages

Bykeeping pages uniform, you ensure your visitors know they are still onyour site. Having various banners, backgrounds and fonts will onlyconfuse visitors. Try to stick to one font, or two at the most. Thehuman eye needs to adjust every time it reads text written in a newfont. Do not irritate your visitors by using many different fonts -they will leave in a flash !

If you have an existing website,but nothing much have been happening for you, try to apply these 8principles and see what good transpires...

Designing for the web
The purpose of design is to facilitate communication between user and content. Designing for the web means designing sympathetically with the way people actually use the web, not how we think they should. People approach web sites in very different ways to how we design them...
How people use web pages
Web designers naturally have a distorted view of web pages. The way we look at pages as we design them is very different from how theyre used in the real world. To create designs that work in the real world, we must appreciate the way theyll really be used...
Basic Design Principles Part 2 Tone, Texture, Light, And Shade
This specifically applies to drawings more than photography, but tone and texture are very important. Tone refers to shading of light and dark on an object and texture is the visual and tactile surface characteristics of an object.
Web Programming 101
At some point along the way webmasters around the net realized that HTML (1) was too limited to do many of the things that they wanted to accomplish.
Understanding Good Web Design Principles
Weve all heard the line Dont judge a book by its cover...but lets get real for a moment. In the real world everyone judges you (and your business) by the image you project. The same goes for your website.
The 8 Most Important Website Design Principles
There are literally 1000s of great ideas out there, but finding the right ones and applying them to your website, is where the real trick lies...
Corporate Logo Design
A corporate logo design is essential in todays corporate world. If used effectively, it will be highly instrumental in building your corporate identity and should successfully exude the companys attitude.
Understand Your Color
Any design on a web application involves the effective input of color scheme in order to impress web surfers, instill a certain image or identity associated with the kind of web site it represents, and add impact to the web pages...
Basic Graphic Design
Whether you design your business brochures, flyers, web page, or ads there are some things that you need to know. There are some basic graphic design principles that those of us trained in the commercial art/graphic design field dont always share. Heres a short list of elements of graphic design.....
The 5 Most Important Things You Must Know About AdSense
Whether youre just starting out with AdSense or whether youve been using it for years, the success of your ads will depend on knowing five absolutely essential pieces of information about AdSense: