Web & Internet

Flash website design is quite popular, and quite mysterious to some of us. Read on for an interview with a very talented young woman who designs websites, including the bells and whistles of flash website design.

Q: What distinguishes flash website design from ordinary website design?

A: Flash website design is a software animation tool used to create miniature digital “films” as opposed to a simple stiff and formal plain-Jane site. Artists naturally tend to favor the flash website design as digital Modern Artistic Expression.

Q: Why do people choose to use flash website design? Is it just bling and glitz, or are there technical or marketing advantages?

A: There are two types of  “flashimators”.

You can definitely market a product with animation, preferably short, as your visitor’s attention span is short and patience wanes quickly. Detail and demonstrate the magnificent uses and features of your product. Most professionals use slow, short bursts of the animated product performing at its highest, with an artistic expression of beauty and use of the product.

The second type uses flash website design for personal artistic purposes. This is a more difficult application of flash website design. These designers must create animations that load quickly an are sufficiently interesting to hold the attention of the target audience. You really need to fascinate your viewer such that they want to watch it every time they visit, up to a point. This leads to another difficulty, that of coming up with fresh new animations frequently.

Q. What can you do with flash-website design?

A. It’s really more a question of what can’t you do with flash website design! You can make a high-resolution, quality full-length movie, although these tend to produce an overly-digitized effect. You can add sound. You can animate just about any digital art.

Q. What types of businesses would most benefit from flash website design?

A. Graphic product producers and gadget marketers, selling products like cell phones or I-pods definitely benefit from flash website design. Artists for sure. I predict high fashion sites will soon get on board.

Q. What kind of background knowledge and skill is necessary to produce a flash website design?

A. The language is pretty easy to learn, but you need to practice regularly and be willing to devote the time required, which is lengthy. There’s a lot of subject!

However,you can shorten the process by purchasing a flash animation package for around $60.00. Click and place features saves you a mind-stretching experience.

I’d like to thank you for your time and excellent insights and information! Good luck to you!

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world — if your website is poorly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

When I’m talking about a “good design”, I’m not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design — accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I’ve come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I’d just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site — users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics — user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor’s screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it’s meant to do effectively. Don’t let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

If you want to start marketing as an affiliate then you need to have your own website. This is the main requirement to start your online business. Your website does not have to be loaded with graphics, but it does need to be informative, simple and professional.

To make your website you will need to do three things. Purchase a domain name, purchase the hosting service and design your website to upload to your hosting server. While purchasing the domain name, try to get a name that contains the main keywords of your website. Or you may simply choose a name that you like.

While selecting your hosting company, look for reliability. Hosting companies will be responsible for the storage of your files and to keep your website up and running. Godaddy.com is a well known, reliable hosting company.

How should your website be designed?

Hire a Designer

You can hire a web designer to do this design work for you. Just ask him to make the site professional looking and clean. The easiest way to hire a designer is to use an auction website like RentACoder.com or ODESK.com. Simply type a description of your project and designers will enter their bids. You will receive many bids from different designers. Check the portfolio and rate of each designer. Select the one which is best for your work and award him your project. After getting your website you can pay him through the auction website.

Use a Free Template

If you don’t want to invest to do the designing then you can get some free templates. There are many websites on the internet that are offering free website templates. Just visit these sites and choose the template that you like. Fill in the template with you own content and upload it on your server.

Use Site Builder Tools

Another choice is to use the site builder tools. You can use “dreamweaver” and “frontpage” to make your website yourself.

Characteristics of a Good Website

Simple and Professional

Your website is meant for business, so it must look professional. It should not be over loaded with heavy graphics and lots of flashy banners. Simplicity is best. Try to use light colors. Make a nice header to show your company name and theme. The site navigation must be simple and easy. People should not have any difficulty in searching for a specific page or information; otherwise they will not re-visit your website.

Provide Search Facility

Your website should have a search box on every page to search your website. This will be a great help for the visitors that want to search for a specific product or information on your website.

Build Your Mailing List

Some affiliate programs offer you a website to promote their business. This is the ready made solution. But in this case you cannot build your mailing list. Always try to get your own website where you can easily build your mailing list to promote your business.

Your own website is the key requirement for affiliate marketing. The overall look and feel of your website should be attractive and the site must provide the information for which people are looking for. Provide easy navigation and search facilities to make it user friendly.

There are many ways to design your Web 2.0 website to make it more attractive. A good design will ensure more hits on your website and therefore improve your business. There are some very simple tips, which you can follow to make your website more effective and generate more traffic.

Simplicity Is The Key

Nobody wants to see a website packed with too many features. It can in fact put off many visitors, as it can look rather unattractive. That doesn’t mean that you should keep your site bare, but have only the very essential features. Do not clutter it with things that are not required. Most internet users, as you know, just need to get the information they require and if there are too many other things distracting them, they will just look elsewhere. With Web 2.0, it is easy to get carried away and add more features than is needed. Try to avoid that.

Fewer columns make it easier for readers to take in the information. It looks neater and is much easier on the eyes. Too much information cluttered on one page will be a complete put off. You can search on Web 2.0 design tip sites to help make navigation easy on your site as well. You do not want to make it difficult for visitors to search for information or they will give up and move to another site providing similar content.

Make It Attractive

You can add colors to your site to make it more appealing. In fact, using different colors in separate sections on your Web 2.0 site is a good idea. Using larger size text will make it easier for the readers as well as look more attractive. You should use certain elements with good aesthetic appeal. Using effects like reflections and shadows can enhance the look of your website.

Many Web 2.0 designers will suggest that you use more self explanatory icons than just plain text to explain a concept better. This use of innovative icons is good but should not be overused. Perhaps, you can use them in some main areas of your site.

You can use labels to draw the reader’s attention to a particular part of your Web 2.0 website. These are especially useful to highlight certain promotions or special events that you may want to tell the readers about. Star shaped labels have been used quite often for this purpose. But again, do not overuse these labels as they can give your site a rather cheap look.

The main thing you should remember when using Web 2.0 web design tips is to use large and bold logos. This will create more interest in your website and increase your traffic as well.