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Design: Intelligence Made Visible by Stephen Bayley and Terence Conran (Hardcover - Sep 14, 2007)
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Design ~ Design
(DVD - Aug 28, 2007)
Buy new: $39.95

Designing a Good Website for Non-Web designers

The Internet is home to a large portion of today's market in almost all sectors. The only way to reach this market is by putting up websites that sell out a company's products or services. Web design can be summarized as the setting up of a website by linking together various related web pages. Two concepts come to play in web design. These are the content or information contained in the website and the presentation method of the content. It is thus important to find a balance between the two so that the site features both in complimenting measures.

The HTML language code, which is easy to use and understand, is used in web designing. For web designers who do not know how to use HTML, text editors such as TextPad will help them in getting the codes right. It is advisable to hand code your website as this gives you more control over the site as opposed to using visual editors like Dreamweaver. However, this may be hard for beginners, in which case web editors are just as good.

The content used to fill web pages should be valuable and accurate. This is because no browser will check out a website that has low quality information or information that is incorrect. Again, do not cram too much useless information into a page as it makes the web page look untidy. Write only what is important and present the content in simple, short, clear sentences that are easy to understand.

The key to designing a good website is in keeping things simple. Avoid complicated designs, images and pictures as much as possible. Simple designs take a shorter period of time to load, are easier to navigate through, are clearer, easier to redesign in case you want to make changes, more likely to operate on different browsers and need less bandwidth to operate.

Make the website look as professional as possible by using standard fonts and colors that are considered to be neutral. Maintain one font through the pages or use a maximum of three fonts. Optimize the images and graphics you use on the pages such that they are relevant and fitting for the particular site you are creating.

Once you are through with composing the content and uploading the necessary images on to your pages, you need to upload them to the web so that the site can be accessed through web browsers. It has to be hosted on a web server. There are many hosting service providers available that can host your domain at a fair charge per annum. You can also use software that enables the site to connect to a server. This software is free and controls everything about the site such as browsers logging on and off, transferring files, making connections to related sites and links; and restarting when the system is slow in loading.