Archive for August 25th, 2009
How To Really Design A Website
August 25th, 2009 | 
Author: How To Really Design A Website
There follows some basic guidelines on designing to engage your online audience favorably.
Well use the site Brothers Construction as an example of a well designed site.
1. Choose your color scheme with care. Make sure the colors do not interfere with legibility of the text.
Avoid glaring color contrasts that make the user feel a little ill.
The example site uses white text on a black background with some red and brown.
2. Choose your fonts with care. More than two different fonts is too many.
Avoid overly large and overly small text size. Too large text can be seen as shouting while too small text
becomes difficult to read especially for older site users.
3. Keep the navigation user intuitive and simply laid out.
Use of mouseover effects is fine to add spice but stay away from effects or a layout that will confuse your users.
Remember that all internet users want to find what they are looking for as quickly and painlessly as possible.
4. Bear in mind screen resolutions. There are many different resolutions commonly used today.
The most common resolution still is 1024*768.
Aim to fit your site to fill this size with no scrolling required in the horizontal or vertical plane.
Depending on how the siteis constructed youll also need to account for how the site will look on the common larger
flat screens of these times.
5. The overall site look is largely determined by how the site is built. Hiring a professional
expert in such areas as CSS Flash and HTML coding will yield a far superior result to trying
to wing it yourself using third party sitebuilding tools or Microsoft FrontPage.
If you really want to promote your online image successfully remember to invest in high quality design
and development for your site. Add this to an efficient site promotion campaign and you are well on your way!
About the writer: Ally Lennon is a web design entrepreneur and founder of Big Orange Planet. His company was built around the need for compelling user interface designs and built the site referenced in this article http://www.brothersconstruction.com ” target=”_blank”>Brothers Construction.
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Email Marketers: How To Use Html
Email Marketers: How To Use Html
You have your newsletter written and are excited about sending it out to your subscribers. The last thing is to use some HTML to get the newsletter to the level you want it to be and for it to look its best. The problem is you dont know that much about HTML. Fortunately its not that difficult to learn and while there are many different things you will need to learn the following tips will help you along the way to ensure that your newsletters look great while displaying correctly across email platforms.
When it comes to background colors and that is that many times they wont work. This is especially true with email applications that are web based like Hotmail or Gmail. That because the body tag will be eliminated in favor of the web based mail applications logo. HTML email is not as advanced as some people might imagine and the old methods that worked years ago are still being used. That means if you want the email to have a background color the easiest way to do it is to use a 100 wide table and assign it a bgcolor. Then youll have your background color.
Something else you will need to keep in mind is the plain text version. Lots of coders think about this at the very end and then do a sloppy job. The problem with this is that many spam filters will assume that this is trash and will send it straight to the junk folder.
Spam filters are very sensitive to emails from email marketers anyway so if you do anything a little off its likely the email will go to the trash. Dont let this happen to you. Instead pay attention to the plain text version of your email and ensure that it is correct so it will be delivered as is. With plain text emails it is recommended to hard wrap them at 60 characters or as many as 70 characters. You need to create a ruler across the top of your plain text editor. Just take any letter and type it 60 times or more across the top. Dont use Microsoft Word but rather an editor for plain text. Type your content and when you reach the end of the ruler hit return.
These are just a few tips to help you with youremail marketingcampaigns and to ensure your HTML is good! Just remember old school HTML is much better and it will work for you. Just be patient take your time and it will all work out!
About the writer: Brought to you by Aaron Goldberg. Aaron is an advocate for Interspire a provider of ecommerce shopping cart software content management software email marketing software and other web software solutions.
