Good Toronto Web Design

In today’s highly technical world, everything is online. There is nothing you cannot buy, sell, trade, research, find pictures of, or play if you have a computer and Internet connection. These days, there is a web site out there for anything you could name.

Which means that someone probably has a web site a lot like yours? As competition for page views grows more intense, web design more technical, and the Internet more popular, good web design becomes more important than ever before. If you have a web site, then you want visitors to view that site. Good web design is the only way to make that happen.

The average Internet cruiser is more jaded these days, harder to impress. Good web design is the only way to get repeat visitors. There are several basic key elements to good web design that every web designer must know how to use.

Content. Internet search engines have grown very clever about searching content on web sites these days. Good web design is centered on your web site’s content. What keywords will people search to find your site? Once you know what your keywords are, you have to have plenty of content on your site that features those keywords. There are several free web sites that allow you to check your keyword content. Use them. Content is what search engines look at first, so it is here that you must make your impression.

Links. Search engines, and your visitors, love links. You want links that connect to other pages of your site, internal links, as well as external links that connect to pages outside your domain. The more links you have, the better, so use them liberally throughout your site. Links also improve the navigation of your site, which is incredibly important to good web design.

Graphics. Bright colors, pictures, and fun fonts will make or break your web site. Graphics are going to fly at Internet cruisers every way they look, so you want to make an impression with the graphics on your site. Good web design is about a pleasing flow of colors, pictures, graphics, and text. Don’t over clutter your pages, but make them exciting and interesting to look at.

Good web design is about learning how to balance key elements that appeal to search engines and your viewers. Your pages should flow together, your navigation should be easy, and your site filled with content. The only way to increase traffic to your site is through good web design that is updated regularly. This will ensure repeat, and new, business to your site. The more visitors you have, the better. Good web design is the only way to make that happen.

www.Silentblast.com

Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design

I was recently asked by a visitor to thesitewizard.com to take a look at her company’s website, designed by a university student. I will not give the URL for that site, partly to protect the innocent, and partly because by the time you read this, it’ll probably have been modified.

The site was heavy in its use of graphics with images adorning most parts of the page layout, to provide curved borders (to replace the sharp corners in enclosing boxes), different background images for different parts of the page, etc. It had a top navigation bar, driven entirely using JavaScript. The navigation bar mimicked the sort of menu bar you find in computer programs - there is a horizontal menu bar with different items listed. When you move your mouse over one of those items, the menu will automatically expand vertically. As you move the mouse cursor down the pop-up menu, the item beneath the pointer is highlighted. Click it, and you will be delivered to another page on the site.

In general, that site is typical of the kind of sites produced by newcomers to web design. It scores well in terms of prettiness and gadgetry (although only under one browser, it doesn’t work well under other browsers), but fares dismally in terms of usability and search engine readiness. In fact, the reason my visitor wrote to me was because the website suffered a significant drop in the number of visitors after it was redesigned in its current form.

This article uses that site as a starting point for discussing some of the issues that a web designer needs to consider when creating a website that must exist and compete in the real world (as opposed to a site that is created merely to fulfill the course requirements of a school or university).

1. Appearance is Not the Most Important Issue

Over the years that I have dealt with newcomers to web design, it is my observation that they tend to focus excessively (and sometimes almost exclusively) on the appearance of a website. The site I mentioned earlier is a case in point: the designer tried hard to make the site look beautiful (and, if I may add, succeeded too - the site does indeed look pretty). However, as hard as it may be to believe (if you are a newcomer), appearance isn’t the most important thing to look at when you are planning and creating your site.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying that appearance is of no importance. Far from it. However, in this article, my intention is to address the excessive importance newcomers place on beauty. In fact, if you belong to the other extreme, discounting the value of the appearance of a website altogether, you might want to read my discussion of Two Common Web Design Myths at http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/myths.shtml

Having said that, your site can still survive (or even thrive) if it is a plain-looking site like Google. This is not necessarily the case if you overlook the other important issues in web design.

2. Usability is Important for You to Achieve Your Purpose

All sites are created for a particular purpose. Some were created so that their owners can sell something. Others are information resources (like thesitewizard.com). Still others are designed to showcase their owner’s talents (such as sites displaying the owner’s resumes and portfolios).

The usability of your site is important to help you achieve that purpose. The basic question that you need to address when dealing with usability is: can your visitors easily access the information they need so that they can do the stuff that you want them to do? There are quite a number of things involved in this question.

1. Information Availability

   Is the information that your visitors need to make informed decisions available on your site? For example, before they can buy a product, they will want to know more about that product. A brief one-line summary about your product’s features may work for your main page, but you will probably find that you get more buyers if you can provide a link to a page that gives a detailed list of features of each of your products.

2. Information Accessibility

   Not only must your information be available to your visitors, it must be easily accessible. A page that gives a detailed description of your products is not going to help your visitors if they have to work hard at finding it. In fact, my experience is that if visitors have to work at finding something on your site, they are not going to find it. Either put the information right under their noses, or put a link to it in that place.

3. Navigation

   A good navigational system for your website is crucial. A navigational system is one by which visitors can move from one page to another. For example, on thesitewizard.com, one way in you can access the main pages on the site is to use the navigation buttons on the left column of the page.

   There are a few features to a good navigational system:

   1. If you are using a navigation bar or panel, standardize its location on all the pages of your website. Don’t make your visitors feel as though they are embarking on a treasure hunt every time they reach a new page.
   2. In addition to your navigation bar or panel, provide short-cuts to places where visitors are likely to want to go. Don’t force your visitors to have to go through your main page (or your site map) every time they need to visit another page on your site. In fact, put direct links in logical places - for example, on your “Products” page, you should have a links to your “Buy / Order” page as well as links to the pages with detailed information about individual products. Think like a visitor and ask yourself what are the things a visitor might want to know or do when he/she is at a particular page.
   3. A good navigation system must be usable by all your visitors. As a result, try to avoid things that are dependent on certain facilities or features being available. For example, don’t make your menu dependent on a specific browser. If your menu is JavaScript-driven, make sure that you have an alternative facility available for people who do not have JavaScript enabled.
   4. If your site has a large number of pages, a site search engine will improve your site’s usability. Not everyone mentally organises information the way you do. Hence a logical arrangement to you may not be logical to another person. Giving your visitors a way to search your web site will help them locate what they want. I discuss the use of a search engine for your site in my article How to Put a Search Engine On Your Site at http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/searchengine.shtml
   5. It’s always good to have a Site Map, unless your site has only a few pages. This allows people to have another route to the other pages on your site. It also helps search engines locate all the pages on your site, particularly if you use dynamically-generated links to your pages (like JavaScript-created links).

3. Search Engine Visibility is Your Site’s Lifeline

As I mentioned earlier, the problem that my visitor faced when her site was redesigned was that it no longer appeared in search engine results even when relevant terms were used for searches.

The problem in her case was that her site relied exclusively on a JavaScript navigation menu. Apart from the links generated by the JavaScript menu, there were absolutely no other links on her site pointing to other pages within the site. Since search engines bots can’t interpret JavaScript (at least not at this time, to my knowledge), they could not follow any links and could thus only index her main page. As a result, her pages were not listed in searches for her keywords (since only the main page was indexed), leading to a drastic drop in visitors.

This is a problem fairly easily fixed (for example, one way is to create a site map and add a normal link to it from the main page), but it illustrates one of the most important issues a real-world website faces: search engine visibility. If your site is not listed in the search engines, you’re not going to be able to get many visitors, if at all. Without visitors, you’re obviously not going to be able to achieve your purpose for the site.

Designing a site that is search engine ready is a lengthy topic, so I am not even going to try to address it here. If you are interested to know more, you can find some general principles for making your site search engine ready by perusing the articles listed on: http://www.thesitewizard.com/sitepromotion/index.shtml

Conclusion

This article is about the importance of factoring usability and search engine readiness into your web design. Usability is important because it improves the chances that your site will help you accomplish your purpose. Search engine visibility is crucial because without it, you will get few visitors. Plan with these two aspects in mind, even as you look into the appearance of your site, and your design will go far in helping you achieve the goals for your site.

This article can be found at http://www.thesitewizard.com/

Separating the Content from its Presentation

The main idea behind the concept of separating the content from its presentation is to allow website developers a useful framework to develop their website giving them the ability to change the website’s appearance whenever they like without needing to redo the content structure. This article will explain the rationale behind separating content from presentation.

Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t just one method for implementing this concept. More than that, since the introduction of technologies such as CGI, ASP, and PHP that allow web developers to generate dynamic web pages, a lot of companies have found creative ways to develop their website applications using this concept as their foundation.

Over the past few years, the internet community has been trying to create a set of standards for creating web sites. A new technology called CSS or Cascading Style Sheets has been introduced. There is nothing actually new in the way CSS handles a web page’s presentation. CSS allows the developer to define a style for each html tag element. This is similar to the method developers (programmers) used in the old days when they attached a variable to each html tag defining its style. The major difference is that CSS style definitions can be interpreted by most of the existing browsers available while in the older method the dynamic web page engine performs the interpretation.

The internet standards organization W3C has encouraged the use of CSS by enhancing its ability to control the web page’s look and feel. New style options have been added to the CSS specifications that have not been added to the HTML description language. There’s no doubt that this was a smart move. It’s forced web developers to use CSS to achieve an attractive web page that also supports the principle of content separation. Unfortunately CSS did not find its way into the internet mainstream easily because of compatibility issues with most web browsers. These days CSS is widely supported by most of the major web browsers, while CSS2, an enhanced version of CSS still has serious compatibility issues.

Obviously, the separation of content from its presentation deals not only with the styling aspects, but also with browser compatibility issues. The styling aspects were the first to be handled by web developers and web designers. As the complexity of information technology (IT) systems become increasingly more difficult to maintain, the internet community is looking for a solution that will become a standard so that content can be easily be managed. One goal for this standard is to define a “language” that IT systems can “talk” with each other and exchange information. Large corporations have historically used many different software platforms in their networks to conduct business. Internet based applications can provide a single platform that can act as an intermediary between all of these different systems and allow communication between them.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) has been adopted as a standard to present the content itself. OFX (Open Financial Exchange) is a close relative of XML that has been widely used by financial institutions who have been using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems to transmit orders and invoices over private networks, intranets and the internet for several years.

The need to present the content in a standard way that separates it from any design elements was so urgent that for the first time in software development history all the three major players (SUN, IBM, and Microsoft) actually agreed with each other and XML become a standard almost overnight and was adopted by many content providers and news agencies.

Yet the concept was not fully implemented. CSS handles the styling aspects while XML handles the document content. What about the webpage layout? New websites are been published each day by thousands. Every day millions of new web pages are being added to the internet’s global database. Webmasters have found that changing the page background color or the font color might not be enough to keep their website fresh and polished to compete with other new websites. However, changing the website layout can sometimes involve a lot of effort because it involves modifying the web page source code. XSL was introduced to solve that issue. Consider XSL a set of rules that can describe a web page layout. Combine it with XML (and optionally with CSS) you will get a valid html file.

XSL is very similar in its mechanics as any other dynamic web page generator. Beside the fact that XSL is platform independent, its biggest advantage is that it can be processed on the client side. The web server sends the client the content using XML format and the layout definition using XSL format. By doing that, the load on the web server’s CPU is reduced allowing it to perform other tasks more quickly. However, XSL was not adopted by all the major web browsers. So unlike XML, XSL has not found its way to the market easily.

Before you run back to your desk and start redesigning your website according to these magnificent standards, you should be aware that those technologies are really not needed most of the time. In fact, using them unnecessarily can cause performance problems. CSS usually will not cause your system to slow down. Just try to keep your CSS file as small as possible. Many web developers maintain large CSS files with lots of unused style definitions. Deciding to work with XML is a serious decision. If your website generates dynamic web pages supported by databases like MySQL, adding additional XML functionality will definitely reduce your website performance. Sometimes you won’t have a choice and will need to upgrade your hardware to maintain your website’s performance. There is no rule of thumb for this issue. The decision should be based on each system and its engineering demands. My advice to you is to think two steps ahead. Try to predict what kind of future services your website will be providing. Plan your website properly at stage one and save yourself lots of effort later.
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.

eCommerce Website Design

eCommerce websites have their own unique character that is designed to lead the visitor to one simple task – make an online purchase. A web designer needs to consider a variety of online selling principles while designing an eCommerce website. In this article we will try to take a look at some of the major design aspects that you must have in an eCommerce website.

Many of you are probably already asking why eCommerce website design is different from any other website design. They all need to be attractive, well organized and use the right colors that fits the website spirit and so on. Your instincts are good. However a close look at some successful eCommerce websites will reveal the conceptual differences that are typical in a successful eCommerce website.

An eCommerce website needs to follow certain selling principles:

1. Give the user a pleasant experience during his online shopping.
2. Make certain you provide sufficient information on who owns the website and why they should be trusted.
3. The website must be easy to use. If it isn’t, the visitor will go to your competitor.

Those principles are not new. We all know those basics from our day to day experiences in the mall, shopping center and every other market place that is waiting for us to open up our wallets. The big challenge for a web designer is how to translate those conventional marketing techniques to the virtual world of the internet. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that in most supermarkets the bread stand is placed at the far end of the building, yet you can smell the fresh bread at the entrance (sometimes they even use a special air duct to carry the smells). That has been done deliberately. Marketers use our sense of smell to draw us through the store where we are exposed to all sorts of tempting goodies as we go to get our loaf of bread.

How do you draw an imaginarily path in a web page? A path designed to lead the visitor to do what you want him to do…make an online purchase. Unlike the supermarket our website has no smell. In a website the distance from one point to the other is pretty much the same, so the exit is always right there. In a website you can try to order the “shelf” in the way you think will best expose the visitor to many of your products, but there is always a chance that he will find a short cut to another page that can also be the way off your site.

As can be see, although putting your products on the web is much easier then renting space and opening a supermarket. However, selling your products on the web can be difficult.

A good eCommerce website design will lead the visitor to the right page in one click or two at the most. Sometime web designers will use techniques that would never be considered for non-eCommerce websites. Everyone has seen at least one sales letter website. On these web pages the only link is to the order form. Sales letters are not the most typical eCommerce website because they usually sell only one product. That allows the web designer the ability to exaggerate the one click principle and make it an advantage. All the facts about the product have been presented to the user is a smart way while every few lines he has the option to click on the order form. If he is not yet convinced he will have the option to continue to read more facts and testimonials about the products. Believe it or not, those sales letter websites are actually selling.

“What about online shops?” Online shops have to deal with more then one product. Of course, the greater number of products increases the complexity of the website. Sophisticated eCommerce websites use a variety of personalization technologies in an effort to determine the best selection of products to offer to the visitor. Personalization technologies are a major part of advanced eCommerce websites. However this topic is beyond the scope of this article. The cleverness of an eCommerce website’s personalization technology has a major influence on its design. The first to use such technology was Amazon.com who decided to push their client’s books to a visitor based on that visitor’s past orders combined with the statistics they had collected on all visitors used to predict what someone looking at a specific book might also be interested in reading. Today the goal is to try to predict what to offer the user on his first visit as well.

An eCommerce web design is also about the layout. One important aspect is where the user’s eyes look first when accessing a web page. Lots of research has been done on this topic. Most research showed that the middle left side area will attract the most attention followed by the center of the page. By using these techniques web designers try to draw the “walking path” for the visitor’s eye, much like what was done at the supermarket. An experienced eCommerce web designer will know how to create designs to meets those demands.

If you are about to open an eCommerce website or you are already own one, make sure you understand the web design principles for online selling. Consider consulting with an experienced website designer preferably someone who has experience with eCommerce websites.

Good luck with your sales.

Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.

Annoying Toronto Website Design

Have you ever considered that your website may be annoying? When it’s comes to website design, knowing what visitors hate most is a must, unless you don’t want them to visit you again. This article describes what you should exclude from your website. If you know about an annoying website, feel free to send this article to its webmaster.

A few weeks ago I received an email from a colleague asking me to check one of the website he had developed. He is a web designer and his client wanted a nice attractive flash header. The flash header was great. You can’t miss it at all. Some nice graphics elements were flying in while sound effects created just the right atmosphere. However, after starting to explore the website, the header became very annoying because every time you clicked on the website the header restarted. What was pleasant initially became very annoying very quickly, disturbing your concentration and making it difficult to read what was on the page.

He is not the first to create what I like to call – “annoying website design”. Many webmasters, especially new webmasters are totally “in love” with their ideas and tend to go overboard with their design in one way or another. It’s nice to have an attractive header, but is it really necessary to assault the visitor’s mind with it? In my opinion, absolutely not!

Webmasters sometimes forget that their website design should send a message to the visitor that should reflect the website topic and not the programmer’s skill level.

Is Your Website Design Annoying?

Well…. It’s not that hard to be annoying. However, some webmasters are much better than others at annoying their visitors. Check my top 5 list and decide for yourself whether you have been annoying your visitors.

1. Background music – Unless you are operating an online internet radio station or sell music CDs, why play a midi/wav file in the background continuously on every page?
2. Huge font size – If you are designing a website for people with a disability then you are doing the right thing, but if not then you are shouting. People don’t like it when someone shouts at them.
3. Small font size – Do you want to be heard? Keep a normal tone, don’t shout but “speak” in a reasonable volume.
4. Overlapping layers – Layers can be very useful up to the point. But not when they are being used to put an annoying message in the visitor’s face. Don’t try to force your visitor to read your messages. Try persuasion instead of brute force.
5. Popup windows – Even though popup windows are now blocked by many add on tools, webmasters keep using them. The annoying part of popups is sometimes we actually miss important information because of those anti popup tools. Haven’t you heard the old phrase “if you can’t beat him, join him”? Don’t use pop up windows. Put your important messages in a central place on your website.

Most likely each one of us has our own private top five lists. You probably have many more annoying design cases in mind. Well, you’re right, the list is much longer then that. I just wanted to describe some of the highlights in order to bring this important subject your attention.

Some of you are probably reading those lines and smiling while some others have a feeling a deja-vu. Keep in your mind that as a webmaster the last thing you want to do is put lots of effort into your website and then find out that your visitors hate it. It’s not a matter of taste, it’s more about being the same polite person we all try to be when we go to a party.

I tried to point out a few things that might be useful to some web designers and webmasters. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to send this article to my friend, hopefully he’ll send it to his client
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.

Keys to a successful Toronto web site

The Internet is becoming the number one source of information for a large part of the world’s population. Its use varies by age group and education level with the higher usage being the more educated and younger generation. However most of the world’s population is quickly becoming computer and Internet literate. Therefore, it is imperative that all businesses and professions establish a web presence (a web site).

The Keys to a successful web site start before the site is created and do not cease when the site is up and running. For example, the selection of the domain name and web site organization are critical factors that need much thought prior to constructing a web site.

Once a site is up and running site metrics should be evaluated on a regular basis to monitor the effectiveness of the site. Over the next few weeks I will be writing a series of articles that will discuss the following subjects;

1. Domain Name Selection/registration
2. Site Layout (site map)
3. Importance of Page Layout and Content
4. Importance and Construction of Meta Tags
5. Search Engine Submission & Rankings
6. Importance of Links
7. Using Web Page Analysis Tools
8. Using Web Site Metrics/Statistics

All of the above topics are important and in most cases the optimization of each is critical in achieving and maintaining a high search engine ranking. Search engine ranking is critical if the success of your business or professional service depends upon people finding you using the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, & MSN).

Usually when one uses these search engines for a word or phrase search they return thousands of pages. Most of us only glance at the first few pages. Therefore, if your page is not ranked in the first fifty or so most will never find you.

If you have not become familiar with the above, I would suggest that you do so. There are a number of good article on each topic available on the Internet.

Blogging for SEO

It’s no secret that blogs are great for helping to boost your seo rankings. You can use a blog to get a new site ranked quickly and ahead of your main site if you are dedicated to posting on a frequent basis.

While the main goal of your blog may be to express your thoughts, talk back to your customers or as a vehicle to promote your product or services, there is another critical element to blogging.

Search Engine Optimization & Marketing.

Because of the frequency of active blogs (daily - or at least 5 times a week) the search engines have put high weight on blogs that are focused and tend to stay on topic.

It’s the freshness of content (in a perfect world) that a search engine is craving and rewarding to the blogs. The ideal situation is that the blog would provide for tiny snippets of information that over time build up to a greater whole. (Almost like a blook)

But the most overloooked element of a blog is that once you’ve established a frequent pattern of posting and you have the Googlebot coming to your site every few days, you can then use that to link to other sites, sub-domains or any deep links that you need to get crawled. While most blog postings may not have direct links to any sites in particular, you could always format your blog with some permanent links on the side.

Another mistake made by the amatuer blogger is that they don’t realize that you can optimize your blog. True, most blogs only have a few areas, namely the “home” page and the “archive” page. But depending on the tool being used to post the blog, there are some places where you can take advantage seo-wise.

The title of your blog should be thought of as a headline - grab the reader’s attention - but also be sure that your blog title is also what gets archived - that way your titles can become search queries as well.

While the main objective of a blog should be to get your message out, don’t forget to take a little time for SEO and you should see your efforts payoff in the search engine results pages.

-To your online success!

Paul Bliss
www.SEOforGoogle.com

Why is CSS Good for Google?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to separate the stylistic elements of a page such as layout, colour and fonts from the content of the page such as paragraphs and images. We call this Separation of Content from Presentation.

If you don’t understand CSS at all then you may decide not to use it for your site. However I would suggest that the advantages to be gained from using CSS, not just for Google, are well worth the time invested in learning it. For an introduction to CSS see CSS Is Easy by Kevin Yank or see the many other quality articles over at SitePoint’s CSS Section.

So why is CSS good for Google?

CSS allows for smaller file sizes
CSS allows you greater control of page structure
CSS allows you to hide certain content from browsers while it still gets picked up by Google
CSS allows for smaller file sizes
By taking styles out of the HTML page and putting it into a standalone (imported) style sheet (.css file), you can reduce the overall amount of code in your web pages. Pages with less code have smaller file sizes and Google prefers pages with smaller file sizes (many other search engines do too).

Though Google doesn’t offer specific advice on this matter, the search engine optimisation community is generally agreed that 100KB is a good upper limit for page sizes.

CSS allows you greater control of page structure
CSS allows you to structure your document according to HTML standards without comprimising the look-and-feel of the page.

Google rewards pages that are well structured, though many designers choose to ignore standards and guidelines as much as possible, because they (incorrectly) believe standards lead to bland pages. Using CSS, designers can create attractive pages with much flair, while adhering to the findability design principles identified in the book (yes you’ll have to buy it to get more!).

CSS allows you to hide content from browsers while it still gets picked up by Google
Using CSS you can hide content from certain browsers in certain situations. For example you may have some content that you only want to appear in print, or you may want certain content to only be shown on screen and not in print (such as page navigation). The advantage is that Google will still index all of the content and you will still get the benefit that content brings.

For an example of this technique see my article Random Content Rotation.

Browser Compatibility
If you are new to CSS, be aware that different browsers still interpret CSS standards in different ways, while some (very) old browsers don’t read CSS at all. Ensure that your CSS is as cross-browser compatible as possible, and that your HTML pages look acceptable even without CSS.

Resources
There are many useful resources for those seeking to learn more about the effective use of CSS. A useful place to start is Glish.com or SitePoint (mentioned above).

Good books on CSS include “Eric Meyer on CSS” by Eric Meyer, and “Designing with Web Standards” by Jeffrey Zeldman.

Top Tips for Toronto web design

Content is King
The most important thing to remember about popular web sites is that they are always rich in content.

Stick to your subject
Don’t try to be all things to all people. Keep your goal in mind. Creating a web site is challenging and fun. The temptation to put as many bells and whistles as you can on a page is almost overwhelming. But unless your site is involved with bells and whistles, don’t do it! The purpose of designing a site carefully is not to make it look cool, or win awards. It’s to accomplish the intended goal of the site. It’s a good idea to write down the goal of your the site before starting any design work. It will help you make design designs for the site as a whole.

First impression count!
Think about the message you are sending to your customer. The first page of your web site should be a concise description of the website. Don’t make this page too busy - entice visitors to dig deeper into your site through the use of inviting text and interesting graphics. If you are serious about your business, buy your own domain name and don’t use a “free” hosting service.

Design sites, not pages
Your primary concern should be the site’s overall design. When starting to design a new site from scratch, you should try to create a design that will make sense to users, has a consistent look and feel, and is not to difficult to extend in the future. The consistency of design of a site is one of the factors that differentiates amateur sites from professional ones.

Make it easy to get around your site
Your customer should be able to easily navigate to any page in your web from any page in your page. It’s important to link in a consistent, well thought out manner that users can learn to navigate. Have clear links to your pages and, if are selling a product, make it easy for people to buy it! Show your business name, address, phone number and E-mail address on each an every page. Invite customers to contact you with their questions or comments. Add links to other sites only when necessary, or on a special links page at the end of your site. You want visitors to go through your site before surfing off to another!

View your site through the eyes of a stranger
Once you have completed you site outline, view it in other browsers. Does it look like you wanted it to look?

Don’t forget to tell the world about your site
Make sure that your URL is on all your company business cards, letter heads, brochures, phone systems, etc. Swap links with other related web sites and consider banner advertising. List your site with the major search engines, but read their rules of submission first!

Keep your site current
Come up with a reason for people to visit and revisit your pages and recommend them to their friends. This could be a series of articles giving tips, a daily cartoon, or other attention catching event. The words most likely to attract visitors are: Free and Special. Be sure you offer something of value if you uses these words!

Toronto Web Design

Silentblast is a professional Internet Consulting and Web Design company.Our business-driven approach and simple process separates us from typical Toronto web design companies.  We specialize in Web Design, Online Marketing, Flash and Multimedia, Search Engine Optimization, Content Management, Website Maintenace, Custom programming, Web Hosting and e-commerce.