Web Graphics: GIFS OR JPEG

The widely supported web image graphic formats are GIF and JPEG. Many are confused about this type of graphics. When should I use GIF and when should I use JPEG?

The easy rule to remember when making or graphic designing:

1. Use GIF format with graphics that have created on computer such as horizontal rules, buttons, or animation.
2. Use JPEG format when the images are scanned pictures or photographs.

GIF file can contain the maximum of 256 colors (8 bit) or less, which is good for customizing your graphic files. For example, if you create a GIF image of a red arrow, , you can customize the file to have only two colors, read and white. This means that the file is very very small because its palette contains only two colors. GIF file will yield a higher quality and smaller size image, compared to JPEG, when it is used with computer generated graphics such as icons, logos, buttons, etc. GIFs also has some special features such as animation, transparency, and interlacing.

JPEG was built to contain 24-bit (16.7+ million colors) and was developed specifically for photographic-style images. JPEG stores the information of images by keeping track of color changes. The advantage of JPEG is that it can carry a smaller file size than GIF when used in storing photographs and images with a wide variety of shading. But, it will not yield a smaller file when dealing with low color level and details like computer generated graphics.

Web Designing Optimization

All website designers want to have the most attractive website that leaves a visitor completely amazed about their works. A usual scene of an extremely attractive web design involves lots of graphical elements. By increasing the overall page size which the cause to download the page slowly to the browser.

As the average internet bandwidth rate per computer is raising, more and more webmasters allow themselves to develop complex websites loaded with heavy graphic elements. In very extreme cases you can find websites that take as much as a few minutes to load their content in your browser. Of course the user will never wait that long for a website to load, and will move on to the next website in search results.

Never limit the web designer by placing any restrictions that impact the final outcome. You might make the claim that what a web designer can do with graphic software is impossible to implement by code. I disagree. When the design is finished and you are ready to slice it into small images to be used in the html code, your creativity is been tested. Everything you do at this stage will affect the total page size. If your design contains rounded shapes that overlap each other or areas with color gradients, then you must slice it carefully so the outcome is a small file size.

Web Design eCommerce

eCommerce site must have a unique character that is designed to lead the visitor to one simple duty – to make an online shopping or purchase. Web designer needs to consider a variety of online selling principles while designing an eCommerce website.

Many are probably already asking why eCommerce website design is different from any other website design. They should be attractive, well organized and using the right or perfect colors that will fits the website spirit and so on.

Here are selling Principles that an eCommerce website needs to follow:

1. By giving user a pleasing experience during his/her online shopping.
2. By providing sufficient and certain information on who owns the website and why they should be trusted.
3. The website must be easy to use or to navigate. If it isn’t, the visitor will go to competitor.

The above principles are not new. 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 seen, although putting your products on the web is much easier then renting space and opening on a supermarket. However, selling your products on the web can be difficult and risky.

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.

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.

Web Designing Principles

The basic principles of web design are true for designing a great website. They are illustrated on how to put together design elements in a very effective manner. Designing a web is more than just putting HTML tags up onto a page, and by using these principles will help in building more useful and pleasing web designs.

Balance

Balance, the distribution of light and heavy elements on the page. Larger, darker elements appear heavier in the design than smaller, lighter elements. The principle of balance shows how to lay out pages so that they will work effectively.

Contrast

What do most people think of contrast, usually they typically think of colors or black and white. But there is more to contrast than color. There are contrasting shapes (square vs. circle), or contrasting sizes (large vs. small), or contrasting textures (smooth vs. rough).

Emphasis

Emphasis is what the eye is drawn to in a design. It's tempting to give everything equal emphasis or try to emphasize everything in a design, but this ends up making the design flat and bland. Instead, as a designer you should determine the hierarchy of the page and then apply the emphasis to the elements based on that hierarchy.

Rhythm

Rhythm, also called repetition. It brings an internal consistency to web designs. Patterns are easy for humans to comprehend, and repetition provides patterns that make the site easier to comprehend.

Unity

Unity is also called proximity. It is the principle of keeping like elements together and diverse elements further apart. Unity pulls elements together.

Web Design with the 3 Elements of SEO

By ensuring that a website is properly optimized for search engines. It is one of the most important steps that an online business will take. Until a business manages to become renowned online (such as amazon, eBay, etc) a huge amount of their traffic will be derived from search engines. Because it is vital that the website appears near the top of search engine results pages. Despite the fact that most online business owners are aware of the importance of achieving a high ranking in the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) a huge number of them don’t even consider search engine optimization until they have either launched a website or are preparing to. This article aims to explain why it can be hugely beneficial to start an SEO campaign at the same time as, or slightly before, the website is being designed.

Keyphrase Selection

One of the most important steps in the search engine optimization process is the selection of keywords. There are several important aspects to look for in a keyphrase that is likely to prove successful. Firstly it is vital that enough people actually search for a particular term. Secondly it is necessary to analyze the competitors that already hold the page one rankings for that phrase. If the top 20 results in the major search engines are held by dominant authority sites with high page rank ratings it is extremely unlikely that a new website will be able to have a strong impact. Finally the keyphrase has to be considered in relation to how well it relates to the page that it will be linked to. For example, for businesses it is integral that they not only generate traffic but also that the traffic is likely to convert to sales. Typically highly generalized key phrases will generate traffic that is looking for information rather than products or services so it is worthwhile looking into more specific long-tail keyphrases.

When web designing and building a website it is very beneficial if the keyphrases have already been selected. This allows the developer to tie the different sections of the website (or product categories for e-commerce sites) to the keywords making each of these sections far easier to optimize for in the long run.

On-site SEO

One of the first steps that an SEO specialist will take when beginning to optimize a website is to analyze the website and create a list of recommendations on what can be improved to give the site the best chance at achieving high rankings. While often these changes are relatively straightforward to implement after a website is completed it makes far more sense if these recommendations are made early to allow the designer to implement them on their initial build. By doing this the owner of the site can save the considerable amounts of time and money that would have been incurred by writing and then rewriting the code and content on each page.

Copywriting

Another reason for starting SEO before a site is completed is that the copy on the site can be written with search engines in mind. While it is obviously important that the website is written for its human visitors first and foremost there are some straightforward SEO techniques (such as utilising the keyphrase within the text and linking to other relevant pages on the site using keyphrase appropriate anchor text) that can help boost a websites ranking. By figuring out the keyphrases early and writing SEO friendly content from the start a lot of the time and money that is often spent redrafting content can be saved.

Ultimately while it is perfectly possible to embark on an SEO campaign after a website has been completed it usually makes far more sense to start it early and then build the site with the SEO in mind. This can save the considerable amount of time that rewriting Titles, headers, descriptions, content, etc can take and result in a website that is ready to launch with the highest potential to rank highly.

Website Graphic Design Information

Website design plays a major role in marketing a website and therefore, it is a very efficient and effective way of boosting sales. It is very likely that graphics give the potential customer their first impression of site and it is very important that a consistent overall image of site is created. The quality and positioning of the graphics contained in website are essential for it to look both attractive and professional. If all else fails in a website.

When you're working on a new web design, you need to determine what is the most important part of the page. If your reader gets only one thing from the Web page, what should that one thing be? The challenge of asking this of your clients is that they will invariably say "it's all equally important". If you attempt to make everything on a page emphasized (or bold, or h1, or whatever), you will end up with a page that has very little appeal.

Professional website graphics are attention grabbers and will make your site stand out online . They can enhance your website and increase it's popularity and thus generate revenue. Good website graphics add professionalism to your website, which will in turn entice viewers to return. On the flip side of the coin, poor quality or badly positioned graphics can cause your site more harm than good. Large graphics files can cause web pages to load slowly, potentially losing viewers and damaging your business. Working with graphics is very time consuming and an art form in itself. It might therefore, be more practical/economical, at times, to pay a professional to alter/construct the graphics you require.

Importance of Meta Tags

The Importance of Meta-tags: The way it Provides for the Human Touch

For the uninitiated, meta-tags are pieces of code within your website that contain information about each page. These tags are supposed to tell search engines and users what the page is about. If you're a little rusty on your Internet jargon, here's a primer. There are essentially and important three types of meta-tags that concern most internet marketers:

* Title - This is the text that appears in the title-bar of your web browser

* Description - This is a quick summary of the information on the page

* Keywords - These are words that are important in the article

Up until about 4 years ago, there was a tremendous focus on meta-tags as a method of improving search engine rankings. Webmasters and also web designers could stuff all sorts of words into the meta-tags to improve their search engine rankings for the words they wanted to rank well for. It wasn't long before the search engines caught on to this little trick, and as a result the efficacy of "keyword-stuffed" meta-tags dwindled over time. Posts on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) forums heralded the demise of the meta-tag with posters claiming that Google all but ignored the meta-tags. It seemed that there was no use for meta-tags anymore - at least from the perspective of the online marketer.

Meta-tag Re-emergence

But then a funny thing happened. The search market started to fracture. Yahoo and MSN both spun up their own search engines and dropped Google's results from their engines. Both Yahoo and MSN's new engines seemed to use content from the Title and Description meta-tags to display in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Google is less predictable with regard to the use of meta-tags. Google often uses the title tag to determine the clickable link on it's results pages, but only occasionally uses the description tag content in the page summary that it displays.

Remember the Human Beings/Visitors of your website:

Ok, now that I've put you to sleep with technical details and observations it's time to wake up, because there is a very important marketing point that I'm working towards here. The point that I'm driving at is that although the search engines probably have devalued the SEO value of the meta-tag to a great extent, that doesn't mean that it isn't important. When people search for keywords in your industry it isn't enough to be #1 on the list of results. You still need to convince those humans to click on your link. The way to do that is to design the most effective page description that can possibly appear in the SERPs.

Steps to Take To Improve Your Meta-Tags

As a general rule, Yahoo uses the first 25-30 words of your Meta Description tag in the site description it displays on your SERPs; MSN uses the first 15 or so. Write out a 30-word description of each page of your website that is broken up into two parts. The first 15 words need to get across what the page is about - this is all the MSN searchers will see. The second 15 words should support the first - this will be visible to Yahoo searchers. Google searchers will sometimes see the first 7 - 15 words as well (although you can't count on it). With meta-tags you have to just focus on the things you can control, and right now Google is an unknown quantity so it's probably best not to worry about optimizing for Google.

Don't Drop the Meta-Tags

Several years ago the search engines devalued the use of meta-tags in determining rankings. But because they use the meta-tags as page descriptions in their SERP pages, you must make special efforts to ensure that the content presented to searchers inspires them to click on your links rather than your competitors'. If you don't put meta-tags on your website's pages, then Yahoo and MSN (with a combined market share of around 45%) will just guess at what to put in the description of your website. They will pull phrases out of context (much the way Google does) from your site and slap them in there. The result is not nearly as inviting as it could have been otherwise. That's why it is always beneficial to learn to write effective meta-tags.