Archive for August, 2011
4 Stages of Web Design

Stage 1 – Style over substance
The first stage is to design a site that the chief executive officer, venture capitalists, and ad agencies like to see. There are all types of “bells and whistles” in this design. An entire site might be a Flash animated site. Or there might be some beautiful JavaScript mouse over effects or drop-down menus in the design. It’s always a pretty design, but the message is clear – style over substance.
Stage 2 – Designing for online visibility
In Stage 2, the reality of an ineffective web design begins to hit, usually around 3-6 months after the initial launch. A site will typically get rejected by many of the major directories, not be indexed by the major search engines, or not get the traffic or sales that were projected based on the various types of marketing strategies used. Typically, that’s when companies decide that they will try to hire a professional online marketer to promote the site. Doorway page companies, in some way, shape or form, rear their ugly heads. Unfortunately, many web site owners fall for a doorway page company’s pitch because the beautifully designed site couldn’t possibly be the problem with low site traffic. Yahoo might have rejected a site, or the site might have been listed in Yahoo and the company cannot understand why they have no description next to their company name. But in no way would many ad agencies or doorway page companies want to tell potential clients the truth — they simply did not design and write an effective web site — because it would mean losing thousands of pounds in business
Stage 3 – Designing for your audience
By Stage 3, after spending an exorbitant amount of money on pretty web site designs and various marketing strategies, web site owners generally figure out that they did not design or write an effective Web site for their target audience. Typically, web site owners will bring in a usability expert to analyze potential problems and present various solutions. Bringing in a search engine marketing expert to help with search-engine friendly web designs &templates early in the design phase can save a company thousands of pounds in online marketing costs.
Stage 4 – Site redesign
After careful usability and search engine visibility analyses, web site owners finally have an effective web site. A site that is written, coded and designed for user friendliness and search engine visibility generally gets the most traffic and resulting sales because it was written, programmed, and designed for end users.
Conclusion
Web sites should always be designed with your target audience in mind, not your own personal preferences. Colours have meaning. Professional designers understand the psychology of colour and the use of white space to best project the image your audience wishes to see. (For example, try not to use the colour red on a financial site.) Understanding the products/services/information your target audience is searching for is paramount to designing and maintaining an effective web site. When you launch a site, you might have to make an educated guess as to what your target audience wants. After that, tools such as site statistics software and reporting from site searches tell you exactly what your visitors are looking for. Then content and marketing strategies can be adjusted accordingly. Unless the advanced technology clearly benefits end users, do not use it on your site. If your venture capitalists or CEO’s or lawyers like the site, ask if they are going to spend the thousands or millions of pounds to keep you in business.
They’re not. Your target audience who will ultimately determine the success or failure of your site.
Best WordPress Plugins
WordPress is definitely an productive bit of program which will as well as delivers a program to begin posting it in addition has many accessory features for example wordpress plug-ins. These wordpress plugins allow end users and directors to add supplemental capabilities to their particular personal blogs and will produce the resources to personalize a website or site to match the theme and music genre.
WordPress plug-ins are to be found in the admin region of your website, you will probably want to check into your wordpress weblog to be able to obtain them and once you have inked so you will observe a loss branded ‘plugins’ when you just click on the tabs you shall be used to a record of wordpress plugins that are holding out to be activated. You will moreover be offered a explanation of which the plugin can and what traduction of wordpress you will must to be running for it to work. When you have which plugin you must switch on simply press stimulate and your done!
You can even travel the wordpress online shop and save a stack of cutting edge and updated plugins precisely from now there. You will furthermore have the opportunity to look at which plugins are purchased most regularly and also find out more information on every single individual wordpress plugin.
Maybe you always wanted a feature that hasn’t been available in the latest release of WordPress. What you can do is either install a 3rd party plugin or write your own custom code to extend the features of WordPress.
WordPress plugins are programming code that enhance the features of a standard
installation of WordPress. A well written plugin will be basically “drag and drop”
without modifying the core code of WordPress. As WordPress has been designed in
a modular way, plugins allow you to customize your site to your specific needs
without modifying the core of WordPress.
Ever since Wordress version 1.2 plugins have been available. WordPress plugins can
be categorized according to the feature it provides. Here a list of various features
that you can implement for your web site through WordPress plugins
Here is some of the best wordpress plugins
The plugin is rather simple to installation, you basically add the total index to your wp-content/plugins index using ftp. You will wish to create sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz writable via CHMOD 666. You then set-off the plugin from inside of your blog website (located under options) and get started to create a sitemap. You is not going to have got to continuously rebuild the sitemap every time a ? change or update is made as this is all semi-automatic or fully automatic.