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Effective Website Design
One of the most commonly overlooked elements of an effective E-Business is the very thing that is essential to your success. Something as simple as the design of your website can make or break your business. Each consumer has their own set...
Printing Your Website the Right Way
There are so many techniques and methods available to create a user friendly website. The first one is by using a server side routine or print stylesheets. The print version may strip out images and navigation that lose their meaning on the printed...
Search Engine Friendly Web Design Advice
Online marketers understand the importance of getting top search engine rankings in major search engines. Therefore, they spend many time in optimizing website content, seeking inbound links, and optimizing title and Meta Tags. However, many of...
Web Design Using a CMS
Web Design Using a CMS
There has been a big craze lately, everybody wants their site as
a database driven site or Content Management System (CMS). There
are many advantages to using a CMS over ordinary static page
site, the main on is...
Web Designer's Guide to Search Engine Optimization
From a search engine point of view, the perfect webpage has no
graphics, no scripting, no tables...etc but just alot of normal,
plain readable text. You can just take it that plain text is the
food for search engine spiders. Therefore, the more...
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10 Tips on designing a fast loading web site
Tips and tricks on effective web design
The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load. Try out our tips to build a great looking web site that also loads fast.
Minimize the use of images - The key to a fast loading web site is to minimize the use of images. Images do enhance a page but don't make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Notice the popular sites like Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Amazon etc., they have very few images because the load time is more important. Very often simple designs are the best.
Optimize images for the web - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image. You can also use online tools like Gif Wizard to optimize your images or to get a recommendation on how to cut down the size of an image.
Use Tables creatively - You can get some great looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like.
Cut down the use of animated gifs - Don't use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor's attention to a particular section of your site.
Design simple icons - Instead of
Crashing On Couches To Talk To Musicians
Jason Crane of <em>The Jazz Session</em> interview podcast is touring the U.S. via Greyhound bus.
Around The Jazz Internet: May 18, 2012
Ten albums for newbies, the hated Cabaret Card and composer/arranger Gil Evans' centennial.
The Harmonica-Playing Baron Of Belgium
Whistling guitarist and harmonica master Toots Thielemans has played in everything from Charlie Parker's band to commercials for Old Spice. In his childhood home of Brussels — really, throughout his homeland — the celebration of his 90th birthday is on.
using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor.
Use background images instead of big images whenever possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small. The code will look like this :
Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.
Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don't make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.
Design most of your site in HTML - As much as possible try to design your site using HTML. You can create great designs by just using HTML code. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc.
Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful.
About the Author
Rachna is the CEO of Entheos, a Web Design firm, with the vision to expand its horizons to encompass new areas of service on the Web. Rachna is a creative Web Designer with capabilities in Flash, Dreamweaver and ASP. She has written over 50 articles and tutorials on Web Designing and Web Promotion.
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