The first thing as far as good web design practices goes is to make a plan for your web site and put it down on paper and though you don?t need to put every minute detail down on paper, you do need to put the feel and look of the web site down in writing and to also include a means of navigating the web site and even creating a flow chart of different web pages that will form part of the entire web site.

The best way to visualize your web site is to liken it to a pyramid in which the homepage is at the very top and visitors to your web site will then need to navigate from this home page to the next tier and from there to further tiers. Thus, the best web design practice would require that you begin planning your home page first and add a second page and then you can clone the different levels from there. The main aim should be to create one perfect web page and then using it as a template go from there and create further pages.

Thus, a look at what a successful web page is will reveal that it must fulfill the needs and desires of the visitor and also the needs of various search engines, and it should also nudge the visitor into clicking through to the merchant page on your web site so that he converts the visit into a sale.

However, there is more to web design best practices than this, since your web site page should also be able to gather the names and addresses of each visitor and so there must be many places as well as opportunities for every visitor to your web site to opt-in to subscribe to your newsletter or to get a freebie, though having an opt-in means of capturing email addresses on each web page in your web site is highly recommended. Sometimes, it can prove more effective for you to gather the visitor?s email address than actually selling him or her product.

You also must ensure that your web site is optimized for search engines because that will help you get a lot of free traffic to your web site. You can even write articles regarding your business and combine them with search engine optimization web pages which will push hordes of targeted visitors to your web site. And, you also need to do more than gather visitor?s email addresses since a well designed web site should also move the visitor down a pre-defined route so that the visitor ends up performing a particular action, which obviously would be to click and arrive at the merchant page where a sale can be affected. Thus, you should remember that good navigation is the key to moving the customer along in your web site.

The thinking behind using Flash skip-intros is no doubt because the web designer and/or owner believe it to be a cool thing to do, though they should know better because such use of Flash has absolutely no real value at all. It helps in taking away the focus of the customer and if you really intend on running a successful online business, you don?t want to place the focus on yourself; rather, it is the customer who is most important and so you should do all that is necessary to make him or her more comfortable and get them to think more about buying from you than being impressed by having to watch unnecessary skip-intro pages.

Apart from looking cool, skip-intros may impress the visitor once at most and will then become more of a liability to your web site rather than an asset, and it can certainly annoy visitors because it forces them to wait before they can really get stuck into your web site which is what they want to do most.

Another major drawback to hundred percent Flash-based introductions is that they are not very search engine friendly, because if there was a complete absence of text on your opening page, the search engine would fail to ?crawl? your web site thus dashing whatever hopes you may have had of being able to achieve good page rankings because the search engines only read up the text contained in the web pages and not Flash.

However, if you must have Flash on your web pages, you should pay heed to advice on how to get it to become more search engine friendly. For starters, you may want to wrap the Flash in the usual HTML coding or you could even use XHTML which will allow Flash to display text from a source that is external to your web site.

If you are using a Flash Splash page, place some text-only navigation bars immediately beneath the splash screen which will allow the search engine to find the rest of the pages a lot more easily. The same principal applies to use of Flash content and all you need to do is to ensure that you have some content containing text which will be useful when search engines are indexing your pages, and so you could go the hybrid way of having Flash animation on top of your web page followed by some amount of text which is good for visitors since there is content richness and it allows the search engines to use the text to properly index your pages.

It thus makes good sense for your web design to allow for breaking up of pages and having many headers so that major ideas can be highlighted thereby enabling the reader to find whatever piece of information they are looking for in an easy and quick manner. There should be headers that make sense in between paragraphs, which is also useful for your web site when it comes to search engine optimization. Also, headers should be from H1 through till H4 tags to make for better search engine optimization.

In addition, you can use contrasting colors for background and for actual text and opt for black and white which makes for better readability and generally choose a background color that is easy on the eyes. Also, it is better to use simple fonts than fancy ones that are often harder to read. And, it is better to use browsers such as FireFox that is Standards compliant when developing as well as testing your web site.

The second golden rule of good web design is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to navigate through your web site, and it thus pays to have more than one navigation point so that the visitor does not experience difficulty in finding whatever interests him or her and choose a left as well as right menu and also one at the top of the page as too one at the bottom.

Another significant rule in good web design is to ensure that the web design is consistent and there should not be any need to use more than a single or maximum two layouts and visitors to the site should become accustomed to looking in the same place to navigate the site as too for further sub-navigation and also to get through the content without any problems.

You also should be concerned with the page weight, which is nothing but the total size of your web page measured in bytes and includes images, code and also text. How much your web site?s page weight is will govern how well the visitor experiences reading your content. As a rule of thumb, if you keep the page weight low you should get better response from readers since such pages will download quicker and thus the visitor gets to view the pages a lot faster, which is what they want in any case. It would thus pay to have page weight not exceeding 64k though anything between 15 and 25k would be ideal.

The bottom line is that any visitor that comes to your site should easily locate what they are looking for and not need to click more than thrice to achieve their objective.

When you want to have your very own web site, you obviously would want it to reflect your personality and also your business needs and it should also conform to current trends in website designing. Most people that visit websites want to come across websites that are appealing in their looks, and which should be easy to use as well. A web site that suffers from design flaws can easily turn off visitors to your web site and thus adversely affects your online business.

Thus, hiring a website designer will at least assure you that there will not be any design flaws and in fact today, these designers are very like fashion designers, and you may often get some pretty outrageous solutions to your website?s needs. Still, they will be able to create the right theme and know the best as far as colors and style go. Another advantage to hiring web designers to create your web site is that they can handle the technical aspect to creating the best websites, and they will also add their valuable inputs to making the website function as expected and maybe even better.

No doubt, you could consider using the free sites that specialize in creating websites though these are more useful when you want to play around with design ideas than for incorporating into a live website. In addition, you may also consider buying inexpensive software that no doubt can also help you create complex designs for your website in a simple as well as quick manner. However, if you consider the importance of having a professional web site then your best bet is still to hire a web designer.

Another important consideration that you should seriously take into account when choosing a web designer to create your website is to understand how powerful is the Internet. With many potential visitors expected to view your web site, you don?t want to have anything less than the best and a good web presence will help your online business immensely.

Web design is something that requires a great deal of skill since it involves more than a nice looking site, because it should work perfectly and its construction is best left in the capable hands of a professional web designer. After all, you don?t want your web site to look the same as hundreds of others, and hiring a professional web designer will at least assure you that it will be a unique web site without any other duplicate. Also, with things such as Search Engine Optimization techniques to consider, you would be well advised to hire a professional web site designer.

To begin with, before you actually create your web page, you should be sure in your mind about the specific keywords you want to have on the page and which will help optimize the page. It would be wise to use such keywords in different parts of the page though you don?t want to overload the page with too many keywords, which will only result in having your page considered as spam which will not be good for your present ranking.

The next thing you need to ensure is that when you use a page title, it should begin with the keyword and it is also not a good idea to have more than five words in the keyword tag and there should be a title, keyword as well as description as the three most important meta tags in each page, and these should be present on each page. Next, you need to understand the importance of your first paragraph which is what the search engines use for analyzing as well as ranking the page, though of course it is also just as important to pay attention to the other paragraphs as well, and remember that you must sprinkle the keywords throughout your web page.

When using the keyword in your headline tag, it is advisable to keep it bold which can help in elevating your page in the rankings though remember not to use the tag too often and twice or thrice on a page would be sufficient because then it can easily be changed whenever necessary. When using images, you should use ?alt? as well as ?title? tags since it is not possible for search engines to otherwise identify whatever graphics are being used on the page. It would also help to rename the images to a specific keyword since that can get your page ranked higher.

When naming your file names, it would be a good idea to have them keyword rich since it will be of great use for the search engines to properly identify the pages and such naming conventions also make it easy for you to remember what the page is all about. You can extend this to naming of folders and to directories also.

Another very important aspect to getting high page rankings is anchor text which is nothing but a mask for URLs, which is text that points to different links. However, when using links, you should make sure not to use more than one hundred of them in a single page. Other tips to help you with making your web pages achieve higher rankings include not using frames, not trying to fool the search engines, and having the best as far as content goes. You also need to ensure that you do not use tricks in order to fool the search engines.

In order to succeed with your web design there are certain methods that you should employ like making good use of all the different methods and means that you know of and combining them with quality content. It goes without saying that you will need to have content on your web pages that are interesting and which will grab and keep the interest of visitors, and thus you need to pay special attention to writing copy that is engaging and of greater interest to readers.

Another feature that when incorporated in your web design will help to make your website stand out from the rest is making best use of Search Engine Optimization techniques that will lead to your website being ranked high in search engine pages and thus you would be well advised to keep density of keywords used to anything between three and five percent, and not higher as that would risk incurring penalties from the various search engines.

An important feature that can make your web design more successful is to include in the website a means whereby you can capture email addresses of visitors and thus create your own mailing list. Some of the means you can employ in order to get these email addresses include making the visitor offers of incentives, and giving them bonuses as well as asking them to subscribe to your newsletter or Ezine and also offering them special offers if they sign up with you.

Successful web design also means having a website?s site map so that all the different pages contained within are linked to this site map. Such a feature will pay rich dividends as it makes for easy navigation which is something that every visitor will appreciate and it is also an aid in getting your website ranked higher by search engine since their crawlers find such a feature to be valuable and thus ranks your website higher.

Finally, you must also ensure that the end product or your finished website has much that will appeal to the aesthetic senses of visitors and choosing light colors is recommended in this regard since it shows off your website in a more professional light. No doubt, flashy colors may do the trick in an odd instance, though conventional wisdom dictates that the more understated and mute is the appeal, the better will be the end result. You can also choose to have text in dark colors on a light background for a more appealing impression.

You should thus ensure that the website makes the buyer feel comfortable and which does not give him the impression that you are an amateur; rather you should come across as a professional who knows how to manage your business because how your website strikes the buyer will reflect on you, your product and thus will have a direct bearing on the sales that you can make every time a buyer visits your website.

To begin with, you need to ensure that your website is one that is easy to surf around and in this regard makes sure to make the web pages appealing and they should also be free from any flaws. A buyer to your website will have a definite goal in mind and thus your web design should ensure that the buyer gets what he is looking for. The key here is to make your buyer believe that he cannot do without your product.

Next, you need to make a main page that has a definite purpose and it should make the buyer want to buy from your website, and when he views it, it should load fast as well as be viewable as well. First impressions count and can often make the difference between a sale and losing a deal and so make your main page simple and whatever links there are should be in the field of vision and should also load quickly, because a page that takes too long to load can cause the buyer to leave the site in frustration.

Another winning tip as far as good web design for your site is concerned is to use mild colors that will sit easy on the eyes and if your site contains a lot of content, the best color option would be black and white, with some color added in tables to brighten up the image of the page and the ideal resolution should be 800×600 that will show up well on all kinds of monitors. And ,when using tables on your web page the best option for you would be to have them span a certain percentage of your web page rather than have them sized in inches because then you can accommodate each and every different size of screen. Since buyers will be using different browsers, you must ensure that your web page looks good on all types of browsers, and thus you may also want to check out various browsers to ensure that you are getting the best result.

The bottom line is that if the overall appearance of the website is aesthetically pleasing, it will help sell your online products and a properly designed website can make for the best marketing strategy to sell your products and also services.

If you have been brought up on the staple diet of splash pages, adding content to web pages and not having standardized or uniform pages, and adding links whenever new pages were added; PHP can be quite a revelation. Gone will be the tedium and slowness of manually changing your links every time you add new features, which even in the case of a small web site can be quite a chore.

The wonders of discovering PHP?s Includes() function can help you replicate your ideas where a single source is used for similar content on a number of different pages on your web site, and the Includes() function can also be placed anywhere on your web page. The Includes() function is not limited to just using it with menus and it is just as useful when using content that requires additions or updation on more than a single page and also when using Google analytics tracking code.

The only thing you need to understand is how to use the Include() function, which in any case is easy to learn. First off, you will need to create a file in which to put the content that requires to be replicated on different pages. And, in addition, you must ensure that the different web pages are given the extension of .php rather than the usual .html, and if you want to redirect people from an .html page to the .php page, you can make use of META tags.

The file that contains your code for the menu should be saved separately in a file and given a name that is easy to remember such as menu.php and then you can go to your original page and include code such as <php include(?name of your menu file. Php?); ?>. In this simple way you will find all your work done and the next time the page loads, the code that you have placed on it will then grab the content from your menu.php file and place it into the page at the place where you had placed the PHP code. All this is achieved so transparently that nobody that is viewing your web site will even gets a whiff of what is taking place in the background.

The beauty of using such PHP code in your web site is that you can simply edit and update your menu.php file and wherever on your web pages that code has been placed, the editing and updations will take affect automatically without your needing to spend time to dig up your various HTML and having to change your content manually.

Times have indeed changed and the present trend in website design has gone the Content Management Systems way or CMS web design. Using CMS for your website allows you as the owner of the website to constantly update the content on your website by using electronic forms rather than the old fashioned way of updating content through changing HTML code or even through programming.

Thus, if you have not already changed to CMS web design, now is the right time to do so because you will get a number of advantages by using this method. In fact, some of the benefits of using CMS web design include savings in the money you spend since there is less maintenance required, increased business since a CMS designed web site will always be up to date and that is what visitors find appealing when they visit your website and which will also make them come back more than once. In addition, CMS web design also improves your chances with search engine optimization since there will be plenty of fresh content which means higher ranking in the search engine rankings.

However, there is a downside to using CMS web design and that is that you have to pay more upfront since the designer needs to design the website according to a CMS framework and that in turn means needing sophisticated programming language of which PHP is a good example. Examples of CMS designed systems include Drupal, Joomla, CMS made simple, and Wordpress.

One of the features about CMS frameworks is that they use default themes, though this does mean that it could lead to your website looking like other websites, and most people love to have unique websites. However, a good designer can work his way around this problem and make your website look quite unique because almost everything that is used in CMS web design can easily be altered and even updated.

However, before opting for CMS web design, you first need to ascertain whether your needs really do require CMS, since you should only opt for it if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The best example of good CMS web design is a news agency where reporters write their stuff on PDA?s or other media and then transfer the content using an interface so that it is transferred to CMS and thus it can be merged with other content flow.

Another tip that you will get with regard to good web design is to ensure that the navigation through your web site is kept as simple as possible. When navigating a web site becomes difficult or complicated, the visitor will be put off by it and thus may leave your web site. It is thus necessary to ensure that the navigation is simple and you should also avoid the use of scripts as well as complicated menus that are flash based because there are certain browsers that do not support scripts which will only cause the visitor to miss out on important aspects of your web site.

Another useful tip with regard to good web design is to have paragraphs contained to a size that is reasonable and to avoid big blocks of paragraphs since that would take away from the visitor?s attention span and cause him to be deterred by content that is too long. In fact, most people like to read a few sentences in order to get the gist of what is being said and which also aids in being able to absorb the contents. So, keep paragraphs short and within a reasonable size.

And, the text on your web site should use a standard font that will be compatible with most systems and though certain fonts could look very nice, they may not be viewable on the visitor?s computer which is certainly something to avoid in your web design. It is advisable to use Cascading Style Sheets or CSS in order to set up as well as adjust your web site?s font as well as size setting and another advantage of CSS is that to make sweeping changes to the site all that is required is to edit a single file.

Also, good web design means testing out your web site on a number of different web browsers so that you can validate your web pages and ensures that it is compatible across browsers.