The internet is an amazing and fascinating place of infinite scale. One of the few remaining examples of global co-operation and communication. Somewhere where we can express ourselves, meet, comment, sell, buy, or generally just hang out. We all have our favourite sites and places to visit, and they work for us because they are appealing. Sites you like or dislike are extremely subjective. Like anything, taste is down to the individual, but there are a few underlying principles in making a web design appealing to the masses, or to just a few. We will cover a couple of them here.

Don’t blind your visitors with flashing or blinking images or text, scrolling titles, animated gifs or sound. Unless done very, very well these should be avoided at all costs. All of these elements distract your audience from the sites message. At worst they annoy them enough that they leave altogether.

Web audiences scan pages, they don’t read them. So when a flashing banner ad or scrolling text keeps drawing their attention away from what you’re trying to say, the website fails. It’s like trying to read a newspaper while a small child is poking you. Not a good position to put your audience in.

Biologically speaking, the human eye is drawn to movement. So theoretically, a moving or flashing banner should attract the eye. While this is true, the reason for grabbing that attention is what annoys the visitor. On any web page, the text should be your advert. It should engage, interest and sell to an audience. Banner ads, and the scrolling text or other annoyances will always be that, annoyances.

In a similar vein, avoid using popups at all costs. Nothing annoys web users more than unsolicited popups. As a website owner, you may be more interested in making money than engaging an audience, but the kind of ads are going to quickly drive traffic away from your site. You aren’t going to make money with no visitors. As a web designer/owner you have to put yourself in the shoes of the audience. See things as they would see them. Try this on a site with popups and you will quickly see why they are a bad idea.

The last piece of advice I’m going to share today is to not use images as backgrounds. It doesn’t matter what quality picture you use, it looks cheap. If you are considering using one in a design, firstly, don’t, but surf a few of the most popular sites you know and see what they are doing. They don’t use them do they?

Design is all about doing things differently and making something stand out, but that has to be achieved the right way. Using images as a background isn’t one of those ways. It looks amateurish and practically screams “home-made site” or “low rent”. Not only does it destroy the appearance of a site, it also slows it down. Even with broadband, loading up a background image can take a while and certainly isn’t worth the wait once it’s loaded. MySpace may be able to get away with it, but as useful at the place is, an example of good design and usability it isn’t.

Keeping it Clean. How not to Turn Off Your Visitors. is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

I used to use the free tool at forums.digitalpoint.com which is a huge webmaster forum. Unfortunely the tool is broken and the owner of the site is being sued by Amazon for cookie stuffing so he doesn’t really have much time to mess with his sites.

I’ll take a few screen shots of the tool for you to see below

What do you use to check your ranks? is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Anyway, our main site is currently being built and when it launches we will definitely be providing links from all our blogs to it.

P.S. Our other blog is Bonita Web Design and we will be going public with more domains in the coming days.

Hello is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

ControlC was an idea thought up by Dan last year. To sum it up, ControlC fills the void left by a lackluster Windows clipboard. For those of you who use CTRL + V + C you know that the copy and paste feature in Windows can sometimes be a pain. What ControlC does is it records and saves every Control + C you do. So say you copy an important URL but you forget to paste it someplace right away and end up copying something else in the meantime, well whatever it was that you had copied before is now lost. With ControlC you can go back in your history and see everything you have ever copied. The new version of ControlC is going to be software based unlike the current web-based application.

Here are the features and screen shots of the ControlC design

• The first site of it’s kind, 100% unique
• Custom programing and design
• Featured on the homepage of TechCrunch and Wired

Control C is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

If you need professional web design services or help marketing your business, contact us and get a free quote.

You can also stop by our Bonita Web Design company if you get a minute.

Bonita Web Design is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design