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

Graphics, images and media are a very important part of any web design. They make the site more appealing, pleasing to the eye and therefore popular. It is likely that the images you use give your visitors the first real idea of the products or service you sell. The quality and placement of your images on the page is essential in order for it to look attractive to the viewer. A quick glance at any of your favourite websites should show you how images are used within a page. The more popular and readable the site, the better the image quality and placement will be.

By having a website you are either wanting to sell something, promote something or just talk. Whatever its purpose the site has to be easy to read and navigable. Writers refer to it as white space. An area between text to break the copy into easily digestible chunks. Web images are the internet version of white space. Careful placement will break up a page with something much more interesting than white space. If the image is relevant to the text it is placed near then it gives added weight to the text, or clarification if any were needed.

The standard format for web images are either JPEG or GIF as they can be optimized for the web better than the others. This means they can load quicker which improves the overall response of the site. Because of this JPEGs are mainly used for photographic images and GIF is for other graphics and images. Not everybody has broadband so an eye has to be kept on the page weight and loading times on lower bandwidth connections. If a page takes too long then your visitor is going to get bored very quickly. You have three seconds to capture a visitors attention, so if you page takes longer than that to load, you’re in trouble!

Aside from customer experience, any image intensive website is going use its bandwidth allocation quite quickly unless the pages are optimized. Most hosting options have bandwidth limits included in the price. If you go over that it can become an expensive business, so it pays to keep an eye on it.

There are free tools on the internet that will optimize your images for free if you don’t have a graphics program that can do it. A word of caution though, JPEG format is lossy, so every time you redo a picture it loses a bit of quality. It is advisable to keep the image in its native format and only convert it to JPEG once complete.

Pictures can paint a thousand words and the right images, in the right places can enhance the readability of your site no end. Careful thought must be given to these images so they don’t cost you more than they earn. Poor quality, badly placed or slow loading images are going to put people off your site rather than bring them back.

Pretty Pictures is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

When thinking about the face of your company, it’s not going to be the employees or the management. It’s not going to be what kind of a building you operate out of. The face of your company is the logo. The face of your company is the first thing a person sees when coming to your website: your logo. With that basic understanding, it is tremendously important to have your logo look proper.

There are three steps to making your logo look proper. Each step is its own process; however, these three are the basic steps required to setting up your logo. By following these three steps, you’ll be able to create the perfect logo that will say “This is my company, that’s that.” Here are the steps:

• Do you just want it to say a name or do you want it to be something truly unique?
• Will the logo be used only for your site or all future advertising?
• What’s the final look going to be?

If you just want the name of your company is nice print, that’s simple. However, if you want it to be unique, it’ll be important to create a plan for it. What this means is you’re going to sit down and sketch out some ideas. Chances are, you’re not an artist, but you have an idea of what you want. Sketch it out.

The next step is to determine if this logo is going to be just for your site or if it will be plastered all over the place for advertising. If you create an ad, you may want to use that logo. However, you may only want it to be used for your site. Determining this will help you to better understand what it should look like.

Finally, what’s the final look? Here’s where you want to find a company that can do it. Since we’re in Atlanta, you could hire us to do it. You sit down with us, we draw out a plan and we execute it. You can do it yourself, but sometimes, it’s better to hire a professional Atlanta graphic design group to do it in this case.

Your logo is one of the most important aspects of your company. It’s brand recognition. You need to be recognized. If you’re not, you’re as common as the next average company. We don’t want common. We want exceptional.

Logo Creation: step 2

adobe-photoshop

Congratulations! You have just accomplished the hard tasks of getting a logo created. Now that you have done that, you can do the final step which is to sit down with your local graphic design group, in this case, Atlanta graphic design. The process of sitting down with the group does not have to be a daunting one and, in actuality, it really isn’t all that hard so long as you follow a certain number of rules.

• Present your sketches and be as open as you can about what you want. You’re not an artist, but they are, so they are going to want to run with it a little bit. See what they have to say, but don’t be afraid to say, “No, not interested.” They may be artists, but you’re paying for it. In the end, it’s what YOU want.
• That leads to the next point of determining the number of revisions you get. Some firms provide only one revision while others provide an unlimited amount. The truth about revisions, though, is that if you and the designer really plan everything out in detail, there is no need to have revisions.
• Plan everything out. Talk about the colors and if you want the dot on top of the “i” to be large or small. Determine everything so that when the designer gets to work, he or she has their notes in front of them to get to work on the logo as soon as possible. This is tremendously important. Notes are KEY.
• Understand that a lot of firms have an upfront fee. That means that they want you to pay a percentage of the cost and then the rest upon completion. This is to ensure that they don’t scammed, but it’s also a way for you to know that you’re going to get your money’s worth. Once you invest, they’ve got to provide a good product. It’s really that simple.

These are four rules of dealing with the graphic design firm and getting your logo created as effectively as possible. Getting through each step from your sketches to your supplemental designs for advertising to the final product doesn’t have to be hard. It simply requires a little bit of pizzazz and some delegation to create that perfect product.

Most importantly, though, is to get that product. You want to have the product and want to ensure that it is exactly what your site needs. Congratulations! You’ve got your logo and have started down the path of creating that brand that people cannot, even if they wanted to, forget.

The final part of your logo creation

As we’ve been discussing over the past few days, there are some procedures to creating a logo before even considering coming to a graphic design group. The previous post was to decide whether you wanted to use your company name as your logo or something unique. Now that you’ve determined what you want to use for your logo, the next step is to determine whether you are going to use that logo for only your website or if it will be used for your advertising as well.

Using the logo for only your site can really help you to have something tremendously unique that looks good for the site only. However, often times, if you make your logo exclusive to your site, building that brand for the site is limited. The only way that people know what the logo stands for is to come to your site rather than getting the logo out there as much as possible.

This is often an issue for people, but not one that needs to become a problem. There are ways around it. For instance, if you were to Google Intel logos, you’d see that there are different types. There is the basic Intel one that has the circle around it, but then there are ones that say Intel Inside and things like that. It allows you to use your logo, but also use it elsewhere. Another example would be to look at the different variations of the Apple logo. There are some that are silver, the old ones used to be a rainbow. The logo stayed the same, but when advertising, they’d change it up.

What does all this mean for you?

It means that when creating your logo for branding abilities, you want to get one that can be manipulated for your needs. While you may want your logo to be blue and red on your site; you may create a product down the line and decide that you want it to be the exact same logo, but in brown and green. By creating a more diverse logo – one for both advertising and your site – you can better market and brand your site.

Congratulations…You’ve now accomplished two out of three steps to creating a successful logo. The first one was to sketch out your plan to guarantee that it works perfectly for you. The next was to decide whether or not you wanted to use it for advertising or not. This would give you the chance to sketch other forms out. The final step is how to deal with the graphic design company that is going to make your graphics.

Creating a logo is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

New site design is almost done is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Anyway, the point of this post was to make it known that we are going to start targeting this niche. Right now I’m just focusing on Naples but soon as this area is going well I’ll move to Fort Myers and Cape Coral and get things going there. Don’t hesitate to contact us for any of your web or graphic design needs.

Naples Graphic Design is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

So far I’ve added SEO, web design, and graphic design, I’m not sure if I want to add too many because it may start to look cluttered. The graphic design is an idea I recently had, I asked the boss if he was targeting Naples graphic design as a search term and he said no. I pointed out that it may be a good idea, we have an in-house graphic design artist which until now we have mainly used for our web projects only. Figure if she’s good enough for our sites and clients design work, she will do fine for other companies logos and designs. So there it is, from now on we are going to target Naples graphic design work, Fort Myers too, but I’m going to start with the Naples area and move to Fort Myers sometime in February.

I added some pages to the site is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design