Website Design Guidelines - Making your website "User Friendly

Some of these guidelines are quite easy to understand and some you will understand only once you know a little about HTML. So save this page in your favorites and come back to it often while making your website often. Also make sure you read these guidelines before and after selecting your template for your website.





Design guidelines - Making your site user friendly (Very Important!)
Your main page is the “first impression you give” and should specifically let your visitors know exactly what you're offering. If your potential customer or visitor can't find your product or service or information, they definitely will not waste a lot of time looking for it. They'll go to the next site and probably never return. They're visiting your site for a specific purpose. They want something your site offers. Provide them with what they are are looking for!

Branding will play a major role in your success. Make sure you place your company or website logo and slogan in the top left corner of each page. This will help your visitors to remember your site. It will also give your pages the same look and feel.

It's much better to keep your main page containing the most essential elements only and link to the detailed informational pages.

A good rule of thumb is "less is more." In other words, keep your main page as small as possible and include your most important elements only. A main page that contains too much information will NOT get you good results.

Navigation
When you begin designing your pages, keep in mind, your visitors may enter your site from pages other than your main page. Make sure you include good navigational links on every page.

Place your navigational links together at the top, bottom, left or right side of the page. Use tables to neatly align your links and maintain a nicely organized and uniform appearance throughout.

When someone requires to go from one page of your website to the other he should have to click a maximum of two links.

It should NOT BE under any circumstances confusing for your visitor to find out how to use your website. No body sits around on slow confusing websites. People leave!




Fonts
One of the most important parts of a web page is text. The way in which you display the text on your web page will have a great impact on your success. It can make your page look very professional or very unprofessional.

When placing text within your web page, always be consistent with your fonts. In other words, don't use different fonts throughout your pages. The standard fonts used on the Internet are Aerial and Verdana. The standard text size is 2. Aerial and Verdana are the standard simply because they are the easiest to read on a computer screen.

Headlines, which require a larger font size, are a bit different. A popular headline font used is Georgia, as it displays nicely in the slightly larger font size.




Background and Text Colors
Use caution when selecting your background and text colors. Some backgrounds make text difficult to read and draw the attention away from the text. In addition, always be consistent with your background theme on each page of your site.

Select your colors very carefully, as colors affect your mood and will have an affect on your visitors as well.

Bright colors, such as yellow and orange, cause you to become more cheerful or happy. Colors such as blue and purple have a calming effect. Dark colors, such as brown and black, have a depressing effect.

A good rule of thumb is to use colors based on the type of effect you're trying to achieve. However, it's always best for your text areas to have a white background with black text. Read more...

After you have learnt HTML - Wesite making tools!

Once you have learnt HTML, the tools that we are going to show you in this section will make much more sense. These tools will help you to make your website at a much faster speed and much more easily.



A WYSIWYG Editor!
I know the wired name might have scared you. But do not worry. It’s a very simple name.


WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get!"


You probably find this a little weird, but that is exactly what it stands for. Computer geeks are a little cool. They give fun names to everything.



So what is a What You See Is What You Get Editor?

A WYSIWYG editor makes it very simple for you to make web pages. It makes it very easy to design websites without bothering too much about HTML. It’s like word or some other simple program. To make the web page you just have to select the pictures you want to put, put the text you want to put in, decide how it looks and all that. You don’t have to bother about writing the HTML for the website. You just decide the colors, fonts, sizes and all the looks, the program writes the HTML code for you. Cool isn’t it!

Even though it is possible to make a website only using a WYSIWYG editor, you must still learn HTML. Many a times you want to “fine tune” your website or do certain things that the program cannot handle, then you need to use hard-core HTML.

So now probably the name WYSIWYG makes a little more sense. What you see on the screen as you make the website is what you will get in the final web page.

Here is a very good free of charge WYSIWYG editor. This is the editor that is used to make this website. It’s called NVU. Check out their website for more info.. http://www.nvu.com/

Once you download it, and after learning HTML, this editor is very easy to use.




Website Templates
There are many websites on the Internet that will provide you with free website templates. These are basically completely designed blank templates that can be filled with your information and your content and your website. The cool thing about these templates is that they are very easy to use if you have a WYSIWYG Editor and know the basics of HTML.

Another great thing about these templates is that they look great and are professionally designed. So you do not have to design you website from scratch. This saves you a whole lot of time and money. There are thousands of templates available on the Internet of all shapes sizes colors etc. You can easily find one that looks cool and matches your business and theme.

In case you are still not clear about what templates are, check out these sites:


http://www.templatesbox.com/
http://freesitetemplates.com/
http://www.steves-templates.com/

After learning HTML, using WYSIWYG Editors and Free Website Templates, you should be able to make your website on your computer.


Get your-self a complete web-design "TOOL BOX"
You could also get your self a web-design "TOOL BOX"! The tool box will contain thousands and thousands of templates, WYSIWYG editors, HTML, flash, java codes and everything else you will probably need for making a website! The best thing is that this tool box is available quite cheap!

You can get yourself your own "tool box" from ebay.in: "4 CD Tool Box" OR "9 CD Tool Box"

The 4 CD Tool Box is good enough for you if you are just a beginner. The 9 CD Tool Box is just bigger than the 4 CD one. It contains more templates, more HTML scripts etc. Both are quite reasonably priced.

If you are new to ebay, do not worry, you can just sign up from here free and buy whatever you are interested in right now! It's quite easy!

Once you are signed up, search for "Logo Templates HTML Scrpts". You could then choose one of the results and buy the kit!

We recommend that you buy the tool box from Ebay.in since it is quite safe & secure. If you are not comfortable with Credit Card payments, there are always other options like DD, money order etc. that you can go in for. Besides that, it will be hard for you to find this kind of complete kit anywhere else.


After you have the tools, do not just make a website. When designing a website there are some things that you must do so that your website is easy for the users to use, for the search engines to find and still looks cool and professional.

In the next section we have provided certain guidelines that you must follow when you are making your website. Follow them… Read more...

Making a website - First Step Learn HTML!

To make your website on your own computer, you need to know HTML. All the web pages on the Internet, are fundamentally made up of HTML. To understand what I mean, go to any page of any website and go to “View > Source” in Internet Explorer or “View > Page Source” in Mozilla Firefox. (You can find “View” along with “File” “Edit” and all those other options on the top of your browser window.) A new window will open and what you will see is a confusing combination of words and brackets and a whole lot of other stuff! This is the HTML of the page.

Now, HTML is basically a language. If you know programming languages like C, C++, VB etc. then HTML will be very very easy for you. HTML, is one of the easiest programming languages. In fact HTML is not even a programming language.

HTML is a very simple “markup” language. This means that HTML decides how the different parts of the web page will “look”. HTML is all about how everything “looks”. For example, if I want this text to look bold. Then I can control how this text looks with HTML.

If you want a particular image on a web page in a particular place and of a particular size, you can decide exactly how it will look on the web page. Controlling the look of the web page is what HTML is all about.

Nowadays, the Internet is changing. Websites are not made only of HTML anymore. Websites are made using HTML, XHTML, Dynamic HTML, CSS, Flash, ASP and a whole lot of other things. To make a decent website you must know at least HTML and CSS.

Note: There are many ways of making a website without knowing anything about HTML or CSS. We will tell you some of them here. However, we are saying that you should know HTML because if you don’t, you will waste a lot of time and money doing something that is very simple. There are simpler ways of doing things if you know HTML.

If this does not make sense now, then just take our word for it. As you learn HTML, you will understand what we mean.

So since you are going to be learning HTML, let me give you the basics of HTML.




Basics of HTML
HTML is a very simple language. It’s all about “tags”.

What are tags?


Tags are the main part of HTML. Suppose you want to make some text look bold. You put the text between & tags. The "" & "" are the tags. is the starting tag. is the ending tag. The ending tag is exactly like the staring tag. The only difference is the “/”.

Anything that comes between these two will appear in bold on the web page. So suppose I want to write “You must learn HTML!” on the web page in bold. I would write:

You must learn HTML!


This probably gives you a basic understanding of tags. Just like there are tags to make text look bold, there are also many many other tags. There are tags to make text look italic, of a particular color, make text blink, make text scroll across the screen, make images show up and a whole lot of other things.

Just to give you an example, to make text bilk, you use the tags. It’s that simple!

These are the basics of HTML. There is a lot more to learn, and I am sure you have many questions in your mind. Don’t worry, we will help you with all of them. Here are some excellent resources where you can learn all about HTML:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/
http://www.utexas.edu/learn/html/

Just for fun you can try to see the “View > Source” and see if you can understand anything now.

In any case, you can come back to this page and learn HTML through the links we have given above a little later. For now, let us assume that you know HTML and move forward towards making your website.. Read more...

The Basics of WEB DEVELOPMENT

First of all, let us clear up the basics.


What is a website? & What is a web-page?


Since a large number of people are confused between these two, it would be a good idea to explain them first. A website is a whole group of web pages. Just like a whole group of "pages" make up a book, a whole group of web-pages make up a website. A web-page is an individual “page” or unit of a website.

For example: You are currently reading a “web page”. This web page combined with all the other web pages linked to this page make up this website…indiahowto.com




Creating a website free of charge!
It is possible to create a website “free of charge” on the Internet. This is done though “free hosting”. The problem is, that your website will not look very professional. This is because the companies that let you create a free website, will make you put their adds on your website.

Another problem that you will have is that, your website address will not be a “.com” like www.indiahowto.com. On the other hand, it will be some long name like "www.freehosting.coolsite.com"

Because of these reasons, it would be good to NOT create a free website if you are doing something serious, like making a website for your business etc.

On the other hand, if you are creating a website just for fun or just as a learning experience etc. if would be best to go in for a free hosting website.



Creating a Professional Website:
If you are interested in creating a professional looking website, you will have to go in for “paid hosting”. Paid hosting has many advantages over free hosting. Firstly, since you “buy” space on the Internet, it’s your space and so nobody will make you put any annoying adds on your site.

Also, you will have your own “.com” like www.mysite.com!

These are required if you intend to use your website for any serious purposes. In any case, paid hosting is not very costly. It is around Rs.450/- for buying the “.com” name and around Rs.800-Rs.1500 for a 50MB space for one year.

The process of creating a “free website” and the process of creating a “paid website” are a little different. In this article we will explain to you how to do both.




What is hosting?
We have used the word “hosting” many times in the last few paragraphs. You may be wondering, “What is hosting?”

Hosting is basically putting your website up on the Internet. Hosting is pretty much like buying some land or buying a shop, so that you can start a business. However, on the Internet, hosting is buying space. Space in terms of MB.

Free hosting companies give you some space free. They give you this space free of charge in return for putting their adds on your website. Paid hosting companies charge you for the space that they give you.



The general process of creating a website:
Make your website on your own computer
Use hosting to put your website up on the Internet
Promote your website

Basically making a website is all about these 3 things.

In this article we will show you how to do all these things so read on! Read more...

How to create a website? & Why?

The need for having a website...
If you are running a business, you MUST have a website. Why? You see, the world is growing, the Internet is growing, India is growing! There are more and more computers all over the place now. There are more and more Internet connections all over the place now. So, thinking about “Who is going to come visit my website?” is hardly a question anymore.

As you probably already know, the harder you make it for someone to do something, the lesser the possibility of them actually doing it! If something is hard for people to do, they will not do it. If something is easy for people to do, a large number of people will do it. The Internet is very important because of this! You see, it is very easy to find out information from the Internet. You just have to go to a search engine and type in what you are looking for. You will find hundreds of answers.

If someone was looking for a “fiber optic cable manufacturer” in Pune for example, a few years ago, he would probably first start looking in the “Yellow pages”. A few years ago, there were no other options that people had.

Now, since information can be found so easily on the Internet, people don’t waste time with yellow pages. They will just go to Google and type in “fiber optic cable manufacturer pune” and find all the info they are looking for.

What if your competitors have websites and you don’t? All the customers who look up information on the Internet will immediately go to them! You may have better products and services, but since no body can find you, you are loosing customers. You have to make it easy for people to find you.

Assuming that your competitors don’t have websites, then YOU SHOULD be the first one to put up a website. Do it now! The customers who search for the products or services you are selling will know you before they know your competitors. If they visit your professional looking website before they visit you, they will already know that you are a company worth dealing with.

If you are running a business, a good professional looking website is a very important marketing tool. If your website shows up for every search for a product or service you are selling, it gives a very good impression to your customers who are online. So if you are running a business, there is no doubt that you MUST have a website!

If you belong to any “government organization” or service that the government of India provides, I especially urge you to have a website. There are many young Indians who use the Internet all the time as a source of information. They would love to see information that is provided by their Government supporting them. There is a lot the Indian govt. has to offer. However, few people know about these things. They are not marketed very well. So, if you belong to a Government organization or service, MAKE A WEBSITE! If you are not interested in making a website yourself, contact us we will make it for you.

If you belong to some organization that works towards a better India or for the people of the country, contact us, we will try to help you with everything we can.

Since you have read all this till here, you probably have a good reason for wanting to make a website, so let me not try to convince you any further. Let us get to it! Read more...