Articles | NipunInfoTech Blog | Website Designing Company

These days, most site design is focused on the improvement and upgrade of existing Websites. As the economy continues to sag, more emphasis has been placed on maintaining what already exists, rather than creating a new one. As a result, productivity, ROI, and other measures of efficiency have found their way into the lexicon of Web design.

This focus on productivity has seen Website designs go back to basics. With the end user in mind, the prime focus of today’s sites is to provide information or make transactions quickly, simply, and without the distraction of long animated introductions, bombardment of visuals, or multi-hyperlink black holes.

So let’s take a look at the basics of good Web design, as well as some of the current tools and technologies available to assist you in creating powerful, usable Websites. We’ll also look at some concepts that are out there on the bleeding edge of design theory and browser technology, just to keep you excited all the time!

A work well begun is half done!

In the heady days of the blast, Web designers went straight to page design, building the overall concept and user experience one Web page at a time. Only after all the pages were built were they connected together—the results were usually a chaos.

In today’s world, most Web designers begin by developing a concept before they create their actual Web pages. Several techniques have evolved to assist designers develop a concept, such as wire framing and site architecting. In any of these cases, a designer defines a starting point, then builds out the various parent/child relationships between pages, documents, external links, and so on. In addition, a separate “link framework” can be defined to point to documents or external destinations. And of course, today, programmatic elements such as dynamic markup language, database connectivity, and Web service support are defined before anyone begins to build any pages.

Like a symphony performance, where the music binds each instrument together in harmony, so a Website’s concept definition binds each participant (graphic designer, copywriter, programmer) together in design harmony. And just as the conductor keeps time and manages the performance, the Web project manager uses this concept definition to coordinate resources, and ensure that the Web project moves through its milestones as scheduled.

Current Web authoring software programs, such as Adobe Go Live, provide Web designers with information architecture, user experience definition, and other design tools. With this kind of toolkit, you can architect a better user experience up front. Whether you create this roadmap for yourself or for a team of graphic artists, designers, and copy editors, a well thought-out site design will ensure your symphony doesn’t hit any sour notes. The result is that harmony is maintained.

Presentation is the key:

It seems ironic that a communication medium with the potential to provide rich information to billions of people revolves around tables. Tables are optimized to display tabular data in rigid boxes defined by height and width—which is great if you’re reading a spreadsheet, but awful if you’re trying to have an interactive experience. Sure, we tried frames for a while, but we all know which way they went. So, just what are designers left with?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) seem to offer the most promise for unchaining design from the restrictions of tables. Simply put, CSS enables designers to separate the style of information from its structure.

Typographic elements (fonts, sizes, and so forth), colors, and other design elements are divided into a separate set of HTML that is leveraged for all the data on a page, which helps avoid fatter elements such as image maps. CSS is reusable across multiple pages, which adds to its versatility. CSS Level 2 (CSS2), an upgrade from the original CSS spec that’s been in use for several years now, provides additional control and functionality such as “@media,” which allows the designer to set specific styles for particular media.

CSS1 took some time to become widely adopted because there were (and in fact continue to be) browser incompatibility issues associated with the technology. While a lot of the problems have since been fixed, it is still advisable to complete thorough browser testing before deploying your CSS-based design. As for CSS2, well, it’s still new enough to suffer from a number of deployment problems, so tread lightly. See HTML Utopia – Designing without Tables Using CSS, Parts 1 and 2 for the ultimate introduction to this topic.

Another concept of note to the burgeoning Web designer is “liquid tables.” Tables that stretch and shrink give designers considerable creative flexibility, removing the rigid constraints of standard table design. Liquid table design basically works by setting percentages for width and height, instead of specific pixel measurements.

But be cautious—liquid design is a complex technique that requires a designer to account for the users’ screen size as a separate element in a design. Elements such as navigation bars and menus become more complex because a range of placement issues must be accounted for in the design. Regardless, well-implemented, liquid pages provide designers with a higher level of flexibility

Advantage XML:

XML is in one sense a markup language like HTML or PHP. However, because tag semantics and tag sets are undefined, rather than fixed, XML is really a “meta-language” for describing other languages that you—the Web designer—defines. To use XML, you write a Document Type Definition (DTD) that describes a series of tags and the elements to be used with those tags.

XML’s flexibility is not only its greatest asset, but also its greatest liability. In order for computer systems to talk to each other using XML, they need to share a standard (in the form of a DTD). This invites numerous coordination problems, especially if different enterprises create different standards for the same application. Security is also an issue, especially for government Web designers, again because of the necessity of shared DTDs in order for different systems to communicate together.

Problems aside, there has been a lot of work done around XML, especially by enterprises with critical content management requirements. Small- and middle-market publishers have been aggressively pursuing XML-based workflows that elegantly store data for both print and the Web, and allow for cross-platform sharing of that data. Plus, these homegrown systems contain business rules and other logic that assist with content routing, deadline management, and archiving.

For Web design, extensible Style sheet Language Transformation (XSLT) is of particular interest. It allows Web designers to define transformations on XML documents and XML-based data, creating presentation structures for end users. XSLT can also help transform XML into non-XML formats, such as HTML. It can work behind the scenes on the Web server or on the client side with more recent browser updates.

XSLT is still a very complicated language that requires some programming sophistication. It has not been well incorporated into visual design tools, either. And unfortunately, today’s browsers don’t fully support direct XML rendering, so most XML-based Websites still need to transform that XML back to HTML for optimum compatibility. However, as design applications and browsers grow more sophisticated; expect to see more support for both XML and XSLT.

Browsing Experience:

Every Web designer has his/her experience of trouble shooting while browsing. In spite of this, the number of browsers continues to grow — Safari and Opera are two of the most recent entries.

Fundamentally, though, the end user experience remains unchanged from years past. Content and data are presented in a window, and requests for other pages or data are made through this window. Browsers also continue to be thin-client in nature, requiring the Web servers on the other end to do most of the heavy code parsing before they present results to a user.

If you really want to glimpse the future, consider events taking place at the extreme fringe of browser concepts. Here you will find applications that break the window metaphor and use visualizations, spider-Web imagery, and other non-traditional elements to guide a user to information or a destination. Some of the more interesting concepts include the Ambulator, the DataCloud, and the Webstalker.

These ideas have a lot of potential, as the traditional PC/monitor interface ages rapidly and the proliferation of wireless devices and wireless connectivity force the design community to deal with a myriad of new presentation platforms.

The next step:

As you approach Website design, ask yourself the following questions:

Can my users get to their desired information in two clicks?
Are my visuals distracting or useful?
What technologies are appropriate and not overkill?
Do my users know where they are within the Website at all times?
Can users get back to the front/home page with one click?
Is my content accessible to disabled users?

This list is simple enough, but many Websites continue to violate these basic rules–and frustrate users in the process. Remember, your competitor’s Website is only one click away, so removing these lacunas will keep your visitors stick to your site.

Attractive Design Sells:

The boom years distracted many from good design techniques as we were lead astray by a rash of new technologies and competitive fervor.

In todays more competitive and focused design world, the provision of clean, crisp information and interaction design leads to greater productivity on the design side and a better user experience on the client side. Plus, design applications have improved over time, incorporating many sophisticated features that allow designers to optimize their creativity, while keeping the programmatic side in check. What’s more, these tools are no longer accused of writing “bloated” code—something that has in the past plagued these applications.

There are still many emerging technologies, a growing number of presentation platforms, and some lingering issues in today’s browsers, but it boils down to this — good design is good business.

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Anantait -
About the Author:

Head SEO, Marketing at AIT India

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Pittsburgh SEO Group – Submitting Articles To Build Back Links

November 7th, 2010

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eyeflow.com – One of the easiest ways for any company to build back links to their site is to write and submit educational articles online. In this discussion Phil Laboon speaks about his experience submitting articles to various article syndication sites and the impact it has on his clients websites. For more free educational SEO videos visit http

admin Link Building Articles, Back, Build, Group, Links, Pittsburgh, Submitting

4 Strong Reasons Why Articles Are The Best SEO Tool

November 4th, 2010

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You can use many tools and strategies to improve your ranking on search engines and drive traffic to your website.

Writing and submitting articles remains the best strategy among all the different search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. The purpose of this article is to outline the key reasons why articles are the best SEO tool.

1. Article writing allows the use of many keywords and phrases that apply to your niche.

Allowing the use of many keywords and phrases relating to your niche makes article writing the best SEO tool. Knowing your essential keywords can enable you to use them in your articles. Your distributed articles, which have your keywords will get picked up by search engines such that when people surfing the internet type in these keywords, your website will show up. The articles you write and distribute can make you rank high on search engines for all your keywords on the internet.

2. Article writing creates life long results on SEO.

The articles you write and distribute are all stored and archived on the directories in which they are published. So this means that all your articles can be read by anyone and can still drive traffic to your website. Articles bring long tern results unlike the other tools of driving traffic to your website.

3. Articles create many backlinks to your website.

Articles as the best SEO tool improves your website popularity rank thus driving a large traffic to your website. Ensure that you write high quality articles so that they may get published by many websites and e-zines thus resulting in increased back links to your website. Having many back links pointing back to your website is very important because it improves the position of website on search engines.

4. Articles are an affordable SEO tool.

Writing and submitting articles is not expensive. You can either write your own articles or hire a ghostwriter. You can manually submit your articles or use some software to automatically submit them to many directories. Generally, the use of articles to improve your ranking on search engines is not expensive so anyone can afford it.

Writing and submitting articles is evidently the best SEO tool or strategy for improving the ranking of your website on search engines. So if you want to succeed in SEO, it is very important that you write and submit many articles.

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Learn How To Undertake Search Engine Submission For Your Site Or Articles

November 3rd, 2010

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Search engines are one of the most indispensable tools of modern online users and produce loads of information and facts within seconds. They are incredibly useful because they will promptly offer hyperlinks to a significant number of different sites in accordance with innumerable combinations of keyword phrases. All internet business operators must know how to harness the power of search engines. One of the techniques you can use to market your website and reel in more traffic, sales and recognition is search engine submission. This article talks about how you can carry out this particular tactic as well as the rewards that you’ll have from it.

The most crucial aspect of owning and operating a website is visibility; without it, your internet business would suffer losses. The most terrible thing that could happen to any internet business is for end users not to know that it even exists. Search engine submission allows your site content and articles to be seen by many buyers all around the world, and this tactic won’t put a dent in your budget as the usage of search engines and adding your site to search engines’ results pages is totally free! The web is quickly turning into the best way to market services and products, and putting your website or write-ups in listings is a very advantageous form of promotion.

Before anything else, you should ensure that your site as well as content pieces comply with high standards. Check if your content has spelling or grammar mistakes and if it contains the message that you intend to convey to current and potential patrons. Remember that countless people use search engines each and every day, and you want to catch their attention and make them check out your website or read through your articles and persuade them to get your products and services. You cannot achieve those goals if your content is filled with blunders and people disregard your site and write-ups for something else.

Also, you cannot send your web address or articles to different search engines without undertaking a bit of research! You need to choose the search engines you wish to submit to and understand precisely how search engine submission will work to your advantage. There are a lot of search engines to choose from and while they all have the same job, they have several crucial differences between them. It’s recommended to take a look at the main pages of top search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo! along with other lesser known search engines and learn about their rules for submissions. You should also check their list of frequently asked questions or Help pages for more information.

When implementing search engine submission, search engines will usually ask you to provide a legitimate e-mail account so that you will be able to confirm your submissions afterward. You should get a confirmation e-mail after sending your web address. Encountering a brief delay in getting confirmation e-mails is normal so don’t get upset or anxious or resubmit your content if you do not receive the e-mail right after submission.

It’s an outstanding idea to check if your preferred search engines have added your website or articles to their listings after submitting your web address and getting the confirmation e-mail. Go back to the home page of the search engines and type in some keyword phrases that could be found in your content, then click on the Search button. Your website content and articles will now be displayed in the list of related hyperlinks.

Submitting your material will not cost you anything and the majority of search engines won’t require you to become a member. If you’d like your website or content pieces to be automatically included in the very first page of search engines’ listings or in the top 20 results, there are a few search engines that’ll ask you for a modest fee for this certain service. Then again, if you update your site routinely or come up with a lot of articles each and every week, pick the right keywords and phrases for them, do search engine optimization and continually publicize your website and content, you will be listed on the very first page of results pages after some time.

Search engine submission is a quick and easy site and article marketing strategy. Presence is the secret to financial success for internet business owners, and submitting your web address and articles to search engines will help you realise that objective and also reel in more earnings, page views and recognition!

The search engines thrive on content and backlinks.

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