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Tips for Designing a Website

Web Design Yonkers

1. Select a color scheme keep it consistent throughout the site.

If your company has a logo or company colors on its stationery that’s a good place to start. If your starting from scratch, choose two or three complementary colors and stick with them.

Some of the more popular color schemes include:

- Red, yellow and white
- Blue and white
- Red, grey and white
- Blue, orange and white
- Yellow, grey and white.

If you’re not sure what color scheme to choose, surf the internet and find a website that you like. You can then gain inspiration from that site and model your color scheme to be similar to it..

2. Use templates.

Can’t find a website you really like? Another option is to choose a template. There are many templates or pre-set designs. These come as part of your web design software (such as Dreamweaver or Expressions Web).

3. Provide an easy to use navigation system.

This is one of the most important issues to consider when designing a website. You need to make sure that your visitors can find what they are looking for easily. Most websites either display their navigation bar on the left or at the top. And since most people are used to this type of navigation, it’s best to stick with it.

It also helps to include your navigation bar at the bottom of each page to save your visitors from having to scroll back to the top.

4. Don’t go overboard on special effects

While it is ok to have one or two special effects to spice up your website, spinning graphics and logos often distract your visitor from the content, not to mention they can take too long to download. Your visitors may click away even before your spinning logo finishes loading. It can also be a turn off if the site is gaudy looking.

Ensure your visitors can read the text on the background, ie. no black writing on dark blue background or yellow on white. Also be careful that your links are visible before and after being visited. The default for links in most programs is blue (before being visited) and burgundy (after being visited), so if you have a dark background, ensure your links are light.

6. External Links

It is a good idea to open links to other websites in a new window. That way your visitors can easily return to your site when they are finished browsing the external link

7. Site Map & Search Feature

If you website is more than 15 pages, it is useful to have a site map or a “Search” feature to ensure your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.

8. Content is King

While it is important that your website looks clean and professional, it is far more important that you concentrate your efforts on the content and promotion.

If you want a professional website, things to stay away from include:

1. Flash intros, revolving globes, beveled line separators, animated mail boxes
2. Loads of pop up or pop under boxes
3. Auto-play music. Allow your customer to play music only if they choose.
4. Hit counters of the free variety, which say “you are 27th visitor”
5. Date and time stamps, unless your website is updated daily or weekly
6. Busy backgrounds.

• web design Yonkers
• Web design New York
• Web design Westchester County

1. Update / patch ALL your software as soon as updates and patches are released!
2. Check / adjust ALL your settings to maximize security, Default setting on software and your computer are often not set to maximize your privacy and security.
3. Use a firewall, like Zone-Alarm to control what goes in and out from your computer!
4. Use good passwords: at least 13 characters long, containing letters ( Uppercase and Lowercase), numbers, and symbols. Remember to change your password every few months at least and don't ever use the same password for two different things!
5. Get a good anti-virus program and keep it updated!
6. Don't open or execute files that you are not 100% sure are absolutely safe no matter where or how you get them.
7. Wipe your history files (like cookies, internet history and temporary files, etc.), logs and personal files, with a respected wiping program (like Eraser) instead of just deleting them.
8. Use encryption to enhance your privacy! Use encrypted email, and encrypt sensitive files on your computer (PGP).
9. When you are finished using some internet based service like email, sign out of it rather than just closing your browser! Also, when you leave your computer, make sure that none of such programs or connections are left open that someone could abuse.
   
10. Don't use public computers for anything that requires you to sign into, they can be easily set-up to capture your passwords.
    
11. Make backups and store them in safe place! Easiest way to do a total-backup is to make an "Image" of your hard drive or partition and store it on safe location.
12. Install and Use a Hardware Firewall for additional protection.

Search Engine Optimization Yonkers

To create an effective and eye catching site you need a website designer. However, when SEO is concerned, hiring just any web designer can a very bad decision. While there are many Web designers, who are SEO-proficient, there are still many that neglect to consider SEO Advantages and disadvantages when designing a site. For them SEO is none of their business and they couldn't care less how a site ranks with search engines. Needless to say, if you hire a non-SEO oriented designer, don't expect your site to rank well with search engines.

If you will do your own SEO, then you might not care a lot about the SEO skills of your Web designer but still they should follow some basic SEO concepts, which if neglected can affect your rankings very badly. When he or she designs the site and disregards SEO rules, it won't matter what SEO tricks you use, your site just won't rank.

One of the ultimate tests of whether or not  a designer is SEO-friendly look at his or her past sites. Are they done professionally, especially where SEO is concerned. If their past sites don't exhibit blatant SEO mistakes, such as the ones we'll list below and they rank well, this may be a person worth hiring. Anyway, after you look at past sites, ask the designer if he or she did the SEO for their past sites because in some cases it might be that the client himself or herself has done a lot to optimize the site and this is why the site ranks well.

Here is a checklist of common web design sins that will make your site a SEO disaster. If you notice any or all of the following in the past sites your would-be designer has created, just move to the next designer. These SEO-unfriendly design elements are absolute sins and unless the client made them do it, no designer who would use the below techniques deserves your attention:

7 Deadly Sins of SEO

1 Rely heavily on Flash

Many designers still believe that Flash is the best way to make a site. While Flash can be very artistic and make a site look cool, heavily Flash-ed sites are disaster in terms of SEO. Simple HTML sites rank better with search engines. Flash also increases load times drastically.

2 No internal links, or very few links

Internal links are back-links and they are very important. Of course, this doesn't mean that all the text on a page must be hyper-linked to all the other pages on the site but if there are only a couple of internal links a page, this is a missed chance to get back-links.

3 Images, not text for anchors

This is another frequent mistake many designers make. Anchor text is vital in SEO and when your links lack anchor text, this is bad. It is true that for menu items and other page elements, it is much easier to use an image than text because with text you can never be sure it will display correctly on users' screens, but since this is impacting your site's rankings in a negative way, you should sacrifice beauty for functionality.

4 Messy code and tons of code

If you have no idea about HTML, then it might be impossible for you to judge if a site's code is messy and if the amount of code is excessive but cleanness of code is an important criteria for SEO. When the code is messy, it might not be crawlable at all and this can literally exclude your site from search engines because they won't be able to index it.

5 Excessive use of (SEO non-friendly) JavaScript

Similarly to Flash, search engines don't love JavaScript, especially tons of it. It is quite possible that because of the use of JavaScript your pages (or parts of them) are not crawlable, which automatically means that they won't be indexed.

6 Over-optimized sites

Over-optimized sites aren't better than under-optimized. In fact, they could be much worse because when you keyword stuff and use other techniques (even when they are not Black Hat SEO) to artificially inflate the rankings of the site, this could get you banned from search engines and this is the worst that can happen to a site.

7 Dynamic and other SEO non-friendly URLs

Well, maybe dynamic URLs is not exactly a design issue but if you are getting a turn-key site - i.e. it is not up to you to upload and configure it and to create the links inside - then dynamic URLs are bad and you have to ask the designer/developer not to use them. You can rewrite dynamic and other SEO non-friendly URLs on your own but actually this means to make dramatic changes to the site and this is hardly the point of hiring a designer.

These points are very important and this is why you need to follow them, when you are choosing a SEO-friendly designer. Some of the items on the list are so bad for SEO (i.e. Flash, JavaScript) that even if the site is a design masterpiece and you promote it heavily, you will still be unable to get decent rankings. SEO-friendliness of design is a necessity, not a whim and you shouldn't settle for a SEO-unfriendly designs – this can be really expensive!

For the best Search Engine Optimization in Yonkers and the Best Website Design in Westchester, visit MastroTek.com today.