Before you start design on a website step back a minute – or two. Think about what a website is REALLY supposed to do for the client as well as the visitor. In its simplest form, a website is there to facilitate a transaction of information between it and the visitor. With this in mind, here are some tips for designing useful web sites:

Are you one of many website designers who use a popular WYSWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program? I was one of them. I blissfully made websites using the ever-popular design view and grew a very nice clientele. Due to years of experience my websites were cross-browser compatible, affordable and attractive. Life was good!!!

I was speaking to a site designer starting out the other day, and she asked me the question every newbie wonders; what’s really so wrong with using tables for design?

Anyone with a basic understanding of accessibility and a degradable web browsing experience just shuddered. But I’m pretty sure there’s a few people sat there wondering what actually is so wrong, and this article is for you.

Structure and Visualization

• Do not use the <font> element
• Move arrangement attributes (align, valign, width, height) to CSS.
• Do not use tables except showing table data. Using tables for visual formatting is acceptable in complex situations only. Max table nesting can not be great than 3.
• Move attribute "background" to CSS.
• Design of input fields and buttons must be written as class in CSS.
• Styles must be written as external file and linked using<link>.

Search engine spiders are by far one of the most useful things to come around in the last 10 years of the internet. They are useful not only to the web sites (Google and many others) that use them, but also to people who are searching for a particular site and those who run web sites. Spiders allow your site to be seen by the millions of people who use search engines every day. In this newsletter, we will discuss what search engine spiders do, how they work, and how to set up a robots.txt file and upload that to your site to keep spiders from visiting your site.

After years of working with entrepreneurs who developed their first web site using an image-based editor, the new world of internet marketing has placed a stronger emphasis on web development that conforms to technical concerns such as search engine optimization and multi-browser compatibility.

The advance of technology has made creating websites easier. More and more website building software were developed by online companies and web hosting service providers to let people create their own websites without web design knowledge and experience. Below are three of the free website building software that are developed to help people build websites easily:



Google Page Creator (GPC)

In the war of design versus functionality, which side is best?

Since the beginning or the internet era, designers have always had to choose functionality or design. But with new graphic technologies and more advanced coding coming to light, some designers are realizing that it isn't a debate at all. Design, as a matter of fact, should complement functionality, not contrast it.

Do colors influence web site visitors?

Several years ago, having a web page (as a business or as an individual), was an indicator of prosperity, and required a certain amount of financial power. Nowadays, almost everybody has one. They are easy to create (thanks to instant web page generators), even if they are not always works of art.

1. CSS font shorthand rule

When styling fonts with CSS you may be doing this:

font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
font-variant: small-caps;
font-size: 1em;
line-height: 1.5em;
font-family: verdana,sans-serif

There's no need though as you can use this CSS shorthand property:

font: bold italic small-caps 1em/1.5em verdana,sans-serif

Tables used to be the “in” thing when it came to designing web sites. As with many other things though, new techniques and methods standards are bound to emerge with time. When once tables were seen in most web pages, some experts now suggest that tables should be thrown out of the window.

Web page creation is no child’s play. A huge amount of time is spent in planning the look and feel of a website, before the actually development begins. From a user’s perspective, apart from the website itself, the only tangible evidence that vouches for this planning is the visible operational elements. In other words, front-end elements that are related to the functionality of the website. A sitemap is one such element.

Template based web page development:
A lot of people get tempted by good looking web templates. Some template vendors even offer do-it-yourself kits to their customers. Web templates are designed by experts, using the latest designing software. They look stunning, compared to web pages developed by other means. While readymade templates offer several advantages, they have some disadvantages too.

Advantages of using templates:
1. You know how your finished site looks. You can choose the template that appeals to you. You need not rely on a web developer to get a good looking website.