Tips and Tricks for designing your web pages
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| WEB DESIGN |
| GRAPHICS |
| FLASH ANIMATIONS |
| FREE GRAPHICS |
What you can do to improve your website’s rankings in the search engines?
Design your website for your product or business. Make sure however that the words that you consider your main keywords appear on the main page. In the title, in your image names, image alt tags, in your website description, meta tags and in your main text. It should not be so obvious that it becomes overkill. Just enough times so that your page becomes searchable. When you list your page in the search engines remember to use your keywords there as well.
Now remember this process for each page. Adapt it as you go along. This way each page will show up in the search engines according to it’s own criteria.______________________________
Preparing images for web pages.
Too many people still put their full size images on their web pages, just resizing the image with the resize handles does not make the image smaller, it just makes it look smaller. By loading full size images you make the web page take forever to open and you are using more bandwidth than your viewer bargained for.
Resize your images in your graphics program. If you want your image to be 250 pixels wide then resize it and make sure that your graphics program saves it to a lower quality so that the file size is also smaller.
If you don’t have Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro then you can always download a program like Irfan View. It has some lovely features and can resize your images quite well. Just always remember to save your image with another name, or you will save over your original large photo.
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It is better to name our images to suit your website. For example if your website is about apples, name your photo correctly e.g. apple_golden_delicious.jpg, rather than app_01.jpg. Use your alt tags as well, you can put a bit more than just a name in the tag. Alt tags are a great way to add appropriate text, when the viewer puts his curser over the image, the alt tag shows up. The alt tag will show up if the viewer has his images turned off.
Name that Page! There is nothing worse than seeing those pages that have not been named. They show up as Untitled.html. Give your page a title that means something, you want people to find your website. Page titles are extremely important in search engine ranking.
When you save the page, choose the file name carefully and keep it short. There should not be any spaces and it should all be in lower case. The only page that you can’t choose the file name for is the home page or main page. The home page should always be named index.html or index.php.
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So you got a great font and you decide that you want to use this font on your website. Your site looks great but…..it does not show up that way on your friend’s computer. The trick is to keep it simple, use only fonts that are on all computers, stick to arial, times new roman, verdana and helvitica. If you want to use a fancy font in a title then do it in your graphics program and save it as an image file. Try and save it as a high quality gif, that will keep the colours clear and crisp.
Tip: Use one font throughout your site, keep the font size uniform and the font colour uniform. Don’t use too many different colours for your fonts.
Another article that you might find useful.