WEBSITE DESIGN ESSENTIALS

Fonts are a very important element in web design as it must be easily readable and be recognised as sometimes it can be associated with a certain company. The right font can also help balance the visual structure of the website and works alongside the colour scheme to complement each other. The size of the font is also important, too big and the customer may lose interest. Too small and the customer may not be able to read it! There is a lot that goes into choosing the right font design, so make sure to choose carefully.

Images and graphics are a crucial element which attracts customers and ultimately can determine the success of your website. The images must not be outdated and must represent your business. Generic business images are used often so try to stay away from these! It must show what you stand for and create an overall picture in the visitor’s mind of what your company is about. The more time and effort applied to the design, the better results you will see. Bespoke website designers will be able to create a website around the images used and make them stand out. Graphics are also a fun and visually creative way to provide facts, charts and graphs to your customers.

Websites are made to connect the businesses with the customers who are interested in your service or products. Once this connection is made, the business should create some sort of relationship to allow the customer to stay in contact. An example of the types of connections that visitors can make are email subscriptions, free downloadable eBooks and free consultations.

This allows businesses to gather contact information which they can begin to build a relationship and eventually convert them into customers. Local website designers in London such as Telsa Media can provide this one-click connection to your website to gain that business to customer connection.

Coding is the behind the scenes development to help with the function of the website. With the right coding created by website experts, it will help customers to navigate across the site without any problems, load promptly and provide an easy connection between business and customers. Meta tags, title tags, heading tags and other HTML codes also appear in the coding of the website to help the business climb the rank of the Google’s search engine. Coding can go out of date as search engines such as Google update their algorithms often. Therefore, businesses need to make sure they keep their coding is up to date to gain constant customers and to stay relevant. Once the bespoke website designers create the website, it needs to be easily accessible on different devices. Website experts need to make sure that desktop web designs are just as good as those on a mobile device.

A static website contains web pages which have fixed content. Each page is coded in HTML and displays the same information to its customers. It is the most basic type of website and are easiest to create as they do not require any web programming. They can be built by creating HTML pages and publishing them to a Web Server.

(i) Advantages

• Every page can be different allowing the business to have flexibility with the website.
• The cost is generally lower up-front.

(ii) Disadvantages

• If you wanted the content changed you would need to go back to the designer which can be a bother for both customers and businesses.
• If your business entails selling many products, using static websites it would take a lot of time, money and effort as you would have to construct individual pages for each product.
• There will be ongoing costs when updating the content

A dynamic website contains web pages generated in real-time. They include code such as PHP or ASP, when the page is accessed, the code is analysed on the web server and the resulting HTML is sent to the customer’s web browser. Many of the larger websites are dynamic as they are easier to maintain than static websites.

(i) Advantages

• Information can easily be pulled into an organised and structured way to create product pages or categories of related products depending how the customer would like to view them.
• A Content Management system can be created to allow customers to input and manage data via administration pages. An example of this would be organising a product range into categories, specifications, and images, etc. They can be as simple or as complex as the customer requires.
• There are little/no ongoing costs unless there is a change in the basic design or an extra capability added.

(ii) Disadvantages

• The pages are fixed because they follow a template which data and the content are transferred to create multiple pages of a similar type. Individual layout changes to certain pages are not usually possible.
• If your business entails selling many products, using static websites it would take a lot of time, money and effort as you would have to construct individual pages for each product.
• The costs are higher up front and additional improvements may also cost more.