Take a look around and you will probably see a logo. In fact, they are seen all over the world and on many different things. If you were to count how many times you see them everyday, the number would be in the hundreds. Simple advertisements for example, like Coca-Cola are being viewed over 200 times by a single person everyday. And you won’t even realize it.

Recently, I tried to count the number of times I saw a logo, and unfortunately, I lost count. I used a pencil and paper while watching TV, riding by a billboard, strolling through the supermarket, reading a magazine, or using a particular product. The results were amazing – a logo was on everything I saw.

What is a logo?

A logo is a name or trademark designed for easy and definite recognition, especially one borne on a single printing plate or piece of type. Whenever a logo is created, no matter what the size or content, it must be accomplished with patience.

Most people do not realize what goes into constructing a logo. Graphics must be carefully thought out, content must be concise, and the idea has to match the logo.

I’m sure you have heard of this before…

A FIRST IMPRESSION IS A LASTING ONE

Well, a logo does just that. it sends a Powerful message across to us all. Most of the time when we see any logo or banner, we instantly think advertisement. This is exactly what a logo represents, whether it’s on a letterhead, magazine, newspaper, or a Coca-Cola can!

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The single most important step before you begin designing your website is defining the structure and purpose of your site. Once you have your structure planned out, you can unleash your creative genius.

What kind of navigation buttons do you want? Would animations, photos or diagrams help get your message across? What sort of layout do you prefer? How will customers navigate through your site? While keeping in mind a few basic guidelines for attractive design, feel free to experiment and be creative with the look and feel of your site.

It may help to draw your ideas on paper first. Decide which colors you want to use. Do you already have an attractive logo on your advertising, letterhead or business cards? Use it. Try to visualize any graphics you want to liven up your content. You may be able to find suitable images in an off-the-shelf image art collection or on the web at one of the image art repositories.

Depending on the size of your company or business and your priorities, you may also want to consider paying a design professional to create the graphics for your site. Alternatively, you could invest some time and money buying and learning to use one of the many commercially available image editing programs.

Most websites utilize some variations of the same two or three layouts. The most common is a left navigation setup, in which you place logos and graphics along the top of the page, include links and navigation buttons along the left hand side, and place content below to the right.

This layout draws attention to your logo while keeping navigation in a set position. Another common layout places both graphics and navigation links along the top of the page. Focusing activity and attention at the top and creating more room for content below.

Before you get carried away with your newly found design freedom, however, remember that there are a few widely accepted design rules to keep in mind.

Make Your Site Easy on the Eyes

Use high contrast colors, dark text on a light background is easier to read. Patterned background designs, though an old popular one, are usually more distracting than appealing. You don’t want your customers to skip reading about your big sale just because they can’t stomach the dancing teddy bears behind the text.

Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

Place your links or buttons in a prominent place and keep them in the same place on every page. Your design should help users access the information you want then to see. To this end, keep your colors, layout and buttons consistent. Label every page so customers always know where they are. Every page should provide links back to the homepage.

Make Your Site Professional and Appropriate for Your Company or Business

Your design, no less than your content, should support, compliment and promote your business and it’s products or services. Keep the design clean and simple. Remember, when it comes to design, white space is beautiful and less is more, unless you have a very unique product or service that is well served by something more avant-garde.

Check Out the Other Guys

When it comes to design, you’ll find that a little time spent looking at what other companies are doing will pay off handsomely, you’ll discover for yourself what works and what doesn’t. There are, unfortunately billions of poorly designed web sites on the internet – look for them and learn from their mistakes.

Write Your Content

Only after you’ve defined your goals and fully planned out your site should you actually begin to create your content. Avoid the temptation to just sit down and start creating web pages. If you hold off until you’ve got a good plan in place, you’ll save yourself a huge amount of time and effort in the long run.

Use your site plan or diagram to identify every page that will be on your website.

You can number them, name them or find another way of listing them that works for you. You should already know generally what each page will contain (contact information, list of services, FAQ, products, photos, etc…. Now you need to decide exactly what you want on each page. Write all the text that should go on each page. Indicate where you want graphics or photos located. Create captions and sidebars. Organize each page around your navigation scheme, and plug in content where it fits.

Make it Short and Sweet

Studies have repeatedly shown that internet users have a short attention span for text on the web. few things on the internet are more intimidating and less inviting than a long page of text scrolling down into the distance. With few exceptions (articles, white papers or other publications), avoid long, uninterrupted word masses. Break up your content with visuals and decorations. Better yet, be concise. Customers aren’t looking for dissertations on your products and services, they just need enough information to make an intelligent decision.

Avoid Scrollbars

Sometimes you’ll need to make your visitors scroll down the page a bit in order to see all your content. But, if you have to scroll down more than an extra page height, it’s a good indication that you have enough to split between several pages. This will give your visitors manageable chunks of text and keep them interacting with your site.

Check, Double Check and Triple Check

Few things are more unprofessional than poorly written or misspelled text on your business website. And inaccurate information is even worse, nothing will destroy your credibility more quickly than misstating the facts. Read through everything you create, have someone else proofread, and run the text through a spell checker. Because not every web editing program includes one, you might want to create your content in a word processor and then copy your finished text into your web pages.

Gather the Site’s Components

After creating your content, gather all of your site’s files together. If you’ve identified logos, buttons, photos or other graphics that you want to include, either create or collect the specific files you want to use and store them in a folder on your PC. Save the text you’ve written in the same folder. Keeping your content in one place will save you time and frustration when you are actually building you site.

Create the Pages

You’re finally ready to make some web pages. You will most likely be creating your entire website in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), so picking up an elementary understanding of the technology behind your site wouldn’t hurt. Basically, HTML is a programming language that gives instructions to an internet browser, telling it how to display text and images. You’ve already created that text and collected those images, all you have left to do is arrange them on each page and define their appearance.

When creating your pages, follow two crucial rules of smart technology implementation.

1. Products Should Drive Technology, Not Vice Versa

When creating your web pages keep both your audience and your business objective in mind. The features you include and the technology you utilize should be appropriate to target your audience. Don’t waste time and energy on bells and whistles that your customers won’t appreciate or can’t take advantage of. If you sell old fashioned gadgets to a nontechnical customer base, your visitors probably aren’t interested in your prowess at creating cute scrolling messages on-screen.

They just want to know if you sell the best gadgets at the lowest price. At the same time, however, you should be prepared to take advantage of whatever technical enhancements suit your business needs. If you sell services that could benefit from the creation collaborative and interactive community areas for your site with discussion boards, mailing lists and online customer surveys.

2. Speed is Everything

Make a conscious effort to limit file sizes and keep download times to a minimum. Most web editing programs will estimate page load times, and you can test them yourself (use dial up connection to test) once you’ve posted each page to the web on your personal host server or your own. Everyone who has surfed the internet has experienced the frustration of sitting around waiting for a site to load. Don’t be that site. Optimize all of your images on your site for web delivery, reuse navigation buttons and logos wherever possible (this will improve page speed because the files have already been loaded once), and keep each page small enough to load quickly.

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Design is a crucial element of any web page. This is truly where the little things mean a lot. Hits are not enough, although driving traffic to your site is very important. Good web page design turns a browser into a customer, a business prospect into a client, and a proposal into a sale.

Stick to the Basics- Always keep your pages simple and to the point. This does not mean boring. Incredible graphics and introductions, and poorly designed graphics can cause long load times. The 8-second rule works great. If a visitor to your site cannot load your page in this time they will move on. At the most, a page should never take more than 20 seconds to load. Using all connection speeds to check it will help determine the load process.

Have a Well Designed Page Layout- Do not cram too much on a page. All the pages should be neat, organized and easy to navigate. Like a regular paper document, there should be enough “white space” so that a browser can properly read the content and locate navigation buttons and menus. When a visitor searches for a specific topic to find you, and they arrive at your page to find that topic, they will leave if there are no means to navigate.

Incorporate a Theme- Settle on a visual theme and stick to it. Graphics, fonts, content, colors, and borders should all be within a theme that provides an identifier for your business. If your company’s logo incorporates a flag and the colors are red, white and blue, your web page should not have graphics that use orange, green or black.

The 3 Clicks Rule- If you incorporate navigation buttons into your page design, a visitor should never be more than 3 clicks away from his/her goal. When designing a web page, always keep the visitor’s needs a priority and your goals second. Although you would like to lead the visitor through several different web pages while taking them to their navigation result, more than 3 clicks will cause frustration, and the visitor will go elsewhere. By keeping this priority structure in mind, you can incorporate your goals while providing for the needs of your visitor.

Take the easy Road Home- Every web page should have a button or link to take your visitor to the home page while visiting other pages throughout the entire site.

Content Publishing Know How- Remember that all content on your pages must fit within the popular internet medium. Something on a paper document must be edited and formatted for publishing on the web. Web pages must be condensed and to the point. Web site visitors do not want to scroll endlessly to read a rambling editorial or sales presentation.

Go Professional- If you are designing a web site for your business and can afford it, hire or contract Professional writers, editors and a page designer. Professional editors will ensure that your information is timely, correct and appropriate for your audience. Professional writers will provide reader friendly content, industry contacts and will keep your pages up to date on the latest trends with news. Professional web page designers are worth every penny spent and more importantly worth the investment.

Your World Wide Audience- If your business has global dealings, shouldn’t you have your content in several languages? This will allow all of your prospects to feel confortable. Your audience may be disabled. This is why it is important to incorporate audio, visual and video options so that a variety of people can access your content. People who are color blind have a particularly rough time with web pages, and this condition is more prevalent than many realize.

Be careful not to Offend- Color is important in the success of any web page. However, colors mean different things to different cultures. If your business deals with several different cultures, be sure to research the importance of colors and their meanings. This includes the colors of fonts, graphics and borders.

Give the page a Sting Affect- A web page that has nothing of value for free. Example; content, resources or expert opinion is nothing more than a sales flyer. Most of these type are discarded without a second glance. A good rule for layout and design is that 50 percent of your content should only offer free news, resources, or opinion in your business industry. This can give a stingy teaser affect causing your visitors into becoming clients and later buying from you.

The Domain Name Game- Spend the money to register your own domain name. To do otherwise is like answering the phone in your office by another business’s name. Identify your business by registering your own domain name.

Only One Choice of Purchasing- If your web page offers products or services, always offer secure credit card ordering using more than one method to purchase. If your visitor finds only one way to purchase, there’s a 50% chance to leave without clicking further. Supplying this option makes your visitor feel comfortable and most importantly secure when performing money transactions.

Old News, No Changes- It is amazing how many web sites do not update their information regularly. Why should a customer return to your page to find no change or an update has been made? Smart designers provide content areas that visitors know will be updated regularly for news and information. Some designers place rotating content code so when the page is re-loaded there will be new content displayed keeping regular customers coming back.

Being Unavailable- Many web pages forget to include something as simple as contact information. Visitors should always be able to easily find the same information that would be on your business card for following up with you. Contact forms work the best along with contact name, mailing address and phone numbers. This will also gain the visitors trust in your site.

Ignoring Marketing Opportunities- Not offering a free email newsletter with news and updates is a huge mistake. Putting a simple subscription form on your pages can build a database of prospective business clients and contacts. This allows you to build a relationship with your subscribers and include specials or latest product or service information.

Not Doing Research- Before you design your pages you should research your prospective clients. Know their needs, wants and what would attract them to your page over and over again. If you have a page dedicated to automobiles, offer links to other sites, videos and profiles of various automobile classics, editorial featuring the larger or more sophisticated models etc.. Offer links to anyone you partner with, updates on the latest trends and news, magazines, content from relevant associations.

Spelling and Grammar mistakes- Presentation is the key. And, nothing is more unprofessional than finding a page with these errors.

Incorrect Information- This is why there are so many disclaimers found on the web. It is highly recommended not to publish information on your site that are not positive. Doing so could result in creating a lack of trust from visitors or a lawsuit from a company or person that feels maligned.

Technical Difficulties- Make sure every link you design actually takes you where it says it will. Also ensure that all of your navigation links and buttons work correctly. Visitors can become lost and frustrated with a web page that doesn’t keep its promises.

Being Too Creative- There is a fine line between creativity and chaos. Personal web page design can incorporate the fun to the funky colors, graphics and special images. However, businesses must remember that perception is everything. Graphics should be appropriate and in moderation. Stick to no more than three colors; your best bet is those identified with your business.

Following these tips, your web pages will be informative, Professional and well organized. Not only will you and your business have a web presence in the marketplace, you will be represented in a manner that will attract and retain your target audience.

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