Day-Glow-Colour-Bomb-Text

Usually this is on a black page. Day-glow-colour-bomb-text is the single most heinous crime in the universe. Those guilty of it surely believe they are adding vibrancy and life into the page – in reality they are killing (with migraine headaches) every poor soul who happens to stumble upon the page. Of course if that's what you want go ahead. If you want a professional looking page then use as few fonts as possible, in as few colours as possible.

Centered Text

Only poets are allowed to use centered text. The rest of us must content ourselves with only using centering for images and the occasional quote. Centered text just doesn't look clean, tidy, or modern. Centered text and images running down the middle of the window leaves visitors wondering if the page was created in 1995 and hasn't been updated since.

Nowadays it is possible to justify the text in web pages and well worth finding out how as there are situations where justified text adds significantly to the look (even in comparison to left aligned text). You can't really go wrong with left aligned text though, just watch out for hanging lines (a single of words hanging at the bottom of a paragraph), picture placement, extra spaces between words and punctuation, and soon you'll have nice crisp columns of text that put the professionals to shame.

Web Pages that Scroll Horizontally

It's hard enough scrolling up and down, without then giving your users the headache of having to scroll left and right as well. Good design practice insists that the website fit on the screen horizontally. If you have a 22 inch monitor in some megalythic screen resolution don't assume that everyone else uses the same setup. Indeed laptops are now outselling desktops, and have traditionally had a slightly lower resolution. Nor does everyone with high resolution like to squander their screen real estate by stretching the browser the full horizontal width across the screen. In addition to this, the longer a line of text becomes, then the more difficult it is to read. Long lines make it harder for the reader to find the beginning of the next line, and it becomes a far more uncomfortable experience since they have to use their neck muscles as well.

Music in Web Pages

Music in web pages is enough to bring out a scream from even the most quiet and well mannered of surfers. Most people are already listening to music while working/surfing, and they don’t need someone else's music suddenly blasting out, playing along, clashing with their music. Not to mention the fact that what you think is awesome music is not necessarily what your visitors would consider to be good music. Now that tabs are in use, having been popularized by browsers such as Firefox, there's nothing worse than opening up a few search results in tabs only to be scared out of your skin by the sudden and unexpected burst of music tearing out of the speakers. This starts a game of hunt the tab… and it's never easy finding the one that's playing music. Guaranteed once the offending tab is found, it will be closed immediately to restore harmony to the users computer. Music just scares away your visitors. Unless you really know your audience this is one to avoid. Weird noises in the background are also to be avoided. An alternative to actually playing music (whether your guests like it or not) is to provide the functionality on your web page, whereby an interested user can play your playlists through a flash player on your website.

Dithered GIFs, Animated or Otherwise

Dithered gif images hail from the mid 90s and not only are hideous things, but also lead one's mind back to those unhappy times when everything you did on the internet was through a 56k modem and your computer crashed every couple of hours. We’ve all seen such gifs (unfortunately). Basically, back in those days computers had sixteen colours (256 colours if you were lucky), and so the idea of using dot patterns of two or more colours to make it look like there were more colours seemed like a good idea at the time. The big problem was it doesn't look very nice. It looked horrible then and it looks horrible now. In fact it looks even more horrible now because everything else is so crisp and clear. All modern computers (except a couple of specialist units) are capable of displaying several tens of millions of colours so there’s no way we can excuse or forgive the use of dithered gifs. Especially inexcusable are ones which have been enlarged at some point in their lives so that the dithering is especially obvious. Take advantage of all those colours, and turn off dithering.

Jagged Graphics

Often, in the lifecycle of an image, someone suddenly decides to make it transparent. Often this part of the project then gets two seconds allocated to it, and a stylistic disaster ensues. In such circumstances the graphic ends up with a billion dots of white around it so that it looks like it was cut out by a blindfolded drug addict (with all limbs shaking from his withdrawals symptoms) and it's just not nice. Cut it out over a contrasting background layer so that you can see what bits have been missed, and go back over those with a pixel sized eraser tool. Better yet learn to master 'masks' and the pen tool in photoshop.

Adverts/Images that Sit On Top of Everything

Somewhere in the development process, something went wrong, and now the design is collapsing inward and covering up the text. This usually suggests that the web page designer has tested the design in a single browser. This is unforgivable.

Pages that Take a Decade to Load

That's right, everyone has broadband, so you can just fire everything in there! Scripts, images, widgets, counters, flash, ajax, java, javascript, a dozen other elements. It loads quick for you, right? And that's all that matters... Well really, not everyone has broadband, but lets face it, anyone who's still using dialup in this day and age deserves to wait.

Wrong. Dialup is still in use, and most people who visit your page will be surfing from other countries. Most of them will have broadband but the distance still slows things down a fair bit. It's only polite to make your pages as fast loading as possible.

Triggering an Epileptic Fit Among Your Visitors

There are many web pages that involve flickering designs such as background colours that flicker as you mouse over links or backgrounds that flash away in the background. This includes moving rainbow coloured backgrounds. Surfing the web shouldn't be a lethal experience for people. Show a little consideration, and make web pages that are easy to look at. This will also increase the number of people who actually stay at your website!

A List of 'Interesting' Designs

To finish off, here is a very short list of extremely 'interesting' designs, each well worth visiting. Often you can learn a lot by looking at other people's, mi... erm... designs... the top one is probably to be avoided if you suffer from epilepsy or recurring migraine headaches as it may trigger an attack.

• dokimos.org/ajff/
• dominique-bellot.com/
• mccannprinting.com/
• thecreationmuseum.org/
• lightningbar.com/
• cpainfrastructure.com/
• cobrastrike.com/
• partytentcity.com/
• gardens-of-italy.com/

Last but not least, there are a few problems with this website, but you might have to look at it for a minute or two before the problems become apparent.

• producten.hema.nl/?%2F

Professional Doesn't Mean Flashy

When designing websites, most people who can really design a website will go for more functionality than flashy lights and bells. While some animation may be an added plus, many who are designing web pages know that a professional and appealing image is simple and to the point. They know that your customers are probably just looking for information rather than glitter and lightshows.

Professional Looking Can Be Beautiful, Too

Having a professional looking website design doesn't mean it can't be nice to look at as well. There are many whose designing of web pages leaves the site looking bland and lacking. Website designing must not only include needed information but also should be pleasant to look at so your visitors don't mind hanging around. Website designing is the ability to combine both the beauty and the professional image of your idea.

Tips for A Professional Site:

While having a good looking site is important, creating a professional looking image is even more so. Someone capable of website design knows this and is able to assist you accordingly. A few tips to look for in the work of someone designing web pages:

• Clean, crisp, easy to use formats
• Proper combination of centering and margins
• An eye for balance
• Consistency throughout your site
• All content is relevant and concise
• All the links are working and go where they should

Add a Splash of Colors

If you have all of the above items incorporated into your website, designing the beauty into it is relatively simple. Website design also involves the use of colors, tones, backround, and subtle effects. Designing web pages also includes the following:

• The ability to coordinate contrasts and like colors
• The ability to incorporate subtle and simple effects into a site to make that make it noticeable
• The ability to create something that doesn't look like it came off of a free template on the internet
• The ability to properly create effects such as mouseovers and fades

If you can find who is confident in their ability and knowledgeable of website designing most of your worries in web page designing are over. Website design takes not only an eye for detail but also an eye for imagination and creativity.

I have been in and around websites and their developers for years, so let me give you a few guidelines. Websites will vary greatly according to complexity and size. We will use a standard five page business website with no e-commerce (a shopping cart) and nothing complex. Many companies have a one to two month waiting period after you sign a contract with them but before the work commences. This is needed for two reasons. They need time to finish the sites they are working on and they give you time to get your content together. A great number of web designers do not handle the actual content or text of the site but we will talk more about that later.

After you get to the front of the line and they are ready to commence work, they will generally show you a mockup. This is a static page done in a program like word to give you an idea of how the site will look. When you are happy with the result, they begin work in earnest and a good company will have a site ready to go live in two to three months. That means there should be a maximum of a five month turn around time for a simple business site. If it is taking longer then it is time to ask them to see what they have so far. Tell them it doesn't need to work or be pretty but you want to see the work in progress. If they will not show it to you for any reason it is time to worry. Also watch for the people who will suddenly get really busy and can't be reached by phone for extended periods.

Let me go back to what I was saying about content earlier. It will usually be up to the client to write the content for the site unless the designer has a writer on staff. Generally the person writing your code is not the same person you want writing your content, you want someone specialized in writing for marketing and sales. Be careful that your designer doesn't just cut and paste text from another website to put into yours. Not only does it irritate people like me, that do business writing for a living but plagiarism can get you both into legal trouble. There is an easy way to see if you are safe. I recommend a website called Copyscape. You can go there and enter a web address and if there are any websites out there with big chunks of the same text it will display them. As an example try running mine through it, it is here. It should display one website because I recently changed my domain and it is pulling up my old site. Now input your website or input the sites from a particular web designer if you are thinking of using them. If more than one or two sites come up, I would steer clear. By keeping a few simple precautions in mind, you will have no trouble finding a professional and honest web designer to build your web presence.

1. You'll need website hosting so learn about paid-for and free web hosting and then decide which one you want. Do some research on suitable web hosts so that you can pick one that fulfils your requirements both now and in the future.
2. It's important to know what sort of website design you want to create. Is it a home page with just personal information or perhaps several pages with more detailed and varied content. Look at some personal websites and find a design you like and then write down how it's constructed. Use this as a template, then add and discard pages and areas until you have just what you want. This is hard work but it will save you a lot of frustration and false starts later and help you get the design right.
3. Look around the web at colours and layouts and decide what you would like to incorporate in your web design. If you're creating from scratch using your own software you can have almost any layout and colour you like but if you are using the tools provided by your web host, then you might have to settle for a template and modify that. Be sure you know what is on offer and try to make a definite decision. Again, it is far better to have a design plan even if you have to change it later.
4. Experience has taught that it is always better to create at least some of the graphics that you intend to use in your design at this stage. Preparing graphics involves selecting them, cropping to size, correcting for colour and contrast and optimizing as well as adopting a naming policy that you will later understand even when you can only see the file name of the graphic.
5. If you intend to create the site to make money then you must choose either the affiliate program you will use or what adverts you will show. If you choose to use affiliates you may need to register beforehand at the website or at the site of their agents. With adverts this it is not so crucial but you will need to work the space for them into the design and spent time sorting out the best colours and layout. You should also learn what size adverts produce the best result and finally ensure that the design looks right with dummy adverts in place.
6. If you will create your own articles or similar writing on your site then decide how much you will write yourself and how much you will use from other sources. If you intend to use other people's writing make sure you can get the articles you want without copyright problems. If you are writing your own, prepare them in a word processor, spell check and, wherever they come from, spend time extracting keywords.
7. Finally, and before you make a start on the web design, think about how you will popularise your site and what steps you will take to promote it. Assuming you are not paying for promotion, you will want to checkout forums, newsgroups, similar sites and register the site with various search engines.

Once you have done all this you have a good, solid structure, in fact a complete blueprint for a good web design. Now the job that you thought was hard - that of actually building it - will seem comparatively easy since all the pieces have been created and only require slotting into place.

These duties shouldn't be left alone for only software or auto responders.

Carriage

As people from diverse cultures walk differently, negative reactions to another cultures carriage is inevitable. For instance, Arabs see the foot in general and the sole as unclean, showing the sole of the foot is an insult. Moreover, the American likes sitting around with the feet up on the furniture. Avoid photos of a pretty young woman with a laptop sitting feet high on your sales page if Arabs forms part of your potential audience.

Eye Contact

While American whites see eye contact as a sign of honesty, Koreans and Asians see prolonged eye contact as rude. In Muslim countries, women and men are not supposed to have eye contact. This miscommunication should be avoided while designing a webpage for multicultural participation. It's so important, because people from other cultures are increasingly getting on the net.

Gestures

Birdwhistell reports that no gesture or body motion means the same in all societies. An American may nod to say yes, but a Bulgarian will nod heads to signify no and shake the head to say yes.

Gestures that mean approval in the US have different signals in other countries. In Website Design, human attributes should not be ignored. The "thumbs up" sign that says "good work" or "go ahead" in United States and Western Europe is a vulgar insult in Greece. The circle formed with the thumb and first finger that means ok in US is obscene in Southern Italy and says “you're worth nothing” in France and Belgium.

Personal Time

Difference in time zones and how different societies keep time complicates international business and will influence how a website is setup. Businesses, government and schools in United States keep time by the calendar and clock; other cultures may keep time by seasons, moon, sun or internal "body clocks" or a personal feeling that "the time is right". Africans in particular have what is referred to as "African Time" which is an allowable time to be late for a meeting or a business trip.

While designing your website, take into consideration that other cultures want to establish a personal relationship before they decide whether to do business with each other, but North Americans believe "time is money" and are often frustrated in negotiations with people who take a leisurely approach.

Colors

Colors also carry meanings in a culture. In the United States, mourners wear black to funerals, while brides wear white. In Japan, white is the color of death. If your website has any business to do with death or funerals, try to balance the color separation to be mutually acceptable by visitors to the site.

In Korea and Africa, red ink is used to record deaths but never to write about living people. In the United States, the first-place winner gets a blue-ribbon while in the United Kingdom, the first-place ribbon is usually red. Be mindful of colors when formatting.

The best part about all these banner maker sites is that they are all free and easy to create. Have fun creating your own banners for your websites or ads!

There's a problem with employing free web templates, nevertheless. Regardless of how hard you look, you'll be hard put to locate a genuinely unique one. Folks who have been on the internet awhile will be capable of recognizing a stock web template.

The most beneficial way to address this trouble is to transform the free web template into a unique website of your own. As long as you have a minimum measure of web layout cognition and a graphics software package, you'll be able to do this easy. The first matter to do is make certain that the free web template you pick out lets you to make modifications without buying a license or paying a fee.

Modifying the Free Web Template Layout

If the free web template’s design is composed in CSS, as it ought to be for prime internet sites, you have to know a little about CSS so you can alter the template. If you don't, you will be able to try interchanging ‘left’ alignments to ‘right,’ or converting the number measures for layout values. Trial and error can teach you much about cascading style sheets (CSS). But make certain to create a backup of the master file before you change anything.

Switching the Free Web Template Colors

Modifying the free web template colors is a outstanding way to create a singular look. First of all, find a color chart on the web. Each color has a six-digit number or letter code. For instance, the code for white is FFFFFF. Search these codes in your CSS internet template and alter them to any colors you enjoy. Many color combinations can look good on a website, but you should be careful to make it match.

Altering the Free Web Template Artwork

The final step in constructing a unique internet site from a free web template is to alter the artwork. Web templates go with graphics. Open these graphical files in your software program and modify them to correspond your internet site design. You'll be able to easily vary the colors, heading, or even the full image by utilizing clip art or stock photography.

After you complete changing the free web template into your own unique site, you have to alter the titles, navigation, and substance of the web site. Then, you'll have your own internet site, personally styled and ready to go.

However, it wasn't long before a visual way to do the same thing called 'What You See Is What You Get' or WYSISYG (say 'Wisiwig') came along with its fancy looks and smart features and tried to take over. But which of these two ways is really better for getting the job done?

HTML

It's recently been overhauled, livened up and dragged into the current century with the adoption of XHTML. If you don't know how to code websites then learn this standard - it's the future of website coding.

The code is not hard to learn, in fact it used to be said that you could learn enough code to produce a respectable looking website on a wet Sunday afternoon and that is still more or less true.

Like anything, however, you need to sit down and work through the initial stages so that you understand it but it's not hard and very quickly you'll find you can produce good looking pages.

So, where do you go to learn it? There are lots of books that will teach you but free tutorials are out there on the internet, too. Try w3schools.com for half an hour a day for a few days and by the end of the week I bet you'll be writing pretty fair looking code!

But remember what I said at the beginning about the new standard. You want to make sure you learn XHTML with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

WYSIWYG

Like everything in life, if you want it easy you have to pay for it and web coding is no different. WYSIWYG editors let you design a web page the way you design a printed document - they're DTP for the online world!

Basically, you add components to the page and slide them into the best position to produce the page design that you want. All the time, behind the scenes, the program is working away furiously to write the HTML code to keep up with you so that when you look at the page in a browser it appears fully formed. It's a great and very visual way to design pages.

To do this, however, a lot has to go on under the hood and all this functionality has to be programmed into a complex piece of software that needs a lot of preparing and testing before it can be released.

As you would expect, this complexity comes at a price and WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver by Adobe are not cheap. That said, editors like this are excellent software to use allowing you to concentrate on the look you want to achieve without having to worry about the code. It's a bit like building a wall with large pre-fabricated blocks instead of bricks.

A Bit of Both

The makers of WYSIWYG software point out that you wouldn't produce a printed magazine by writing the code for your printer (although you could) so WYSIWYG is the way to go.

But some WYSIWYG editors have been criticised for producing horrendously complex code that made pages run and load slowly and which were hard or next to impossible to modify by hand. Also, the modern trend in website design is for a clean, minimalistic Web2.0 style that is best made with hand coding that mixes XHTML with other web scripting languages like Javascript (equally easy to learn) and Cascading Style Sheets.

For this reason the best approach is to learn to use both and use WYSISWG to prepare or 'rough out' pages until you get the design you want and then use hand coding to do the final version.

If cost is a factor then look for free WYSIWYG editors like Composer (available at no cost with the excellent SeaMonkey suite of programs) or the inexpensive CoffeeCup Editor.

For hand coding you can get a range of very acceptable and free editors and a list and review of each can be found on Wikipedia if you search for 'html text editors'.

So my advice, if you are preparing to write your own website, is to learn to use both ways of producing pages. It does mean a little more work but the result will far outweigh the work involved.