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.

KEEP EVERYTHING OBVIOUS

Do not go out of the general pattern of a web-page when designing it. Take the examples of large companies such as Microsoft, eBay, Google or Yahoo! and understand the general pattern of placing logos, navigation links, etc. Visitors to your web-site expect certain conventions and when they don't find them, you lose valuable visitors.

LIMIT THE USE OF COLORS

Flashy colors look good only when used in small amounts. Emphasize on the headers through bright colors but limit using too many colors on the same page. Software like Color Wheel Pro greatly help in choosing the right color combinations. Limiting the choice of colors to 2 or 3 will not only save designing time, but also save your web-site from looking cheap and tacky. Certain color combinations can also create problems for color-blind people. To get the right combination of colors for them, try out the free software provided by Vischeck.

GET THE RIGHT FONTS

The content on your web-site must be legible to all its visitors. To do this, you need to get the right font for the content. Fonts like Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman, Geneva and Georgia may not look very interesting but they make your content, which is the thing required to be interesting, much easier to read. Once again, keep in mind the use of colors for the font, against the color of the background.

MAKE PLANS BEFOREHAND

It gets really irritating when you are almost done with designing a page of your web-site and you forgot to add something in between. Even worse, if you haven't got any space left for additions. Always get a clear-cut idea of what you are going to include in your content and how much space you will need for it. Understanding how to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), avoiding unconventional layouts and complicated backgrounds will help a great deal.

MAINTAIN CONSISTENCY

Do not opt for changes in between different pages of your web-site, for the same type of content. For example, if your hyperlinks are in green, keep them green throughout the web-site and do not change the color for every page. If your navigation bar is at the top of the page on the home page, keep it at the top of the page for every other page as well. By using CSS correctly, most of this should happen by default and you can concentrate more on the web-site content.

KEEP IT RELEVANT

They say, “A picture is better than a thousand words” - true, but never post a picture irrelevant to the subject of discussion. Even more, don't paste a picture or a video just because you have space, as these pictures and videos do take up bandwidth. If you are able to remove a picture without negatively affecting your content, then do not hesitate to do so. Remember, focusing on your content will ultimately offer your web-site better search-engine ranks.

SIMPLICITY IS THE BEST

To not confuse your web-site's visitors and to save development time, use the simple, common and popular web-design layouts available online for free. Pushing boundaries usually leads to confused and frustrated visitors, which affects the incoming traffic to your web-site.

TRY AND MASTER CSS

This may not be a necessary step, but is extremely useful when you are designing a web-site intended for a large amount of traffic. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is extremely useful as it makes your site easy to maintain and update for you, and helps visitors and search-engines read your content much more easily. CSS can certainly be called the web-designer's best friend. Two amazing books for learning CSS are “CSS the Missing Manual” - David McFarland and “Bulletproof Web Design” - Dan Cederholm

Online Jewelry and Craft Galleries

A variety of online galleries have sprung up on the internet making it easy for you to sell handmade jewelry online to a national and even an international audience. Listing your jewelry on these sites is usually no more complicated than creating a listing on Ebay. If you choose to use this option, it's important to choose a site that has items that are consistent with your type of jewelry designs. For example, you wouldn't attempt to sell sophisticated sterling silver jewelry with gemstones in a country craft mall. It's also important to choose a mall that gets high traffic. One site to consider is Beadiest where you get a free two week trial to see if their site will work for you.

Just Beads

Just Beads is an online site dedicated exclusively to buying and selling beads, jewelry components, and finished jewelry. If you make your own handmade beads, pendants, or other jewelry components, this is an excellent site for sales because they have a loyal audience of bead and component buyers. If you sell finished jewelry, this site may be worth a try, although you'll likely have more success in an online jewelry or craft gallery where visitors are focused on buying finished products. If you make lampwork or polymer clay beads and pendants, Just Beads may be just the market you're looking for.

Your Own Wesite

To successfully sell handmade jewelry online from your own web page, you'll need to create an attractive website with clear photos of your work. In addition, you'll need a shopping cart to process sales as well as the ability to accept credit cards. If you don't want to bother getting your own merchant account, Paypal provides a viable alternative for receiving payments, although you may lose out on some sales from people who don't have Paypal accounts. The biggest barrier to success with a stand alone website is building traffic.

Promoting your site could take a fair time and energy which will require time away from designing jewelry. Be sure you're ready to make this commitment. There are a variety of ways to drive traffic to your handmade jewelry website. One of the most effective is to publish a blog with useful information on how to wear your jewelry along with photos of your designs. People love ideas and inspiration on how to enhance their appearance with jewelry.

As you can see, there are a variety of ways to sell handmade jewelry online. Why not see if these markets will work for you?

The Good:

Interactivity

Flash's Actionscript opens up a vast field of possibilities. Programmers and designers have used Flash to produce interactive features ranging from feedback forms to attractive Flash-based games. This whole new level of interactivity will always leave visitors returning for more.

A standardised site

With Flash, you don't have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. No more hassles over how a certain CSS code displays differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. When you position your site elements in Flash, they'll always appear as they are as long as the user has Flash Player installed.

Better expression through animation

In Flash, you can make use of its animating features to communicate a message in a much more efficient and effective way. Flash is a lightweight choice for animation because it's vector based (therefore smaller file sizes) as opposed to real "movie files" that are raster based and much larger in size.

The Bad:

The Flash player

People have to download the Flash player beforehand before they can view Flash movies, so by using Flash your visitor range will decrease substantially as not everyone will be willing to download the Flash player just to view your site. You'll also have to submit extra work in redirecting the user to the Flash download page if he or she doesn't have the player installed.

Site optimisation

If your content is presented in Flash, most search engines won't be able to index your content. Therefore, your ranking will be low in search engines and there will be less traffic heading to your site.

The Ugly:

Loading Time

Visitors will have to wait longer than normal to load Flash content compared to regular text and images, and some visitors may just lose their patience and click the Back button. The longer your Flash takes to load, the more you risk losing visitors.

Recommendation

The best way to use Flash is only when you absolutely need the interactivity and motion that comes with it. Otherwise, use a mixture of Flash and HTML or use pure text if your site is purely to present simple textual and graphical information.

Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you're offering your visitors a place to voice their feelings and interact with their peers -- all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations develop, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

Start a blog

Keep an online journal, or more commonly called a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are funny creatures and they'll keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You'll also develop your credibility as you're proving to them that there's also a real life person behind the website.

Conduct polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely think about adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their feelings and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to discover about the results.

Provide puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work day-after-day, and you'll be able to estimate how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of amusement. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

Update often with fresh content

Update your site frequently with new content so that every time your visitors return, they'll have something to read on your site. This is the most widely acknowledged and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least implemented one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

Don't use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They usually have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they're just that, pretty vases with no actual purpose. Don't let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

Don't use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you'll be wasting valuable website space. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and allow your visitors to feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to offer a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from elaborated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they'll leave your site.

Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you'll want to make sure they know which part of the site they're in at that moment. That way, they'll be able to surf for relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you'll want to make sure they're not bothered by some audio looping on and on, on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they've got some control over it, volume or muting controls would work fine.

You begin by designing funky pictures that you think that people would like to see on there cloths, it could be "Don't have a Cow Man" (Famously known by Bart Simpson from The Simpson's TV program) or "Don't Drink and Drive, Smoke *&^( and fly home" whatever your taste in humor or pictures of cartoons or basically anything that could possibly be featured on a t-shirt or mug... even your own picture of your face, if you think that someone would buy it then show it off.

But remember it has to be your design, your phrase, strictly yours under your own copyright, as you could get in serious trouble merchandising someone else's ideas.

Where to Go

Now that you have a design of your very own you need to open a shop, now there is a nifty online business that does everything for you. All you have to do is upload the picture to there site and they do the rest. You don't need to print, distribute or take money for any of your products as they do it all for you, this is the only one I know of that does this service at this time but there may be more - CafePress.

and register yourself cool huh. You can even make your own prices for the stuff as long as its above the base price that the company charges so there is no limit to your profits, just as long as you dont sell the things too high that no one will buy them. Obviously the company will charge for there time and stock. But if you think you could do the printing on your own well go for it.

Then you just advertise the shop that you have registered and created to anyone that you think would buy from it, wether it be on websites or forums ect. Just get your URL out there, I even go on eBay and advertise the products on there and have a reserve price and when I get a buyer I get there money from them then I order the stuff with my credit card from my own shop and tell them to send it to the ebayer's address generating loads of sales.

I myself have several free shops all with different designs in them as with the free shops you can only have 1 image per product so if you have more than 1 image you have to open a second shop or upgrade to a premium shop which for just beginning wouldn't be a good thing to do as if it doesn't take off then you haven't lost any money with the free shops.

This is a free how to and I hope you will be as successful as I was with this shop. Also check on Google or MSN search engines to see if there are other companies that do the same service ...... I haven't really checked as I like the free service this one offers but there will be them out there.

Thank you for your time and happy designing.