Website Design guidelines for novice and pros
Website designing is not as complex as people make it look if proper guidelines are followed. In the current internet age, having a website is not a mere show off, but an absolute necessity. Your website can serve as your business place, business and self branding tools, marketing tools, communication channels, relationship builder, career and skills building tools, and money making machine. According to Bill Gate, “if your business is not on the internet, you will soon be out of business”, and having your own website is one of the best way to have your business on the internet.
Simple guidelines to website design
- What is your name?
Everything answers to a name and some names end up as brand. When you hear Apple, Samsung, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, you don’t need be told who they are. Naming your website after your domain can be your best bet. If your domain name is the same as URL to your website, locating you on net will be much easier. Some of the points to note when choosing a domain name are:
- Choose a name that can be a brand
- Choose a name that is easy to pronounce
- Choose a name that is easy to remember
- Choose a name that is as short as possible
- Make the name intuitive for people to guess what it is all about
- Make your name keyword rich
- Use smart ways of modifying name if your desired name is taken
- .com extension is still the golden standard
- Don’t infringe trademarks or copyright
- KIS
Keep it simple (KIS) should be your golden rule in your website design. You don’t need to confuse your site visitors with bell, whistles, animations, pop ups, multiples links, color riot and complicated things that will keep your website visitors confused all their stay on your web page. Go straight to the point, few external links, and few calls to action.
- Branding your site
Branding is the distinguishing factor of any business entity. In a very few words say what your website is out to do. What is your mission and vision? What are your text, colors, logo, slogans, images, audios, videos and unique selling proposition?
- Design approach
When it comes to web design, you have many options out there because of many themes and templates available to use. Designing website with wordpress or wix, wordpress has thousands of free and paid themes you can use for beautiful web design or website builder software from wix that comes with hundreds of templates. Choose a theme or templates that suit your desired styles
- Professionalize your site
Your webpage is the best place to showcase your passion and enhance your professionalism. Depending on your field or industry, your site can offer video and audio coaching platforms, you can provide online stores, and you can provide apps for self improvement, web forms for newsletters, webinars and mentoring.
- Customize your site
When you visit most websites on the internet, majority of sites look the same. To customize your website is to add some unique features to it. I use wordpress in most of my web design and the good here is that wordpress come with thousands of plugins that can help you customize your website in the matter of seconds. There many widgets that will make your WebPages unique and beautiful. Wix free website builder software is another option if you are not out for wordpress site.
- Optimize your site
To optimize your website makes it run smoothly, quickly, and accessibly by search engines. It can be search engine optimization, which ensures good site’s ranking on search engines. Things to consider when optimizing your website are: meta and title tags, keywords research, smart use of keywords in content, fresh and new content, back links, alt tags on images, Google analytical and site map and many more techniques you can learn online.
- Responsive design
Responsive website design is to ensure the theme, template or code is using css and html that will make your content look good on any screen. The web page should look good on desktops, tablets, and phones.
- Images
Make sure your images are small or resize to the standard website size for easy loading.
- Socialize your site
Socializing your website does not only give you online presence but also generate good traffic to your website. Social media and website promotion are now great tools for website exposure. All you need to do is to add the buttons like: follow us on twitter, share us on Facebook, watch us on YouTube, and any social media you are active on.
Website design is a dynamic process that needs a continuous improvement. You can contact me for further training or check me on Hire a Webmaster for your Website Design
Why You Should Start Blogging Now
Blogging is an interactive act of updating contents on the web. These contents can be in the form of articles, images, audios, videos, and software. The word “blogging” is present continuous tense of “blog”. And the word blog was derived from two combined words web and log (Weblog). Back in the 90s, blog was a simple online diaries, journals, or online chronological entries forms for passion and interest but today blog has become a dominant way of self-publishing tool made accessible to billions of internet surfers surfing the internet worldwide.
Blog today
Unlike the late 90s blogs of simple online diaries, blogs today can be a full blown website, a mini website, a video site or a social media site.
Blogs has made creating a website as easy as copy and paste. With blog, you can have a full blown website created in 15 minutes. If you were not told, you hardly differentiate between a blog and a conventional website.
Blogs are often created through specialized content management software (CMS), that enables instant publication, and are somewhat sophisticated, in the sense that users can publish their content on the Internet with just one click of the mouse!
It is an overwhelmingly popular tool these days among the online community, because of its simplicity and user-friendly features like themes, widgets, plugins, and third party integration. Indeed, unlike a conventional website, all it takes is just around 15 minutes to create a personalized blog.
Blogs are now getting spidered and indexed faster than a conventional website, due to the amount of relevant, up-to-date content they contain. Search engine giant Google, has even made available a specialized search function for blogs. Additionally, blog content may be syndicated and aggregated into RSS readers, which will give them wider exposure. It’s no wonder online marketers are taking advantage of all these benefits a blog offers! Imagine the traffic a blog can bring to your website!”
As at October 2016 over 319.8 million blogs with billions of readers could be found online with new ones being created every day. “This statistic illustrates Tumblr.com’s cumulative total blogs from May 2011 to October 2016. As of that month, the social networking site had surpassed 319.8 million blog accounts, up from 260.5 million in the previous year”.
That is why blogging producing online millionaires faster than any internet business model. Many companies are dumping their old conventional websites for Blogs. Social Networks, microblogs and content sharing sites are smartly and fully integrating their conventional websites with blogs for content syndicate.
Blogging provides you the platform to showcase yourself and become an instant authority in your subject of interest (technology, celebrities’ gossip, business, money, romance, entertainment news, animals, politics, and spirituality e.t.c). There are lots of benefits in blogging either as a hubby or a personal business.
Two ways to benefit from blogging
- Be a guest blogger
- Own a blog
Who is a guest blogger?
A blogger is a person that updates a blog and a guest blogger is a person that helps blog owners to update their blogs on a regular basis for a fee. Once you are good in article writing, audio post cast, video promotion, software creation, a blog owner can hire you for and of the service and that alone can generate you $100 income daily if you are good at it. Guest blogging can give you some level of income and authority but the major benefit and the credit goes to the blog owner. The best option is to own a blog.
Own a Blog
A detail report on how to create a blog is treated in my eBook “Blogging Demystify” but right here I will give you the basic hint on creating your blog.
We have two types of blogs
- Free host blogs
- Self host blogs
Free host blogs
At zero budgets, you can create your free blogs and start updating content on any of the blogging platform below:
wix.com, wordpress.com, weebly.com, squarespace.com, blogger.com, postach.io/site, livejournal.com, tumblr.com, ghost.org are top leading free blogging platform. All you need to sign free is your email address. Some of the setbacks of free blogs are: sub domain of your domain name e.g. xxx.wix.com or xxx.wordpress.com or xxx.blogspot.com and others will stamp your blog with their banners or adverts.
You can actually make a living from free blogs but it makes you look unprofessional and under the control of your hosting platform. You must keep to their terms and conditions, anytime they go down, you go down with them. Technorati tracks over 175million blogs out of which the top 100 blogs has no single free blog or .blogspot.com. so, free blog can put food on your table but cannot take you to the best.
Self host blog
Let’s face it! The top 10 blogs earning millions of dollars annually are self host. Starting from huffingtonpost.com ($29,896 daily), mashable.com ($15,781 daily), and techcrunch.com ($14,816 daily) and on and on – You can search the top 50 earning blogs to see the list.
These top earning blog do not start making money the very day they started blogging, there is the hard work and learning curve of it.
How do I setup myself host blog?
- Register a domain name
- Get a webhost
- Setup your blog using quick install or fantastico under www.wordpress.org from your webhost
- Customize and optimize your blog
- Enriched your blog with quality content
- Monetize your blog
- Promote your blog
Though all these steps can take professional blogger few minutes, it usually takes some beginners few days or weeks. In most cases, you can hire a profession blogger to set it up for you. Hire us Now!
Why you need a blog today!
- Is your online business address. 2. All internet business can be done on blog. 3. Endless cash flow. 4. Turns you into Authority and celebrity in your field of endeviour
Blogging holds the future. Feel free to find me on skype: techclus, Hire us Now,!
Hoping to work with you on blogsphere.
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