Free Website, Printing and Graphic Design Tips

Whether you’re just sitting down to begin designing your website or if you already have a website, you may want to include the following information in your site.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s): Adding a “Frequently Asked Questions” page to your website enhances both user-friendliness and search-engine friendliness. Visitors go to this page looking for quick answers to common questions regarding your services.

“Make it Sticky”: A “Sticky” website keeps its visitors coming back by providing information they want. You site should be informative and interactive. Downloadable documents are a very effective way to inform, engage and boost search engine results. These documents could include service or product related “How-To” and Resource Information, Coupons, Gift Certificates, product instructions, etc.

Links: Help your visitors by providing links to service or product related informational sites. These links will add to your site’s interactivity and will enhance your search engine placement. You could use links to industry associations, organizations, and anything else you think your visitors may be interested in. Please be sure to include only those sites which are relevant to yours! Too many links or links to unrelated sites may result in lower search engine rankings.

Add A Guarantee: A guarantee is a great way to increase consumer confidence. Visitors will choose to do business with a company that provides a guarantee over a company which does not offer one.

Customer Testimonials: Be sure to collect and save positive feedback from your previous customers! Providing potential clients with positive feedback from existing clients is another great way to help build confidence in your company and its services.

Terms and Conditions: Your company’s terms and conditions of sale should be included on your website.

Contact Form: Forms allow you to request specific information from your visitors. This method helps to ensure that you obtain the type of contact information you want, the visitor’s email address and any other information you may need. This information can be returned to you in an email.

Although there are hundreds of items you can select to include inyour website, the above mentioned ones are among my favorites. They are simple, yet effective tools in creating a successful website.

Black is black…except when it’s not. Color is an integral part to any successful website, logo or type layout. Consider using colors and  art at less than their 100 percent values. For instance, a black symbol used at 50 percent of its color value, would appear as gray. When combined, a color and its tinted equivalent can have a striking effect.

In the above example we see green used at 100 percent (also referred to as “solid” color) to display a cell number and email address (lower right hand corner of card). That same green is used at 20 percent to create the two large script letters in the background. As a result, it would appear that we have used two different colors.

This simple process, of using one ink color at different percentages, can create the look of a multi color business card when, in fact, only two colors have been used (black for the band and green at 100 percent and 20 percent). If you were to eliminate the black and make the band green the card would print using only one color. Using one color is even more economical than two.

This technicque is really less about economics and more about adding style to your text and images. The tinted script letters shown above could also have been printed in 100 percent green but would not have had the same end effect as printed them as a tint of green. Consider using tints when working with logos made of text only or when you want to add an image or symbol to the background of another.

Be aware that when colors overlay they will combine in the overlapped areas and the dominant color (darker) will prevail. For example, in the business card image above if the black band were the same color and tint as the large script letters and the large script letters were black, you would see the black letters showing through the light green band. Not necessarily the effect you were going for.

Experiment using tints in your designs. They can add a layer of  visual interest to almost any application.

When designing your website be sure to include a header and a footer on each page. A header can include your logo along with your business name or website name, a slogan or tag line if you have one and any contact information your visitor’s may want immediately such as a phone number, email address or travel directions. You may also want to include a brief description (one or two lines) of what type of services you offer. Your navigation menu, whether horizontally or vertically positioned, should also be considered as part of your header and, as such, should be included on every page in your site. The footer can include your logo, usually on a smaller scale, a horizontal version of your navigational menu (links to each of your main pages as one or two lines across the bottom) and, most importantly, your contact information (in addition to the link to your “Contact Us” page).

Use this header and footer on every page. Doing so will create a sense of continuity and legitimacy for your potential clients. A visitor will never have to click more than once to contact you and they will be able to do it from any page within your site. This is a great way to make it easy for people to get in touch with you! With this in mind, be sure to include an “email us” link” in your footer. Have this link open up your visitor’s email client and have the subject line already filled in for them (i.e. “Website Contact”).

Practices such as these will make your visitor’s experience positive and will improve the overall appeal of your website. An effective web site design is simple yet informative. Great design and functionality go hand in hand. Function and design are codependent and integral to a successful website. If you’re starting from scratch, be sure to include these items in your website design. If you already have a website, it’s a good idea to review it and be sure that there are headers and footers on all your pages and that they contain all the information your visitors will need to have at their fingertips.

Two major factors resulting in better search engine placement are relevent content and the correct use of keywords.

The importance of the relationship between keywords and content cannot be understated. Your keywords should appear in your content but please don’t “over do it”! Your site could be rejected by a search engine if you have too many keywords in a page’s content. Keep the percentage of keywords to between 5-10% of the page’s overall content. You should also keep the number of keywords in your code to somewhere around 20-25 words maximum. Too many keywords in the meta tag will dillute their value.
Content should be relevent and informative while including those all important keywords. Check you content and keep it current by updating it regularly. Finally, don’t forget to include a keyword or two in your page title and meta description section.

Here are a couple of hint to help you make your website even more “crawlable” by the search engines. Why? Because it’s the key to better search engine return ranking. You want people to find your site!
1. Spiders like html and lots of content related text. Keep the Flash but don’t go all Flash and use alt tags on your pictures. Make sure you have enough html and content related text to keep the spiders happy.
2. Include a sitemap in your website. Spiders love a good sitemap and ifyou’re not sure how to set it up, Google will give you all the help you need. Take a look at their Webmaster Tools.
3. Update you site. Putting up a website and never updating it is the wrong approach. The spiders want to crawl new stuff and your visitors want new reasons to return. Do yourself a favor and make the time to update your website.