Website Design, Templates, and Blogging Information

Web site design customers in the US tend to frown upon outsourcing and this is understandable. Almost every large company today outsource their back office and customer services are generally handled by non-US staff abroad. A lack of personal touch, poor communication skills and accents means that these services are not welcomed by customers at large. We do not want to speak to somebody sitting thousands of miles away for services and products. How about your web site design? Would you outsource your web site design work to another country? Although you might be reluctant at first, there might be circumstances under which it could be interesting and even advisable to have your web site design done abroad or outsourced. A local project manager who communicates well, good value for money and excellent web site design support are just some of the key factors that you might consider before outsourcing your web site design.

Although communications technology has greatly improved over the past few years with cheap and quality technology and telecommunications services, you cannot beat talking to a local project manager in the US when discussing and ordering your web site design. No matter where your web site is developed, you need to be able to pick up the phone and talk to a sales or project manager who, not only understand your language, but also who is familiar with your needs and the local web site design market. Someone looking for a web site is also looking for a friendly service and web site design advice from a professional who is available at local times and who is sensitive to your needs. This is not always easy to achieve when dealing with remote staff sitting in a foreign country with foreign customs and markets, no matter how much training they have received and no matter how good their accents.

If you are dealing with a local professional with whom you can talk to and develop a professional relationship, there is no reason why the actual web site design work cannot be outsourced abroad in the back end. As far as you are concerned, it does not matter where the web site is being developed. Your local web site design project manager will make sure that your web site is designed as per your request and amended to suit your needs. Once you develop this confidence, outsourcing your web site design work can prove to be very rewarding both in terms of value for money and the quality of the web site design.

Indeed, one of the main reasons for outsourcing web site design, or any other services for that matter, is the cost factor. You could get a lot more done for your money through competitive web site design prices. Like it or not, a lot of the web site design skills is actually sitting abroad where, for various reasons, the cost of labor is still reasonable low. If you are concerned about using ‘cheap labor’, rest assured that web designers and highly skilled personnel abroad are not underpaid. Typically, a web site designer abroad working for an outsourcing company will earn at least double the average pay rate of his/her country.

Another key factor is the service level. Web site developers abroad are hungry for work and will generally work odd hours, fast and efficiently to secure jobs and build confidence in their services. They have more to prove than their counterparts in the US and therefore will generally work much harder on your web site design project. More than likely, you will require changes to your web site design while it is being developed and even after the commissioning of the web site. The chances are you will have more flexibility on this issue with your web site designers abroad than with local web designers.

So, outsourcing is not a no go area, certainly not in back office web site design. In fact it can be a blessing provided you have an excellent project manager based locally who communicates well with you and his or her back office web site design team.

Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) have slowly but surely become a website design standard over the past few years. It was not that many years ago that people used Frames to position their content across their web pages and Tables gradually replaced this. Many low-end website developers are still very comfortable with Tables, as it ‘does what it says on the tin’. However, more and more people are now moving over to CSS, as virtually all the layout options can be achieved using the code.

One major problem with CSS is that not all Web browsers produce the same results and it has not been helped in the past by the various browsers employing their own way of interpreting certain CSS conventions. You can think your CSS design looks OK in the current version of your preferred browser and can then be crestfallen when you view your Web pages in another version that has destroyed the formatting. Therefore, when moving over to CSS, it is important that you use the capabilities that are consistently supported across the entire range of popular browsers. It is interesting that the new version 7 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has fixed a number of earlier anomalies, but many people are now waking up to the reality that IE7 has in fact caused problems arising from their earlier workarounds!

So why not bother with CSS, if Tables work for you? The principal advantages are as follows:

1. Web page code is generally much easier to follow;

2. The amount of code used to achieve the same result is much less. The general view is that by switching to a CSS layout, the typical page size reduction is between 50 - 60 per cent;

3. Download speeds for CSS pages are generally faster than their Table-driven counterparts. This is because browsers have to read through the table code twice before they are able to display the contents. They do this firstly to figure out the structure and then again to understand the content. It should also be recognised that a Table’s contents can only be presented to the screen in one go, whereas CSS content will drop in separately, thereby giving a better user experience. It is also possible to govern the order in which specific screen elements appear, so the user is not distracted by the more bulky and slower to load image files. Furthermore, because all the code involved with CSS page layout is held in one external CSS document and is cached, it is faster than Table layouts that need to be interpreted every time a new page is displayed;

4. It is much easier to edit existing pages and to add new pages, particularly in the area of subtle formatting amendments. For example, you can change the font or colour scheme across an entire website in literally minutes;

5. CSS delivers enhanced accessibility. In recent years the number of people using web browsers on hand-held devices has risen significantly and CSS plays an important function in delivering content to PDA’s etc through additional CSS documents. This just isn’t possible with Table-driven layouts;

6. CSS is considered to be more Search Engine friendly because they can spider CSS pages quicker. However, it remains to be seen if this has any tangible benefits such as an improvement on the your page ranking.

On the flipside, there are a few disadvantages to CSS web page design you should consider:

1. As compared with Tables, CSS involves a much bigger learning curve;

2. Because of cross browser support issues, the time spent implementing workarounds should not be underestimated;

3. New browser versions can catch website developers napping if you are not careful. You can find that earlier workarounds have been overcome and the look of your website has changed overnight.

Ultimately, your decision on whether or not to move over to see CSS will probably depend on your level of technical capability and the time you’re able to devote to understanding CSS layout alternatives.

It goes without saying that there is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. One major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is through the search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

The major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, read the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

Proper keyword research is obviously a must for on-page optimization but what use is this on page optimization if the search engines robots can’t ‘read’ your site well in the first place?

For starters you should try and avoid using frames. This helps the search engines index your site easily. Frames can confuse the search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically. Where you do use images you should incorporate alt text using your keywords or related phrases.

Meta tags should be placed on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about. Pay particular attention to the title and description tags as the keyword tags are largely ignored by the major engines.

Using CSS makes your code cleaner. This means that the robots can simply crawl your actual content more easily and this has the added benefit of making your pages load faster.

A profitable web site design will need few things in it. You have to approach it in a particular way. You can follow the following 3 top ways to web site design

Think about design - In case of Web Site Design, always think and plan before starting. The look of the website should be attractive and professional. Offer the visitor simple navigation facility.

The content should be well written and interesting. Use images as images speak more than the words. Images also make the pages attractive. Provide the viewer with useful information.

For profitable web site design, your website should comly with the HTML standards. Provide the viewers easy usable facilities like search facility, download facility. Use professional looking background and text colour.

Use the best technology – Use the best technology available in web site design. Search for the technology available today. Techonology get out of date easily. So, before using any, make sure it is the latest one. Latest technology will stay for some time and it will be profitable for the web site designing.

Download time of any software, tool, content you are providing, should be less, as more time will put off your visitors. While designing a website, select your target and matching them, select the technology. While selecting a technology keep in mind the usability of the website.

Be accessible to all – Make your website easily accessible. A website that takes lot of time to upload will attract only a few viewers. So, in designing a website, use such tools which will help it load quickly. Do not use too much of flash, as it takes times when loading. Also provide a option to skip the introduction which is heavy with graphics.

Do not use any tool which needs not so regular software for loading or viewing. Stick to the softwares which are generally used by a general Internet user.