A design of a website resembles the first impression of what people perceive about a company. Every color and graphic represents a corporate identity of a website and its company. The perception a site creates will determine if the visitor will continue to stay or leave the site.  As the old saying goes, first impression is the last impression. From the color of the logo, to the size of the font and the overall layout of a website can trigger different feelings for visitors and it is the designer’s job to ensure visitors will get the most positive effect to stay longer. Designing a website is an art and requires a lot of creativity. To a website, the design is also associated with promoting more sales, business leads and ROI. With that objective in mind, designers are trained to be visually sensitive with the psychology of what a visitor sees, as modern people now have a built-in ability to filter suspicious looking websites. They can instinctively tell if a website is just merely pushing for a desperate sale or they really have something good to offer.

Thanks to thousands of spammy website that bombard visitors daily, a stereotype of a good and bad website has been created in their mind. Visitors have developed the “spider-sense” radar. As a designer, the job is to make sure that a website would not fall within this radar by ensuring good quality of design. If you are not a designer and don’t have the designing skills, it is recommended that you outsource the job to the professionals. Most companies building a website only have one thing in common, to create more sales. Of course, nothing is wrong with that. But it is also because of the sales mindset that makes aggressive looking website that visitors try to avoid. This is because visitors have seen so many hundred of websites that does the same thing by asking them to buy things without even introducing itself properly. Credibility plays an important role in a website. Although companies have sales objective to meet, it is usually unwise to instruct a designer to maximize the use of every space available for some consent as it would kill the design. If you want your website to look good and has credibility, it is best to just pass the content to the designer and let them advise you with the appropriate design. Never argue with the designer about space, because they know what negative space is and they know what is best for your site’s appearance.

Now with some practical tips of web design, a website should always maximize its content with rich keywords for all topics in all pages. This includes applying appropriate meta tags of keyword, title and description on all pages. Be as precise as possible with all keywords. The more precise and narrow your keywords are, the more closer it bring you to your target audience. It is recommended that a meta title be kept within 70 characters, meta keywords to be within 10 and meta description within 150. If you have different topic of contents, putting it on different pages and keywords would improve the precision of your page being indexed for the right topic. Images are also an important component of a website as it conveys messages faster than words. But it is important to ensure that a page does not have too many images as it can slow the page’s load time. To be safe, always expect your visitors to have the lowest connection speed.

You’ll also need to make sure that images are of acceptable size and format. The labeling of images are also important as search engines will also crawl onto it and index pictures in search results. A sitemap is not only useful for a site with heavy content, but also for search engine friendly. Browsing compatibility must be ensured with all browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox Mozilla, Opera, etc). Last but not least is to create a conversion page to evaluate your site’s goal. Conversion page include RSS, form page and also a ‘thank you’ page for people who made purchase on your site. All of these are useful to evaluate the conversion rate of your website.

With all design in once piece, it is time for you to host your masterpiece on a server. Different sites may have different requirement of a server (click here to find out your need) If you want to run an ecommerce or a mission critical site, you may want to get a dedicated server, which could exceed your budget or you may opt to get a VPS (find out more about VPS here). But one thing that cannot be excluded from your criteria is the reliability of a web server.

This quality is so important that without a RELIABLE WEB HOSTING, it would be worthless for all your efforts to create a successful website.

Without a reliable web hosting to provide you a consistent uptime, your visitors would be disappointed with your website disappeared. Your rankings in search engines would eventually drop and more importantly, you lose the reputation of your company. A reliable web hosting gives you a consistent uptime and allows your effort for the site to flourish to the fullest. Webserver and some other hosting company provide a last-mile application support which is very useful for clients who face many technical issues with applications on their sites. However, be extra careful when choosing a web hosting company, as many are not clear with the charges of the extra technical service, so be sure to read their pocilies.