When deciding on a web design it is important to know your competition. What do you like about there site? What could be done better? Are there certain aspects of the site that would appeal visually? Are there certain aspects of a competitor’s site that have helped in organic SEO/SEM? Are there certain aspects/offers on a competitor’s site that may draw people in? I think these are all important factors to keep in mind when visiting the competition in the pre-web design phase. However, this article is going to focus on another aspect: Namely, is there repetition in style amongst your competition? If you where starting a business to rival NetFlix & Blockbuster movie rentals online, you would immediately become aware that the two look very much identical except for the color scheme. In a similar respect, you may even find two websites using the exact same design in the same industry. Then you may find the exact same web design on a web design template site! This situation is the low point of template web design buying. If you decide to use a template (and I will argue that sometimes this is the way to go) you MUST KNOW YOUR COMPETITION!

If nothing else, template web design can spark ideas. There are many template sites out there like BoxedArt.com and TemplateMonster.com, and even a variety of free ones, with decent web site designs. When browsing through these sites it can be very helpful for sparking the idea in your head of what you may want your web design project to be like. Adversely, many of the templates found are also very generic to a certain point. There tends to be an overwhelmingly corporate feel to a high percentage of templates on the market. Not all web designs call for a corporate look but just simply need to look professional to gain credibility. Take aspects that work from different designs and merge them with the current identity you are looking for. Don’t get carried away with this process though, if you take away a little from each one you may get a very disorienting look and feel to the site as each design may vary. Likewise, when I say take it is important to emphasize that I am not talking about stealing. These template designers have spent time and expect return, however if you find a font you like and match something as simple as this to a similar font that would fit in with your design then use the idea. Don’t directly take images or color layouts. This browsing of templates for ideas is very much like browsing your competitor’s websites for ideas and scoping the market.

If you are looking at purchasing a template make sure to follow these guidelines:

1. Know that your competitors are not using this template. If you are a national chain, you will probably not be reading this as you may very well have your own unique design team. For everyone else, how far does your competition boundary spread? If you own a local hot dog stand, you may only have a handful of competitors in your area that are branding themselves. Buying a template that can be purchased by the public even after you purchase it may be ok in this instance if the hot dog template is a great design. In this case it would be a perfect fit for a low priced design that may be high quality. If however you may run into multi-state or national competition for your product then you may opt against the generic template as a foundation to your design.

2. Make sure the template is only the foundation to your web design building. This may mean that you use the overall structure of the design, but change all the graphics to make the design more personalized. Often times this also means that you will change the color scheme to fit with your current identity or logo. Also, maybe only a portion of the template should be used. Does it have a great looking header or search box, but the rest of the site is left to be desired?

3. Always make sure to follow the guidelines of the company your purchase your web design template from. This is important as certain amount of “redesign” of the template is most likely expected in the user agreement.

Templates certainly are not for everyone, however when small business owners are just trying to get there feet wet online, a template may be the best choice. They are typically professional looking, well thought out (in many industry themes), require less knowledge to build from than a web design from scratch and most certainly more affordable than starting a web design from scratch.

As a side note: There are many web template sites out there that also sell limited download web design templates for a little more money. These are templates that once purchased a few or one time are taken from the template library and now longer available for purchase. These can keep branding in house and save time and money if the design is what you are looking for.

Todd Levi has been designing websites for 5 years and is currently owns http://LeviSolutions.com which is a Fort Collins based Web Design Company serving the Colorado area.

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As a webmaster, you want to keep your visitors content so they’ll come back again. Below you will find ten common mistakes made by webmasters that may deter people from returning.

1) Poor Color Choice

There’s one important thing to keep in mind when designing your web site, and that is always keep it simple. More is not necessarily better. Your web site should contain no more than three colors. Also remember that your body text should be a contrasting color from your background. There’s nothing worse than trying to read yellow text on a pink background. It may look cool to you, but cause your visitors to go cross-eyed.

2) Confusing Navigation

If your visitors cannot find their way around your web site, they’ll leave…plain and simple. Your navigation should be logical and consistent on every page. Studies have also shown that web surfers prefer the standard left or right side navigation over other layouts.

3) Inconsistent Font Face and Size

Just like your navigation, you’ll want your font style and size to be consistent. If your home page text is in Arial font, size 10, make sure the rest of your pages adhere to the same font style and size. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and you may need to use a smaller font for disclaimers, terms and conditions, etc. However, in most cases, you should use the same style on every page.

4) Long Paragraphs

This is a common mistake made by many webmasters.

To make your web pages easy to read, remember to break up your paragraphs often and use subtitles. Most people will skim when trying to find what they’re looking for so when your paragraphs are small and separated by logical headings, it will make it much easier on your visitor’s eyes.

5) Misplaced or Lack of Contact Info

Don’t make people search for contact information…especially if you’re selling goods and services. Always have your contact information visible on every page of your web site. Hidden contact information looks fishy and makes people leery of doing business with you.

6) Long Page Loads

If your web site does not fully load within 10 seconds, your HTML files are too large. Check your graphics. Are you using too many? Do they need to be resized? Make sure your multi-color graphics (photos) are saved in JPEG format and use GIF files for solid colors and poster art. Also remember to use table height and width tags in your HTML code because your text will load before the images. Animated graphics also slow the page loading time tremendously.

7) No Meta Tag Info

Meta tags are HTML code invisible to the human eye but read by many of the search engines. While these don’t have as much of an impact as they used to, many search engines still rely on this information when displaying your site in the search results.

Use of Frames

Frames can become somewhat of a burden. Many search engines do not list pages with frames, they don’t allow visitors to bookmark certain pages, and they can cause printing problems.

9) Scrolling Text

The marquee tag is a cool feature, but many overuse it. Although the idea of scrolling text may seem appealing, remember that not everyone will find this idea entertaining. If you do decide to use it, make sure you clearly evaluate whether or not it is adding value or enhancing your page. There are some instances where this feature works, but there are many where it doesn’t. Use it very sparingly.

If you have a sentence or two that you feel is very important to your readers, don’t make them wait eons for the message to scroll across your screen — just use plain text and save the scrolling text for the less significant messages or perhaps sub-titles.

10) Wrong Resolution

The average web surfer surfs with their PC screen set to an 800 x 600 resolution. If you create your web pages to fit a 1024 x 768 resolution or higher, keep in mind many people will have to scroll left and right to see your entire page. I don’t know about you, but I find that quite annoying.

If you want your web page to be displayed correctly in all resolutions, create your web pages with tables and use percentages to define your table widths instead of actual pixel values. For example, if the table width is set to 100% instead of “800″ then it will take up 100% of the screen no matter what the PC resolution is set to.

About The Author

Lisa Irby is the author of 2 Create a Web Site — a site that encourages you to plan accordingly and GET THE FACTS before diving into the web site creation process.

http://www.2CreateAWebSite.com

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Semantic Web Modelling Centre of Excellence

Introduction

Semantic Web Development and dealing with complexity is a tricky issue. Representing information is a problem where complexity can preclude any single approach. In order to find our way around large quantities of information it needs to be structured. But the information already exists and is still being created, so this makes it a moving target.

I’m sure such matters will be covered at the www2006 conference at Edinburgh 23-26 May http://www2006.org/. Kurt Cagle refers to this in his article on complexity on his Understanding XML blog at http://www.understandingxml.com/.

The structuring of ontologies from the top down can be useful, but can only be achieved where the ontology developers have some control over the information. Much of web development and other creation of information is bottom up, in that there is no controlling authority. This is good for inclusiveness and speed of development, and something that encourages community, and encourages individuals to create their own content, which is a good thing. In his interview with the British Computer Society Tim Berners-Lee http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4 answers a question on ontologies. He talks of a top level ontology that can be created to hold certain terms and the need to find out who is using these terms, so that other web pages and databases can be categorised. This would be achieved using URIs (Universal Resource Identifier) and RDF (Resource Description Framework). In answer to what Tim Berners-Lee hopes to achieve, he talks of this bottom up development that is going on, using blogs, and wikis etc and a possible approach of ‘web science’ - ‘the science and engineering of web based things that have a bottom up Web-like structure’.

I think this approach is highly relevant to my PhD research on user-driven programming, with University of the West of England (UWE - Bristol). Not everyone has the time to learn programming especially if their main expertise is elsewhere. They then have to ask others to do the development for them and this leads to delays and mis-understandings. The approach advocated here could enable visual creation of software by members of a community. Members of this community would not need advanced programming skills if other members with more advanced development skills could create a suitable interface for the creation of software. This could be achieved in a similar way to that used in visual web page creation tools, or word processor and spreadsheet software. Also the members who do possess advanced skills could provide ways of sorting, searching and navigating the programs created using the visual development tools. Members could work with either or both groups, according to their skills and interests.

A good first step would be to link communities and sites that have a mix of those with advanced software skills who want to encourage and enable others to learn to program, and of new starters who want to learn. This could involve those who are willing to try out new techniques to make it easier for new starters to train learn and gain experience.

Sir Tim-Berners-Lee’s interview - http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3337.

This talk by Nigel Shadbolt explains research about coping with diverse sources of information - http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3043.

This article by Bill Thompson for the BBC technology site examines new developments in Web 2.0 technologies - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4842498.stm.

I am a Researcher Associate in the final year of my. I specialise in applying Semantic Web techniques. My current research is on a technique of ‘User Driven Modelling/Programming’. My intention is to enable non-programmers to create software from a user interface that allows them to model a particular problem or scenario. This involves a user entering information visually in the from of a tree diagram. I am attempting to develop ways of automatically translating this information into program code in a variety of computer languages. This is very important and useful for many employees that have insufficient time to learn programming languages. I am using the Protege ontology editor developed from a project of Stanford University. I am looking to research visualisation, and visualisation techniques to create a human computer interface that allows non experts to create software.

My Home Page is at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/
My blog is http://userdrivenmodelling.blogspot.com/

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