Get Your Small Business Online in 2009

Despite a slowdown in the economy, leading research organizations including eMarketer are forecasting online shopping to grow at approximately 6% over the next year, while in-store retail sales continue to decline.
At a time when all businesses are trying to maximize every sales opportunity, it is amazing to find that nearly 40% of small businesses still [...]

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6 Signs You Need a New eCommerce Website

The web is like everything else in life; it constantly changes. This being the case, what may have worked for your business online a few years ago, may no longer be working today. This is why it is critical to choose an ecommerce platform that is highly scalable that can continue to grow with your [...]

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Web Site Navigation Design

Your web site’s primary and secondary navigation is important to users, search engines, and the overall success of your site. User-friendly site navigation is important to help both search engine crawlers and visitors find their way through your site. Therefore, the easier you make this process, the more pages search engines will index – and [...]

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Guidelines for Good Web Site Design – Part 9 of 9

Consistency
In this final post of our series on Guidelines for Good Web Design, we’re wrapping it up with the element that ties all of the other pieces together – consistency.
Consistency is critical to good web design to ensure everything matches. Heading sizes, fonts, colors, spacing, navigation, etc. Good web design should be consistently themed to [...]

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Guidelines for Good Web Site Design – Part 8 of 9

Crisp and Sharp Web Design
Keeping your web site design looking crisp and sharp requires thinking at the pixel level. Sure, everything in your CSS will be pixel perfect, but in software such as Photoshop you’re going to have to work for it. To achieve a sharp design for your images and graphics you have to:

Keep [...]

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Guidelines for Good Web Site Design – Part 7 of 9

Alignment in Web Design
All good web designers understand the importance of using alignment to create associations between visual elements of a web page, which helps site visitors easily understand the objects on the page.
Alignment in web design works by visually associating multiple elements in a way that the elements become instinctively related to one another [...]

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Guidelines for Good Web Site Design – Part 6 of 9

Usability
As important as a great looking website is, it’s not going to perform well if it isn’t easy for your visitors to interact with. Therefore, web designers need to ensure they provide for both eye appeal and a site that’s designed for easy use.
Although, we have previously covered some areas of usability such as navigation [...]

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Guidelines for Good Web Site Design – Part 5 of 9

Text and Formatting
The text you choose for your web site is among the most important design elements you need to consider. Even though you may have always liked Arial font on previous sites, a new project may not necessarily look as good with this tried and true font. To set off the overall look of [...]

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Guidelines for Good Web Site Design – Part 4 of 9

Design to Build
Thanks to CSS layouts building great looking websites has gotten a lot easier, but you still need to do some thinking while you’re in the ‘design’ mode. Things you want to consider include:
Can it be done? – Are your design ideas compatible with current standards? If not you may have fonts that don’t [...]

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5 Tips for a More Compelling Homepage

We’ve all heard that the homepage is the most important page of our web site. Even though this has been ingrained into our brains over the years, many of us are still guilty of wasting this precious piece of online real estate. So now it’s time to look at your homepage with an objective eye [...]

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