The Internet is getting larger and larger with the passing of every day. While the amount of data stored on the web is spiralling by the hour, the prospect of an information overload is becoming a major issue to web developers.
 
Far from settling down with web pages expiring and making way for fresh information, we're on the verge of a domain crisis. Some websites now host millions of pages, and the boom of user generated content has given way to a major discussion amongst the Internet community. How can we keep track of information?
 
A site map, technically speaking, is an index of all the content included on a particular website. As the Internet continues to grow and websites continue to add to their work, common users are finding it increasingly difficult to seek out the specific information that they're looking for.
 
Gone are the days when information architecture brought the challenge of modelling navigation for 5 or 6 pages of static content. But if the Internet is to continue to grow, more websites need to start providing site maps to help the every day user. Currently, less than 50% of all commercial websites actually have a site map.
 
Can you imagine opening a book and trying to find the paragraph of information that you're looking for without a content or index page? Consider the same prospect for a cautious Internet user on a site brimming with dynamic content.
 
If your website is starting to branch out in to various categories, you need to be prepared to sacrifice convenience for your clients. A site map is the least you can offer, a means to navigate your content. Research proves that users will rarely persist with a website if they don't find what they're looking for within those first vital clicks.
 
Yet even the inclusion of a site map is by no means a guarantee that it'll actually be any help. So what are the tell tale signs of a poorly designed map?
 
First, it's important to consider what's driving your visitor to the site map in the first place. They're obviously having problems navigating the content of the site and wish to be given a shove in the right direction. You wouldn't believe how many web developers let this small fact go to waste and design crazily inventive site maps; even using Macromedia Flash - to try and express themselves.
 
A lost user doesn't want to have to crawl through complicated map interfaces to find the right link. Categorizing HTML links is a nice start to making your site map more usable, but presentation is extremely important.
 
Many designers will add expand functions : the ability to minimize or maximise categories to save screen space. While screen space is certainly important, so is serving the purpose of a site map. Its purpose isn’t to make the user search out more links. All the major categories of your website should be present on that one screen. How many atlases do you see where the continent has to be clicked on to reveal the countries? Not many, and with good reason.
 
It's possible to use a variety of site map generating programs to create your guide, but the end result isn't always as pretty as you'd hope for. Software from Google and SiteXPert provide nice functionality, but you know your website better than a machine. It's important that you program the categories yourself since the people using it aren't going to be computer bots. Human logic certainly prevails when it comes to providing usability on a perfect site map.
 
Before you try to implement your site structure, make a note of the categories that you can divide it in to. Make these the basis of your map and divide slowly in to further sub-sections. But don't go crazy. Too many sub-sections will lead to too many choices. A key factor of good website usability rests upon narrowing choices for the user. The less they have to consider, the more likely they are to reach their destination.
 
Your navigation should be absolutely basic. Now isn't the time to provide rollover images, scroll bar menus or search functions. Nor is it the time to try out your new CSS themes. The priority should be to present the categories in a clear and simple manner. Visualisation of the site content is crucial.
 
One of the great deterrents to stop designers from implementing site maps is the idea of having to update it with every page that gets added. While it's possible to use a CMS (Content Management System) and draw up a tree of pages automatically, there really is little way of avoiding the process of manually updating your map. That is, of course, unless you have the opportunity to implement a database. Database-driven site maps are excellent in the sense that they can add links automatically to your index, through a couple of simple table fields in MS Access or mySQL.
 
As you can probably imagine, automation makes site mapping a whole lot easier in the long run. You can negotiate the issue on a dynamic website by providing an extra field for each page submission which specifies where the link should appear on the site map; if at all.
 
Content management is very much the future for web development. It can make site mapping an afterthought. You don't even have to worry about it.
 
There's one last thing to remember and it's the most important consideration of all. Can your users find the site map? Hundreds upon hundreds of websites will go through the painstaking bother of mapping their every last page, only to bury the link to the site map. What was the point?
 
User accessibility surveys have illustrated that users refer to the top right hand of the screen when they require help. This is where your link to a Help page, or in this case, a Site Map should go. Make sure it's clearly visible and coded in to EVERY page. Your users should never be more than one click away from the assistance that they require. Follow that simple principle and you may begin to notice a slight increase in the number of visits from previously bemused clients!

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Building web graphics can be one of the hardest or easiest tasks you face as a web designer, depending on the purpose of your website. While some websites will pride themselves with the fanciest graphical interfaces on the Internet, others will be happy with a few HTML tables and a simple header graphic.
 
There are plenty of programs catering for graphics design, and if you're serious about getting in on the act, you should have one of the following packages:
  
- Adobe Photoshop CS2
- Adobe ImageReady
- Macromedia Fireworks
- ULead PhotoImpact
- Jasc PaintShop Pro
- Xara Xtreme
 
While all of the above programs are relatively similar in terms of the available features, Adobe Photoshop remains by far the most popular choice of software. For the most comprehensive graphical development package, you'd be well advised to invest in Adobe's premium product.
 
Once you've opened your design suite, you'll usually find a wide variety of tools and effects that can be applied to your work. It's worth noting that you may need to have an image open for these options to appear.
 
Shape creation tools, paintbrush menus and various selection options are usually displayed on the primary toolbar.
 
The development of graphics is largely dependant on the usage of layers. We use layers to add different levels of content to our graphical designs. For example, if you've been developing a piece of traditional art, you might like the idea of applying a border around the edge. To add borders, it's a good idea to use a transparent layer and apply a 1-pixel stroke. This will add a neat border, without hard-printing it on to the original image. In the same way that we don't paint a border on to a portrait!
 
Once you have an open canvas to design your web graphic, there are many different techniques that can be used to get the job done. You'll find thousand of web graphic tutorials on the Internet, but to become a great designer, you should be keen to learn the art of your craft. Explore the various options and experiment thoroughly, even if it doesn't lead to something that can be used on the web.
 
There are also several in-built features which can be used to make graphic design easier. Patterns, textures and brushes are incredibly popular and you can create some intriguing graphics with them. Don't let that be an excuse to get lazy though. It's easy to apply an impressive little pattern and consider the job done; but you won't win any awards for originality.
 
A great graphic designer has an eye for the innovative. To create unique work, you don't need to know the obscenely complicated methods from tutorials on the Internet. You simply need to learn what each tool does, and how to implement it.
 
Blending effects are another commonly used technique to give a piece that extra finishing touch. Have you ever seen an outer glow around an image, or a box-like shadow to create emphasis? This is all done through the blending effects menu, it might be named something slightly different depending on your choice of software.
 
As the years pass, graphic editing utilities are becoming incredibly sophisticated and the blending effects are advancing. Popular features include:
  
- Inner glow : Creates a lightened effect inside the perimeter of the image.
- Outer glow : Creates a lightened effect outside the perimeter of the image.
- Beveling : Creates an engraved look, or adds a groove to an image. 
- Inner shadow : Creates a heavy shadow inside the perimeter of an image.
- Outer shadow : Creates a heavy shadow outside the perimeter of an image.
- Stroke : Creates a stroke of pixels, or a border - on the perimeter of the image. 
- Gradient : Applies a transition of colors over the top of the image.
 
These are the widely accepted features that you'll find in most graphical development suites. Photoshop, in particular, comes with many more filters and image manipulation tools that can also be applied. Be sure to explore your software and determine what features are available to you.
 
As tempting as it may be to revamp your website with fancy graphics all over, be sensible about how far you go with your designs. Are your web graphics utilizing lots of solid color? It's amazing how many designers will save blocks of images in GIF or JPEG format, when a simple HTML tag for the background of a table cell would do the trick.
 
Websites using lots of web graphics are typically much slower to load. This can be a problem depending on who you plan to serve your content to. A gaming audience, for example, is likely to have high spec computers and thus, make better candidates for your slower loading designs. Optimization is certainly important, and by limiting web graphics to the bare essential inclusions, you can do wonders for your loading times.
 
How does this affect your web graphic design specifically? Well, it puts important emphasis on how you save your files. GIF format is great for compression although you should be aware that it compresses via rows and not columns. This means that if you have a lot of vertical lines in your image, it won't compress as well. JPEG should be used for photographic work and pixel intensive designs.
 
You can also take the simple step of resizing images to improve web performance. By scaling the images down, you can reduce their physical size. Be aware that resizing an image with text can cause problems due to the way that the proportion is altered; it can look pretty horrific if you're not careful.
 
If you're going to scale an image down, you should make sure you restore the original ratio. Scaling images upwards is extremely inconvenient and shouldn't be practiced unless you're working with vectors.
 
The art of building web graphics doesn't develop on its own accord. It takes many hours of practice to come to terms with the many tools at a web designer's disposal. But the rewards are obvious. A great web designer is a great web designer for life, and the ability to produce good graphics will prove invaluable as you develop your site

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Can you imagine a web without color? It makes for an interesting vision indeed. Where would we be with only plain black and white to make use of? You can forget those intricate layered interfaces, and the animation can join the scrap heap too. So much of our modern design work is centered on the use of various web colors to create an atmosphere. Depending on how a designer implements it, a well chosen color scheme can make a homepage stand out from your screen.
 
Unfortunately, a poorly chosen scheme can burn the eyes so horribly that we're tempted never to return.
 
But why is color such an essential component of a self-respecting web page? The truth is, if you design a website which uses every last color in the rainbow, you'll be making an even bigger mistake than somebody who chooses, say, pink for a male magazine.
 
Color sets the mood, tone and first impression for your site. Of course, it doesn't work alone. But it's one of the bare essentials of good design practice.
 
We use color for a variety of purposes, ranging from text to table cell backgrounds. The standard HTML configuration is to output text in black and backgrounds in white. We can change this easily by dipping in to the code and changing the FONT tag, or the BODY tag, as shown below.

• <font color=”…”>
• <body bgcolor=”…”>

Any paragraph classed under that particular style set would have white text. This is a rather basic example of how we use HTML and CSS together to provide global settings for color.
 
Why don't we simply use the FONT tag for everything? Well, if you can imagine going through how ever many pages your website has, and reassigning a color to each FONT tag, you'll be busy for a long time indeed. CSS is extremely efficient in comparison to hard coded HTML.
 
You may have noticed in the example above, the color is defined as "White". This is, technically speaking, very bad practice.
 
Whenever you assign a color to an HTML tag, or CSS for that matter, you can use either the name of the shade, or the equivalent hexadecimal value.
 
Hexadecimal is simply a way of providing an RGB triplet (CMY triplets are not available) to the browser, which renders the exact color on to the user's monitor. While stipulating "White" or "Red" can show the same results, what your browser associates as red, somebody else's might associate with a deep mauve. Hexadecimal takes the issue away from the browser's interpretation, creating a more consistent color scheme.
 
For example, changing a tag of "White" to "#FFFFFF" will make no difference whatsoever when you view the page in your browser. Both terms equate to white. But if you choose a color such as grey, various browsers have various different definitions of what constitutes as being grey.
 
When we break the Hex code down to its core essence, we're left with three hexadecimal numbers. These exist in pairs of two, as you can see below.
 
# FF (< First triplet - RED) 00 (Second triplet - GREEN) 00 (Third triplet - BLUE)
 
Speaking in hexadecimal jargon, this attribute will produce red color. The reason for that is because the red triplet is FF, which is the strongest hue you can have in hexadecimal. The two instances of "00" represent the lowest hue you can have on the scale, in the same way as a traditional zero effectively.
 
When the code is sent to the browser, and subsequently your monitor, the hex code will send a little message to display the entire red channel, and none of the blue or green channel. This gives us red output.
 
As you can imagine, the hexadecimal format offers much more leeway for manipulation than standard color name attributes. There are hundreds of possible hex combinations, but we can shorten them down to what's known as the 216 browser-safe color codes. These are colors that can be produced to the exact same effect on an old-fashioned 8-bit monitor.
 
When it comes to designing websites with maximum usability, you'll probably find that this becomes a factor in how you go about your work.
 
If you select a hex code, and it doesn't fall within the browser-safe color set, a process called dithering will take place. We don't like dithering. This is where the browser will evaluate the code and try to output the closest match that it can find. Subsequently, the dumber browsers on the market can make a complete mess of your carefully designed color theme.
 
How do you know whether your hex is a browser-safe color? The important thing to take note of is that valid hex codes contain a small number of possible options. These are 0, 3, 6, 9, C and F. If your code contains any figure which doesn't fall within those bounds, you run the risk of inconsistent design. For further information on valid codes, be sure to check out the w3 consortium website, which is the holy grail of all web usability resources.
 
Once you have the basics of applying color attributes, you can begin to enjoy experimenting and trying to find the right theme for your site. After all, colors can be used to provide some extra zest to those plain white tables, or the default black text. Feel free to experiment and play with your CSS Macromedia's Dreamweaver is a good tool for this.
 
But stop for a moment. How many of the biggest websites on the Net actually pack their templates with color? Think of Ebay. Think of Amazon. Think of MySpace. In all of these cases, you'll find that white is the most common color. There's good reason for this. White space is one of the most useful weapons in the web designer's armory.
 
White is the perfect tone for your standard web template, presuming that you don't have a pre-arranged theme to meet. It's clear, easy on the eyes, and acts as an excellent compliment to your text and images. If you scout around the Net, you'll generally find that most websites make good use of white.
 
Black, on the other hand, should be used as an absolute last resort!
 
Color themes should be employed across the entire website, not just parts of it. You will also have to make the decision between a two-color template, and a three-color template. What's wrong with four-color and five-color, you ask? It's not discriminating, it's just widely accepted that any more than three global colors and you won't have a theme at all.
 
A two-color theme can prove equally unattractive in the sense that contrast is important. Don't get in to the habit of using the same color for everything. You should use it sensibly to draw your visitor's eye where you want it.
 
Color is the one attribute which can give your website the fresh feel that you desire, so use it carefully and avoid those black backgrounds!

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When you have a commercial website online, it's natural to want to expose it to as many potential clients as possible. And the same logic can be applied to any website, for any purpose. If we didn't want to receive exposure across the web, we wouldn't be using the Internet.
 
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO - is the method of maximizing potential search listings when a user enters a keyword in to a search engine. It's actually a sub-section of the more expansive Search Engine Marketing (SEM) definition. The concept is applied in several different ways, and depending on the business approach, the ultimate goal may differ considerably.
 
There's two important points to understand here. SEO can be used to maximize the quantity of SERP (Search Engine Result Page) links. Or it can be used to distinguish the relevance. Why does it matter? Surely the age old expression of any publicity being good publicity is true? Not necessarily.
 
Consider the analogy of a packed shopping mall, with every last shop front vying for your attention. As you walk through the mall, you don't have the eyes to see inside and view every last product in the shop. Nor would you have any idea what the store actually specializes in. The store front is used to draw your attention and demonstrate what the customer can expect if they decide to enter inside.
 
You could take one approach and fill your shop window with just about every attention grabber under the sun. You could pretend to sell DVDs, books, videos, clothes, sports gear and maybe even mortgages. Such a shop window would attract a lot of visitors; but how many of them will stick around when they enter your store and find that, well, actually you only trade children's toys?
 
On the other hand, you could fill your shop window with relevant information on the real content of your shop, providing more precise information including what to expect inside. While you might find a lot more visitors go passing by, the chances are that they weren't potential clients in the first place. This method is much more likely to generate sales, and is what's known as a conversion action.
 
The same concept applies to Meta keywords and Meta descriptions. These are the holy grail of SEO, and the reason why some websites will draw in potential customers, while poorly prepared sites will go unnoticed regardless of the standard of the service, or the actual content.
 
A Meta description is essentially a brief summary of the current page, and one which search bots and spiders will cache. You won't see it by browsing normally. To read the Meta description, you'll have to go to the actual source of the page. That's irrelevant in the long run however, since you don't want your users to be viewing Meta information.
 
Meta keywords are short phrases and terms which you can use to appeal to certain SERPs. For example, if you pack your content with relevant terms which a user would search for on Google, you have a higher chance of being picked out on SERPs.
 
There are two sub-sets of SEO, and opinion is divided on what constitutes belonging to a certain set. These are called White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.
 
White Hat SEO is the traditionally fair way of increasing the number and quality of search listings via natural means. Black Hat SEO, as you can probably imagine, is the opposite.
 
Black Hat applies to those who try to use methods of misleading search engines in to getting a better ranking than the content deserves. These methods include - but certainly aren't limited to spamdexing, cloaking and general abuse of the various search engine algorithms.
 
For the purpose of being fair, and not getting your website blacklisted, we're going to concentrate on ways that you can use SEO the lawful way to get a better ranking. Be warned that while Black Hat might bring you a short burst of activity, it will also get you banned from indexing altogether when the engine catches on.
 
First things first, what do we gain by using the White Hat method? The answer is desirable traffic and increased sales leads. These benefits weight far more heavily than a surge of useless clicks from users you'll never see again.
 
You can optimize your website right from the very top of the page. No, we're not talking about the header image or the first line of content. We're talking about the actual title which displays in the browser toolbar.
 
You should always use a unique and relevant title; especially on the pages which matter most to your website. God forbid using a bland title like "My Sales Page". Make your title meaningful and consider the impetus it would give a potential client to want to see what's on the rest of the page.
 
While a relevant title is crucial, it pales in significance to the importance of using specific terminology throughout your content. Don't throw vague definitions across your website. Match specific useful keywords and phrases which a potential client would enter in to a search engine. These are vital for drawing in the right kind of web traffic.
 
Many websites face problems when they decide to implement a log-in or member area to their site. Remember that the spider techniques employed by search engines only have the capability to access pages which don't require any input.
 
Requiring a user to register before viewing a certain page will rule out the opportunity of a search bot indexing the protected content. There's no real way to get around this, other than to make as much of your website accessible to bots as possible.
 
There are also several scripts which detect spider visitors and apply certain permission levels to access all of the content. You can find these on many varieties of forum software across the web, but it opens up an entirely different debate over security and unwanted access to files.
 
The inclusion of a robots.txt file in your main directory will be read by search engine spiders. This file is your opportunity to exclude certain directories from being indexed. As you can imagine, this is a tremendously valuable tool and a commonly implemented one in web development.
 
Above all else, remember that a search bot will only find a page if it finds a genuine HTML link. Flash and JavaScript links will NOT be followed by the spider programs and if that's the only route to the page, it won't be indexed. 
 
By following those simple golden rules, you should find that SEO can play a large role in generating more leads for your website. It might not happen overnight, and it might not happen at all, but search engine optimization is a key method of presenting your site to the correct audience. Master it and you'll be one step closer to conquering the SEM minefield.

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What makes a great web designer? Is it the ability to learn countless Photoshop tutorials, or the ability to store the largest bank of HTML knowledge?
 
The answer is neither. Every skill that you ever learn as a web designer is absolutely redundant if you're not capable of targeting a desired website audience.
 
The first step you have to take before you write the very first HTML tag is to ask yourself who you plan to reach with your new website. Is it designed to sell a product? Is it an archive of information? Maybe its purpose is simply to look pretty and act as a portfolio for your work.
 
Whatever the reason, optimizing content towards the correct audience is imperative. Consider the target market that you're looking to crack and imagine in your head what that audience would like to find in a website.
 
Relevant images are a great way to reach out to your desired web audience. An image can convey more than any page of words, if you choose the right one that is. There are several stock photo services offering royalty free images for use with your website, and these are extremely important for the purpose of getting the right message across.
 
Make sure you select images appropriate for your website theme. Is it designed for teenagers with a sporting interest? Abstract business imagery probably isn't the right choice then. It sounds like common sense, but you'd be amazed how many web designers select images based on how pretty they look rather than whether they're relevant to the content.
 
This brings us on to the much debated topic of flash content. How many times have you visited a website which requires some kind of browser plug-in to operate a fancy animation? So many designers choose to flood their websites with artsy multimedia videos which add absolutely nothing to the browsing experience of a user.
 
If you're working on a business template, or trying to sell a service, the last thing you should be thinking of doing is loading your page with flash animation. New web technologies are developing all the time, but the purpose of a business is to reach out to as many potential clients as possible.
 
How many clients are going to purchase your service if they receive a "Plug-in required" error on your homepage?
 
There are exceptions, of course. If you're designing a website for a gaming clan for example, it's highly likely that your web audience is in possession of the latest web technology and capable of supporting additional plug-ins.
 
Consider download times. Is your audience going to accept a long wait to access the content that they're looking for? It's extremely important to cater for the connection speeds of the people that you're pitching your website to. Make sure that your website has optimized loading times if you're aiming it at the type of users who aren't computer savvy with lightening fast connections.
 
Believe it or not, there are still a substantial number of users out there with connection speeds on 56k. If you want to sell a product to them, or provide a pleasurable browsing experience, make sure that your content and web graphics are optimized for maximum web performance.
 
One of the first jobs you'll have to tend to with a new web template is the CSS planning. CSS (or Cascading Style Sheet) allows for extremely important modifications to the style of a web page. Why is this important for reaching the right audience?
 
If you can imagine having a website with several content authors, consider a few people using Arial as a font, a few more using bright orange Times New Roman, and then one stray typist writing everything in italics. You can forget about appealing to the right audience. A website without a set style isn't going to appeal to ANY audience.
 
CSS lets you customize your website and apply global styles which must be adhered to by content authors. Many a fine template has been ruined by awful formatting, and CSS takes this danger out of the picture. If you want to format your content to fit in with a certain theme "business or casual" CSS is definitely the way to go. Alternatives include new techniques such as XSL (Extensible Style Sheet Language).
 
Once you have your web template in place, and a style sheet employed, it's time to create the actual content. Don't blow it now. Always remember the audience that you're aiming to please, and the kind of language that there sort of people would use to communicate.
 
Your website is the layer of web communication between yourself and your clients or visitors. Talk to them in a language that they're comfortable with. If you're producing a website for teenagers, don't bombard them with corporate talk. You'll lose your audience in seconds, and all that intricate design work will go to waste.
 
It's important to get the balance right between providing relevant content to your users and flooding the pages with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). While it's certainly not impossible to make your content search engine friendly and readable at the same time, you're probably going to need to make the decision at some point and choose where your priorities lie.
 
The same decision needs to be taken for your website navigation. Will you be using graphical buttons for your linking? If you do, consider that a search engine can't spider the content of an image.
 
Are you concerned about how your website ranks on Google and the number of visitors it attracts? Is being search engine friendly a big deal to you? Or are you devoted to keeping hold of the users who reach your site and losing out on possible SEO-driven traffic? The choice is up to you, but the answer should be reached BEFORE you begin to design your website!

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It's the question which has baffled some of the finest web designers you're ever likely to find. Unfortunately, there's no easy answer. But that doesn't stop people from wondering; how can I attract visitors to my website?
 
The reality is that competition on the Internet from rival websites all vying for the same consumers has reached such a fever pitch that it's incredibly difficult to gain an advantage. How can we market a website and gain attention, if many of the techniques are being employed by other developers across the Net? The answer is to steer clear of basing your business approach on marketing techniques alone.
 
The World Wide Web is saturated in terms of the effectiveness that early traffic generating schemes are likely to enjoy. That's not to say that we should avoid advanced concepts such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing), but we should expand on them.
 
Much depends on the nature of the website itself. A commercial website will gain clients through word of mouth and satisfied testimonials. A hobbyist website's best hope, in the modern day, is to create a "buzz factor" for its brand.
 
Websites such as MySpace and YouTube have grown at a frightening rate due to the buzz factor of user generated content, which has become arguably the most rewarding phase of online marketing.
 
Some websites are now making use of what's known as the folksonomy methodology. This is where a site relies on its users to generate content and data to attract further users. Obviously, you can't operate a folksonomy approach if you're running a commercial website where the image is ingrained, but the trends are switching.
 
User generated content is a great source of free publicity and you're likely to catch on like wildfire through the blogging scene, if your website fills the criteria.
 
For those of us faced with the prospect of building a website from the ground up, and attracting users with our own content, the task isn't quite as easy.
 
The focus on search engine ranking is hard to overcome for all of its importance. Websites like Google and Yahoo Search remain the number one source for referrals to popular websites. The simple reality is that if a web user wants to find something, they're more than likely going to use one of the major search engines. Directories and categorized listings used to be just as popular, but are quickly falling out of favor as the search algorithms increase their efficiency.
 
The use of keywords and metadata is a useful start for any budding webmaster. It may sound strange, but the Internet has evolved to the point where we now need to provide information about information. This is what metadata does. It serves information to the various search engines, and with some carefully planned SEO, it's possible to gain a higher search ranking.
 
While the Search Engine Marketing arena is widely regarded as a useful tool in generating web exposure, it remains a complimentary feature. In other words, it won't stand the test of time if your content isn't up to scratch.
 
Web users tend to be more skeptical of content these days, so if you don't deliver on your keywords, or dress a site for search engines only, forgetting the importance of human readability: you'll fall out of favor in a matter of weeks.
 
Of course, if you're that determined to launch your website with as many visitors as possible, there are paid solutions available. You can purchase advertising space and draw traffic from other websites, but ultimately, is this a long term solution to you? You'll tend to find that the most popular websites stay on top through branding alone, and rarely have to resort to paid advertising for their activity.
 
As an alternative to the paid method of advertising, you can sometimes strike up deals with other webmasters to provide content in exchange for an author's link. This is a simple way to channel traffic to your own website, and free if you're willing to work with other sites.
 
How often do you find that a visitor will drop by your site once, have a brief look, and never return? You'd be shocked at the facts and figures of how regular this occurs, but is it so hard to believe? Most poorly planned websites are designed with a lack of interactivity and flair. Once you have users on your site, do whatever it takes to keep them. Offer a newsletter system so that you can inform them of updates. Just don't let your site name slip to the back of their mind, since the chances are, they won't be returning anytime soon.
 
A registration system is great for getting a steady influx of regular visitors, but you have to have something to offer. Whether it's a discussion forum : VBulletin or Invision Power - or simple premium benefits, there has to be a motive to want to come back. You'll soon find that the problem isn't so much attracting users to a website; it's keeping them.

The good news for aspiring web designers is that absolutely anybody can design a website for the Internet. The bad news is that there's a significant difference between an ordinary web designer and a competent one.
 
So how do you set about the long and winding road towards web designing success? The most important thing to understand is that developing on the web, in any fashion, will require a great deal of patience.
 
Would you expect to learn a new language over night? You might manage a few words, in the same way that a web designer might manage to upload a few pages of limited code. But to design content for the web and implement it successfully, you need to have a grasp of a programming language. A computer doesn't have the capacity to translate your vision in to a website since it only has two states : on and off. Instead, we have to feed it instructions via a language that it can understand. For the most part, we do this with HTML (Hypertext Mark-Up Language). HTML is the translator between our human words and the computer's ability to output that image on to a page.
 
While HTML is widely accepted as the essential language behind web pages on the Internet, that doesn't mean to say that there aren't higher levels of development. Programming languages come in all shapes and sizes. Popular adaptations include, but are not limited to PHP, XML, ColdFusion, Java and ASP. These higher level languages serve a greater purpose and provide the scope for dynamic web design or database interaction. To reel off the whole list would be redundant at this stage. For the time being, you need only worry about HTML and learning its core syntax.
 
If you're human like the rest of us and appreciate the benefits of good old fashioned hard work, there's nothing stopping you from designing that inspirational website to end all. But don't underestimate the frustration and discarded tutorials that you're going to experience along the way.
 
The first step on the road of to web designing success is simple and it involves asking your good self a question. Do I want to design the graphics and organise how a website looks? Or do I want to provide the content and functionality? They are two fundamental and absolutely crucial differences - the ultimate separator between a creative whiz who gets paid as a web designer, and a professional who earns his living as a developer.
 
Web designers do not specifically develop the content of a website. A good web designer simply makes it his goal to provide an effective web template that can be handed over to a developer. The developer will then cut it in to fragments of computer-fed programming language- usually HTML with CSS - and mould it for the end user's good.
 
Do you want to be involved with the design stage, rather than the implementation? If you do, congratulations, you've just taken your first step towards becoming a great web designer.
 
Perhaps the greatest way to get an eye for various web techniques is hidden in this very sentence. What's that you say? The key is to use your eyes. Explore the web and look at other people's work. Nearly every website known to man has taken inspiration from somewhere else and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Tutorials will get you only so far before you have to take the step of analysing existing websites and using them to produce your own design work.
 
That isn't to say that you should rip off Amazon or EBay and plug them in to your own identical web template. Far from it. But a great web designer will have an intricate eye for the small details. Pay special attention to the way that professional looking sites utilise color and text.
 
Of course, there's only so much time you can spend gazing at other people's creations before you're straining at the leash and ready to be launched in to your first web designing project. If you're serious about learning web design, it's extremely recommended that you invest in a suitable commercial package capable of producing graphical interfaces.
 
If you want to become a great designer, you'll need a great designer's toolbox. Adobe Photoshop CS2 " the latest version at the time of writing " is an excellent product and perfect for any aspiring designer. Photoshop tutorials are scattered around the Internet with specific advice for customizations you can make to improve your templates. Don't start running before you've found your feet though.
 
At its very most basic, you can become a web designer by opening up Notepad, typing a few tags and uploading them to a web server. This might not be influential to the end user, and it might look like something you'd rather bin, but it's still a design.
 
While this hands-on method to web design is extremely valuable and allows the designer total control over his work, there are still other solutions on the market. Popular development tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver make use of what's known as a WYSIWYG editor to completely eliminate the problem of coding. They work by allowing the user to plot a page directly in to a graphical window. The HTML code is then automatically generated and created in an instant.
 
This form of automated coding is beneficial in the sense that it cuts development time dramatically. It is, however, a bad habit to fall in to. Dreamweaver, FrontPage and all the other development suites will generate the code with absolutely no consideration to the problems that a web designer may face in editing the file. They have a bad knack of generating scores of stray HTML code which could be handled much more efficiently by a laterally thinking web developer. It's up to you whether you choose to invest in one of these tools.
 
Remember that there are many stages to web design. The learning curve isn't so much substantial as it is never ending. Web technology is constantly evolving and a good professional designer will have to evolve with the times, refining his or her work along the way.
 
Although you should be aware that learning to design and learning to develop are two entirely different concepts, you shouldn't mistake the common ground that they share. A good designer must anticipate the problems that a developer will encounter when implementing the design. Likewise, a good developer should have an eye for basic web designing principles when the code is drawn up.
 
Ultimately, you will need access to a web server in order to present your designs to the world. This is an extremely complex talking point and every server is customised to fulfil a certain obligation. There are also considerable steps to be taken in order to choose the right web server for your personal requirements. Microsoft, for example, provides the IIS pack. Another extremely popular choice is Apache's HTTP server. Depending on what software and application your website will be required to support, it's important that you select the right server for the task. If you intend to implement a database of some kind, choosing the right server is absolutely vital.
 
You will also require some form of client to upload your pages to the web, presuming that your server is located on somebody else's machine. They don't get there on their own accord and the investment of a competent File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client is highly recommended. Programs such as SmartFTP or CuteFTP provide a great interface to get to grips with accessing your web server.
 
Learning to design a site isn't as simple as creating it and letting it rot in My Documents. You need to be able to understand the basics of how a server functions, or have the resources to hire a web developer to do all of the work after those initial designing stages. In general, you'll become a much better designer by learning to appreciate the developmental side of your work. Not to mention, you'll save yourself some invaluable resources in the process!
 
As a starting point, you've taken your first step. Take the time to consider what draws your attention to a well designed site. By picking up on the subtle flourishes, you will be leaving yourself in good stead to master the art of web design.

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A small search on Google will return thousands upon thousands of interface design tricks to impress web users. Most of these will consist of wild and wacky Adobe Photoshop techniques to create a visually appealing design. While this can certainly boost the appeal of a website on the surface, the art of impressing a web user extends far beyond a few snazzy graphics and a Macromedia Flash logo.
 
Truthfully, the idea of impressing with your interface design is a little misguided. The trademark of a great design is one that goes unnoticed. You don't want an audience to leave your website with the impression that the interface was the best you had to offer. A successful interface acts as a compliment to the rest of the website and highlights the ease at which a user can browse through your content.
 
We're going to look at some of the tricks you can use to transform your interface in to an efficient gateway to the rest of your content.
 
With every interface that you design, there should be one word resounding in your head; consistency. Web users love consistency.
 
As a developer, you should be looking to implement modelling standards as arranged by the w3 Consortium to tie in with accessibility and usability requirements. To do this, it may be necessary to draw up an interface flow diagram prior to coding.
 
Flow diagrams can be used to plot out how your website will operate, and they're ideal for arranging the information architecture in to an organized view. Your interface should allow navigation between every major area of your website within one click. This is an example of consistency to settle the user in to the mindset that they're not going to get lost. It sounds ridiculous, but how many times have you visited a website where one wrong click can spring up a completely different page layout? It's extremely common, but don't let that be an excuse for making the same mistake.
 
If you're a commercial website, you might have three separate sections; Products, Support and Research. A good interface design should allow users to access every parent category from any sub-page ANYWHERE on the website. This is a standard based on the idea that the most likely destinations should be readily available to your web audience, within one click.
 
Where are you placing the key information on your web page? Western users are prone to reading from left to right so the first place that they'll look is on the left of your interface. This suggests that your navigation panel belongs on that side, simply to fit in with the coordination of your western audience. As a mark of this, if you visit websites of an eastern origin, you'll find the navigation and key links on the right hand side.
 
You can place your navigation perfectly but it won't improve anything if you fall victim to the Mystery Meat Navigation disease. Ensure that all hyperlink labels are named accurately and not broad sweeping statements with a liability to be misinterpreted. Messages coded in to the interface should be concise and straight to the point.
 
A popular interface technique over the last few years has been to include layout icons as a means of linking to different sections of a site. Hyperlink icons are a terrible development practice at the best of times, but using them in your interface is unforgivable. Never rely on images to get your user from A to B. Not only does it waste your own time as a web designer, but it wastes the time of the user when they reach your page and have to decipher what a random image is supposed to mean. Text links should rarely be strayed from.
 
If you do happen to use an icon as a link, or as part of one, always use the HTML ALT tag to provide accessibility in compatibility with w3 standards.
 
While web icons are certainly risky ground to be covering in terms of your interface's efficiency, that's not to say they can't be a great compliment to user friendly buttons. You can create wonderfully complex designs in programs like Macromedia Flash, and these are good for giving the wow factor to a web page.
 
Sometimes, it can be out of our hands as developers to control all of the content that reaches a web page. This is usually the case when advertisements are placed on a page from an external source. We can, however, decide what forms of embedded advertisements make it to a page. If you wish to impress your web audience, the use of floating adverts is something that you should fight to the very bitter end.
 
It doesn't matter how great your original interface is, if you have advertisements appearing over the top of it, your audience is going to have immense trouble navigating from page to page. Consider the types of advertising that you allow on your website. And remember that these companies set out with the specific goal of making a user click on their advert. Are those rewarding banners really worth the effect that they're having on your own website?
 
Google AdSense is a great provider of non-intrusive advertisements. You can also customize them to fit in with the theme of your page, which is more than can be said for some of the third party companies that distribute code.
 
Finally, and arguably most importantly, always make sure that your interface complies with the web developing "contrast rule". This means that light text should always be displayed over dark background colors, and vice versa.
 
Interface design shouldn't be hard to master if you follow the basic guidelines of usability. It also represents one of the areas of web development which is most likely to take off with new technologies in the future. Individuals are constantly striving to produce innovative interfaces. We can expect the presentation of web applications to change dramatically over the next few years, so be prepared to spend plenty of time refining your work for the future!

Before the Internet became popular, it was nothing like the mass network of information that it is today. Web design was non-existent and the Internet simply provided a way for users to transfer text files. It really was as simple as that.
 
It wasn't until the extended development of HTML and the introduction of the FONT tag that users were given the chance to define the way that text should be presented on a monitor to a web audience.
 
Back before you and I were browsing the Internet, every last page of text was constructed from Times New Roman. Users had no choice to define alternatives such as Verdana, Arial or Georgia. It's hard to believe how drastically the font designer's landscape has shifted since those days, but the new scope for type design is endless.
 
Typography - or font design is an extremely profitable business as far as web design is concerned. You've probably seen the various websites that offer commercial fonts for a premium fee, and you've probably been pretty surprised that a few characters of color could be worth such a price.
 
Why is that the case, you ask?
 
It's primarily because creating a typeface is painstakingly hard work.
 
Websites are in debt to the hard graft of digital font designers. The Internet has developed to a stage where it's possible to embed custom fonts in to a page, and completely overhaul the theme of a site. The text may seem like an afterthought in the queue of designer's priorities, behind images and interface design, but it's actually an integral factor. Choosing the right font can make a website feel futuristic, traditional, or maybe even gothic.
 
A typeface designer is responsible for the programming and aesthetical presentation of a font. Depending on whether you plan to implement your font on the operating system or as a custom image, you need to consider the implications of the various standards around the web.
 
There are several popular commercial products which can be purchased to develop a type design. Programs such as Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Fireworks are all used on a widespread basis and have sufficient tools to aid a budding designer.
 
Illustrator is particularly useful given its supplementary toolbox for careful custom drawing. Fireworks is also catching on, and Photoshop fulfils just about every designing purpose you could imagine.
 
Technically speaking, there are many different kinds of fonts and typefaces that you can expect to work with. The most popular of all is TrueType (TTF), developed by Apple and later modified by Microsoft for Windows. When you use a typical font on a Windows-based system, you're most probably using a TrueType font. If you're designing a TrueType face, you can rest assured that it will be widely compatible across the web.
 
Another option is OpenType, a combination of TrueType and the Linux based Type1. This is the second most popular type and another good option if you're thinking about designing from scratch.
 
One of the most common instances you'll come across is the inclusion of a bitmap font in a web graphic. Bitmap types are special in the sense that they don't make use of vectors. They're actually a matrix of pixels, and thus don't make good candidates for scaling. If you try to resize a bitmap font, the text will lose its clarity and produce rough edges.
 
The benefit of bitmap types, and it's a pretty huge benefit, is that you can simply open up Photoshop or your chosen program and draw on the text in pixel form. There's no vector and glyph coding to worry about.
 
When you're implementing a letter type on a website, you need to give due consideration to the style of the site itself. Is the theme traditional? Is it casual, or formal? Try to remember that too much of the same font can be a hindrance and dilute the impact in general.
 
Always remember to design with anti-aliasing in mind. You may have seen the term alias crop up in font engineering before, it simply describes the smoothness of the edges. Setting your font to anti-alias will provide a much smoother feel to the text and is highly recommended for all type design.
 
As we've already discussed, the use of vectors is another important issue to consider. A vector based type is one which relies upon lines, curves, and mathematical calculations to predict the look of a font. The advantage of this is the loading time and efficiency.
 
If you imagine that you have a 400x400 square that you wish to output to your screen, what do you suppose is the best way to approach this? Some designers may choose to go in and color the pixels, saving it as a bitmap. Others may opt for a vector format which essentially tells the browser the angles and dimensions, and cuts down on the erroneous memory required to save the information of every last pixel.
 
As far as your fonts are concerned, there are advantages in both methods. For an aspiring designer, however, it's best to start with what you can see. Bitmap based fonts (BDF) are more responsive in that sense.
 
Even if you have the best character set imaginable, it doesn't count for much if you don't have a good grasp of kerning and tracking. When we see a typeface on our screens, what is it that tells the output device how to space the individual characters? This is where kerning is influential. When we kern, we specify the distance and attributes linked to space. While some fonts may have a spacey feel, others may overlap. Take a look at certain fonts on web pages and notice how the letters overlap each other. The process behind this concept is kerning. And as a type face designer, kerning is your best friend.
 
So let's suppose that you're looking to set the theme of your website with fonts and typefaces. Where do you start? Times New Roman can look fairly ugly and it isn't the friendliest font on the eyes by any means.
 
The golden rule of font implementation on the web, and indeed everywhere - is to never use two similar fonts on the same site. You should only ever use a maximum of two fonts on your website in the first place, but similar types are a strict no-go. Any more and the user will consider the theme inconsistent and unpredictable.
 
It's quite possible to use a tidy modern font with a dirty graffiti typeface, or any other font which happens to look different. But if you start meshing the same styles together, you'll be losing a great deal of professionalism.
 
Embedding fonts in a webpage, although it's not technically true to the term : is growing in popularity and users are opting to use small GIFs rather than HTML text.
 
When you're using fonts on the web, with the use of the FONT tag or CSS scripting, it's important to remember that fonts will only translate to a user's browser if they have that particular typeface installed on their system. If they don't, they'll simply get the default : Times New Roman.
 
While this is an inconvenience, you've probably seen interface designs with some wild and wacky fonts that you've never seen before in your life. Designers get around this by presenting the fonts to the user as GIF or JPEG images. The user doesn't have to have the font installed on the operating system to be able to view it, because the image format automatically translates every last pixel to their screen.
 
So why aren't all typefaces saved in image format? As we've already seen, some are. But text loads MUCH faster in TTF form. Can you imagine having to load an entire page of images just to read a few paragraphs? The HTML standard converts text to a format which it can output in the browser, and this is why we only have a limited number of options when we choose to select a font in the FONT tag.
 
As a global rule, if you choose to take the path of displaying text in images, always remember to provide the ALT tag. This crucial tag ensures that images which fail to load are still outputted with the "alternative" text.
 
To master the art of typography, you have to truly appreciate the delicacy with which characters and fonts are built. It's certainly a rewarding process and can be the making of a website. But it isn't an easy skill to learn.

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Once you have your interface design drawn up with content that you'd like to transfer to the website, a careful consideration needs to be given to the way in which users are going to access your information.
 
Every good website should use a form of information architecture to lay down the manner in which users can move from page to page. Navigation is crucial to the browsing experience of your web audience and you don't want them pointed in the wrong directions, do you now?
 
It's possible to make use of a CMS (Content Management System) which automatically generates web structure for your content, and enables you to oversee the hierarchy of pages. This is helpful in the sense that it adds a lot of functionality to the administration of your site, but it's also a restraint if you don't have the money to purchase a sufficient CMS or the know-how to install a freeware version. Products like Serena Collage and other popular CMS tools can be extremely expensive.
 
There are two methods that you can use for the navigation of a website : taxonomy and folksonomy.
 
Taxonomy is the approach that most of us will be familiar with. It represents the idea of dividing content in to specific categories and grouping as such. Folksonomy, on the other hand, is a relatively new formula which several of the popular community websites put to good use. If you have what's known as user generated content being created by users "rather than uploaded by the developer" it becomes plausible to organize by the author rather than the category.
 
In either case, navigation plays a crucial role to whether the general public is going to find the data that they're looking for.
 
When you design your homepage, draw up a list of links which will cascade from the first page and make a note of them. Your links should be descriptive and to the point. Don't fall under the spell of Mystery Meat Navigation. Users stand no chance of finding the content they're looking for if you have hyperlinks which simply say "Section" or "Stuff".
 
Your goal should be to limit the destinations so that your web traffic is channeled to the right areas of the site. When a user arrives on the site, they should be presented with as few links as possible. Instead of listing every last product that you have for sale, include a simple link to a "Product" section.
 
Categorizing links is an absolute must if you have a vast number of files for navigation. Organize a hierarchy of priority. Where do you want the users to go upon arriving on the homepage?
 
Simple formatting such as bold links and drawing attention to them with white space - never underestimate the power of white space: can attract your visitor's eyes to where you want them to go on the site.
 
One thing to take great caution over is the use of navigation images. It can be very tempting to produce navigation buttons and provide a little more glitz to your interface, but is it really worth it?
 
Optimized web usability is an important factor in accessible content, and if you design your navigation to make use of relevant images rather than text, you may be missing the boat so to speak.
 
Search engines, or search bots as they're known by some, will fail to spider your website correctly if the links aren't effectively formatted. If you can't escape the idea of using images for navigation, always use the HTML ALT tag to assist users and search engines alike.
 
Consider the way that you name your files and subfolders. Did you know that a website loads much faster if your first level of files is restricted to simply the homepage? When a browser points to your server, it will automatically scan the entire top directory of files until it reaches an index.html (or relevant extension) file.
 
If your top-tier folder includes an index.html file, along with several other pages, you'll be missing out on optimized loading times. Not to mention, a website with clearly defined categories can assist users if they wish to manually point their browser to a sub-section of your site.
 
A good way to look at organizing navigation is to treat your homepage as a portal and the access point for the rest of your content. Don't include a "Home" link on your homepage. It's a common mistake made by many designers and one that can disorientate the less canny users that drop by your site. They don't want to see links to pages that they're already on. If you're not using a database driven system such as Access or mySQL, this can be a little tricky to address. The solution is simply to add a distinguished style of formatting to the currently active page. Take the A HREF tag away and apply a simple bold style, for example.
 
Another issue for web designers to address is the consistency of the navigation. There is absolutely no excuse for a site infrastructure where essential links only appear on certain pages. Your key categories should be available from every sub page. This is one of the most important stages in perfecting your navigation design. A user should not have to trace backwards to find a key link.
 
Look at your website from the perspective of a complete stranger. Would you feel capable of finding a certain area of the site? If not, you have poor information architecture and your navigation design is lacking.

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HTML is typically much more advanced than people give it credit for. While advanced programming languages reap the rewards for being complex in nature, or incorporating several built-in functions, HTML provides the basis for much of the interactivity on the web.
 
We're going to look at a few of the elements that you'll have the opportunity to work with as you grow accustomed to HTML coding. These include forms, sounds and the implementation of web surveys.
 
It goes without saying that you can build a successful website without these elements; although forms are extremely popular; but you'll soon find that they can add an extra dimension to your site.
 
Sound, for example, is a great way of bringing your page to life and providing a further level of multimedia which was simply out of the equation during the early days of the Internet.
 
It's now possible to embed music in to a page so that the user hears a certain song when they browse it. The trend has been accentuated largely by the role of user generated content sites such as MySpace and Bebo. Years ago, the most you could expect was a MIDI file to play over the background, which at the time, was nice, but ultimately no more than computerized bleeps. With increasing bandwidth, a sizeable number of web users are capable of streaming audio content and this is possible through basic HTML programming.
 
Looking past the usage of MP3 and WMA to stream modern music, you need to consider that not every computer is capable of supporting sound. Maybe the user doesn't have a sound card, or maybe their speakers are switched off. Either way, you shouldn't assume that a web user is going to be able to hear audio.
 

WAVE (Waveform Audio File Format), MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and Microsoft's AU format are the most common that you'll find for simple web sound. They're also the most highly supported and thus significantly more likely to play on a standard platform.
 
To include an audio file in your web page, you will need to use one of the following code examples:

   

- <EMBED src="yourfile.mid" WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=150 AUTOSTART="false">
 
In the instance above, the file will be embedded in to the page and the user will be able to click a small icon to play the music. This is the way that we transfer videos and audio files on user generated content communities. Embedding the multimedia file in to the page allows it to be played on any website. It's extremely recommended that you set the AUTOSTART attribute to FALSE. This prevents the file from playing automatically, and is widely considered the polite thing to do. Users should have the choice as to whether they want to have your audio files blasted through their speakers.
  
- <A href="mysong.wav">Click To Hear My Song</A>
 
This second example shows how you can provide a link to an audio file, without embedding unexpected music in to the actual page. When the user clicks the link, they'll be given the chance to listen to the audio file. The only problem with this method is that it raises copyright issues if the user should decide to actually save the file to their hard drive, which is harder to do with an embedded clip.
 
Unlike other forms of media such as images, the use of audio files has been somewhat slow in catching on. But it looks as if web users are finally accepting it and in certain circumstances "where you're not intruding on the user" a small HTML code snippet can add a whole new level of interactivity to your website. But it doesn't stop there.
 
As one of the most essential components on the web, forms can be used to provide direct interactivity with your website traffic. It cannot be understated how influential forms are in the global scheme of running a website. But what are they?
 
Without them, the web would be strictly read-only. By submitting forms to a web server, through a CGI interface, we can allow users to interact with the previously static content on our pages. How else would we retrieve information from the user?
 
Whenever you register on a website, login or submit any kind of change: you're using a form. Below is the basic syntax of a standard HTML form declaration.
  
- <FORM ACTION="action_page.extension" METHOD="get/post"> </FORM>
 
Bare in mind that this is no more than the basic syntax and we would typically go on to declare several text boxes or select fields to give the form a purpose. But let's look at the basics.
 
The ACTION attribute is what we use to define where the form should be sent when the user presses the submit button. Some forms will send data to the same page, others will redirect.
 
The METHOD attribute can be either GET or POST. The difference is subtle but important. When we use the GET attribute, form data is submitted through the URL string "that's the address bar" and visible to the trained eye. The POST method is different in the sense that it submits data as part of the actual body of the form. By doing this, we can count on additional security and the data will not be visible in the URL string. But we also lose the ability to bookmark or save a page URL.
 
Inside the opening and closing form tags, we can use a variety of different input tools to specify the type of data that will be submitted, and also the presentation. These include:
  
- Text fields
- Password fields
- Select boxes
- Radio buttons
- Upload options
- Text areas
- Generic buttons
- Checkboxes
 
By using forms, there's plenty of opportunity to retrieve feedback from web visitors, and we can implement a survey to do just this.
 
Web surveys are great for collecting information straight from the audience that you're pitching your website at. Not to mention, users like to feel that their opinion counts and it should!
 
Software is available to install a survey system and save yourself a lot of time, but if you have a firm grasp of forms, including knowledge of CGI, Perl or even ColdFusion , you can write your own code and have users' opinions collected almost straight away.
 
Every commercial website should have a "How can we improve?" dialogue form somewhere, just as long as it isn't the first thing the user notices when loading the page! A survey can be as minimal or as extensive as you want it to be, but there's no doubt that HTML is capable of initiating the task, even if a server-side scripting language is required to finish the job.
 
Designing a website doesn't have to be a chore of static content creation and minimal interactivity. Indeed, most of the top websites are finding creative new ways to relate to their audience, and by making use of these additional elements, you can too!

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You'll soon find that much of your time as a web designer is spent on graphics production. There's good reason for this. It's probably the most creative area of web design, and certainly one of the most noticeable aspects when we first visit a web page. Good graphics can be the difference between a site that remains lodged in the memory of a web user, and one which fades in the time spent navigating back to Google.
 
We're going to look at some of the techniques and background knowledge required to master the art of pixel perfect design. Obviously, to manage this, you're going to need a graphical editing suite. Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks (Now owned by Adobe) are both viable solutions and well worth your investment. It can't be overstated that you get what you pay for in the case of these two excellent programs.
 
Web graphics, as you probably realize, make up more than just simple photos on a website. Graphics can extend from text replacements to the actual nature of the web layout itself.
 
While they can add an extra level of professionalism to a website, they can also add download times which are quite unprofessional in their own right. So how can we get around the deterrent of lagging pages to create a website that looks as good as it acts?
 
Optimization is important. Yet many websites will throw the sheer thought out of the window in exchange for page stretching backgrounds that consume valuable bandwidth resources. You should avoid the temptation of designing a 1024x768 splash to cover the user's entire screen. Not only will this dramatically affect the loading times of your site, but you can look "quite frankly" just a little bit silly when a user accesses your website on a different screen resolution.
 
A better solution is to use tiled background images. By doing this, we can create simple patterns to be repeated across a user's screen and give the impression of an actual background being used. The key benefits are, firstly, the sharper loading speed. And secondly, the background will adjust to the screen resolution accordingly. That's more like the pixel perfect design that we're looking for.
 
Another good practice is to reuse graphics where possible. By making separate spacers, you can cut down on further download times by simply reusing your current graphics. The browser won't waste any extra time rendering them after the first instance has been displayed. Slicing images is also recommended. By slicing an image in to several smaller graphics, they will load continuously and the user won't be left to stare at a blank screen.
 
To get to the bottom of graphic optimization, however, we must evaluate the format that we're saving our graphics in. These will usually consist of GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group). The key to when to use each format is hidden in their names.
 
JPEGs are probably the most common format that you'll have heard about. They're an excellent choice,as their name would suggest, for saving photographic images. JPEG is not a lossless format, meaning the quality will suffer when you make changes. When we use a JPEG, the screen will recognize blocks of color and modify pixels appropriately. As a result, the JPEG is great for use with photographic imagery where rich levels of color are regularly used. Unfortunately, they don't hold up quite as well in flat-covered graphics. This is where we should switch to GIF format.
 
The GIF format has been around for an extremely long time, and is a great solution for saving text based images, vectors or flat-colored graphics. GIF is also a strong competitor in the compression market.
 
The format uses Run Length Encoding to compress horizontal lines, which means that if you use traditional scanlines, you'll be saving almost half of the original image file size.
 
Image compression is important for optimizing your web pages and improving the final download times, and this is where GIF holds a great advantage over its JPEG rival. GIF is a lossless format, meaning that it doesn't alter the individual pixels in a graphic. As such, it's an excellent choice for vector based graphics, or areas of blocky color.
 
Another advantage that comes with using GIFs lies in the ability to make one color completely transparent. You've probably seen instances of this before where the background is missing from an image. Transparency can be a valuable technique. Just remember that if you're going to specify the removal of a particular color, make its one that isn't included in the graphic that you're trying to retain!
 
Finally, it's important to address a couple of the more popular Photoshop techniques that seem to be grossly overused on the web; the drop shadow and beveling effects.
 
Quite why these particular effects have taken off is a bit of a mystery. General consensus would suggest that it has something to do with the 3D illusion that they provide, with all the ease of a single button click. But don't let that be an incentive to overuse them. Beveling, in particular, leaves a horribly unprofessional depth which will turn away the trained eye.
 
There really is no way of establishing pixel perfect design without getting your hands dirty and experimenting in a graphical development suite. It's not something that you'll discover overnight, but once you've mastered it, you'll be one step closer to the kind of web design that'll instantly impress a web user when they arrive on your page.

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The web design represents an arranged collaboration of web pages, which in turn make up a website or application. There are millions of web designers scattered around the world, and all of them have their own design preferences, but the end goal is always the same.
 
Web design, although associated with graphics design in some quarters, is primarily concerned with three objectives:
 
Information value : The quality of information stored across the website.

These three factors make up the essential components of a web page, and a good web designer will score highly in each area.
 
Web design caters for several technologies in order to aid the production of web based material. Most pages are made up of HTML (or XHTML), CSS, images and further multimedia content. HTML is the underlying foundation for most of these pages, but web technology is constantly improving and just as we usher in XHTML as the new design standard, several other technologies are expanding their horizons and further dividing the web community.
 
You can compare a web design to a book in many ways. A successful book usually stands out from the others, whether it's through a snappy effective title, or an appealing front cover. An author will spend a great deal of time targeting their title and display information to gain the attention of potential readers. This works in the same way that a web designer may use SEO and keywords. A book has to stand out in a library, in the same fashion that a website has to stand out in a network of other sites.
 
Then you have the actual value of the content. A fancy front cover or an attractive title isn't usually enough to guarantee the user's satisfaction. The book has to have valuable content, or a good story. A website has to have relevant information stored on its sub pages.
 
Finally, a book needs to be easy to read and presented in a user friendly manner, with images where appropriate to aid the reading experience. The same can be said for a website, which can be improved dramatically by the inclusion of multimedia content or relevant images. Just as a book has readability specifications, a website has usability and accessibility guidelines. These are designated by the w3 Consortium.
 
As we mention the w3 Consortium, it's important to understand the influence that the w3 community has over the web. Every web technology needs to have a fixed set of standards drawn up and approved, due to the nature of most open source web languages. The w3 Consortium handles this task and sets out strict web regulations which we're all obliged to follow if we wish to comply with the accepted industry standards. For commercial websites, this is essential.
 
Before your web design can be accessed by other users, you need to make sure that you have several items available. These are listed below.

• Editing software
• A web server
• An upload client

Looking at the first requirement, editing software can be as simple or as advanced as you'd like it to be. For example, an HTML page can be coded in Notepad and saved with the .HTML extension. But if you're working with complex languages, you can also purchase a copy of Adobe Dreamweaver (Formerly owned by Macromedia) or Microsoft FrontPage. These development suites allow for a much more automated coding experience, with the use of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. Indeed, it's possible to create HTML pages without the knowledge of a single tag!
 
A web server is required to host your content on the World Wide Web. Servers are usually maintained by professional businesses, so it's quite possible to sign up for hosting on a number of websites and use their own resources. This is usually the case when you find a website offering to store your content. There are free hosting services on the Internet, but they'll usually come with advertisements included in the package.
 
Finally, you need an FTP upload client, or a web based upload environment, so that you can send your content to be published on the web. SmartFTP and Cute FTP are both great tools for this purpose.
 
If you have all three of the items above, you're ready to get involved with the production of a web design.
 
Every web design is initiated when a user accesses the INDEX page of your website. This will be named with a further extension, determined by the language that you've used for the page. If you're using PHP, it might be INDEX.PHP. If you're using ColdFusion, it might be INDEX.CFM.
 
Your index page should be the portal to the rest of your website. A good design starts on the very first page, and it's important to make this particular page the most informative on your site.
 
Web design doesn't have to be restricted to the basics of HTML and CSS. We can use what's known as server-side scripting and client-side scripting to make a site dynamic and more interactive.
 
Server-side production usually consists of one of the following programming languages:

• ASP
• JSP
• PHP
• ColdFusion
• Python

Client-side scripting is mainly restricted to the use of JavaScript. You will shortly discover the benefits of these advanced languages, but rest assured that web design was once as simple as plain HTML and it still can be!
 
With good planning foundations and a solid grasp of HTML, we can produce some excellent websites and web applications. The learning curve is ongoing, and you'll find that your web design can always be improved. Don't be put off by the idea. Even the greatest websites were once imaginary tags in a designer's imagination!

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Unfortunately for us all, web design is a business with considerable scope for problems. You'd be alarmed to hear of the sheer number of things that can go wrong; even after you've completed your website to the highest of standards. Here we will take a look at some of those problems and how you can address the possibility of facing them in the future.
 
At the top of the agenda, we're confronted with the issue of website security. How can we make our web pages secure?
 
The first thing to ask ourselves is how can a webpage become insecure in the first place? Depending on the nature of a website, the issue of data protection may rank as one of the most important considerations throughout your business plan.
 
If you're supplying a service where consumers trust you with their private details, it's absolutely vital that you do everything in your power to respect the confidentiality of their transactions. This isn't an optional requirement, you should be aware that failing to appreciate the data protections requirements can lead to severe fines and a damaged reputation that won't be healing anytime soon.
 
Of course, you might be designing your website with total honesty and no intention whatsoever of exploiting user privacy. But that's not to say that third party hackers would be so courteous. To provide a service to a web audience, you need to take personal responsibility to ensure that your website is as secure as possible.
 
Make sure that your web database, if you're using one, is protected and sufficient user privileges are employed. You should change your master password regularly for any FTP client or administration login which allows access to the back-end of your site.
 
Security considerations should be pondered right the way back to the coding phase of your website. Make sure that you use sufficient user authentication and that your entire website has undergone a thorough examination before you release it for retail use.
 
Your carefully constructed HTML pages are liable to become corrupted, especially if you use dynamic web design. With the increased concern of hacking and malicious users, always keep regular backups of your core files and databases. A mySQL or Access database can be somewhat large to download, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
 
One of the most common hindrances to web design is often out of your hands completely. Most designers have experienced the painstaking frustration of a lousy server that spends more time down than it does hosting a site. When you seek out a host for your website, be sure to research in to the potential companies.
 
You don't want server downtime to force your web users elsewhere. Free hosting is available on a widespread basis, but the benefits of paid servers are obvious. There are some great providers of cheap web hosting if you keep your eyes peeled. GoDaddy offers an incredible amount of space and a free domain with most of their orders, which is obviously a plus.
 
You should also be aware of revolving technology standards when you design your site. Don't use beta-phase technologies until a full public release is available. The last thing you want to do is code your website in a brand new programming language, only to discover later that the release contains bugs and your website isn't quite as accessible as you'd originally hoped.
 
Stick to stable programming languages and consult the w3 Consortium website for the latest upgrades to code specifications. It may seem like a hassle at first, but the rewards of using supported technology far outweigh the extra hours of converting your site across.
 
If you have a website which relies on lots of external links to provide a service to the users, make sure that you check them on a regular basis!
 
External links can become defunct, or be moved at any given time. If you're going to link to external content, have the courtesy of ensuring that the links are directing to the right places. This means testing your website every couple of weeks and correcting expired links where necessary.
 
Finally, we move on to one of the hardest problems that you'll face as a web developer. How can we prevent user activity from drying up over time?
 
The lifetime of a website, in most cases, is extremely short. Rapidly improving technology, along with static content, make it incredibly hard to sustain a website over a significant amount of time. This problem is accentuated if you have no interactive features to lure a user back. Community forums from vBulletin or Invision Power can be put to great use to retain user activity; but they're not always appropriate for the theme of a website.
 
If you're stuck with static content, try to stay up to date with your website theme. Don't be under the assumption that a web design is a design for life. Most successful websites are constantly being tweaked with fresh touches added to the interface.
 
If you find that your user activity is drying up, be prepared to act and overhaul your website. Whether it's with several pages of added content, or a complete redesign, you'll need to do something to give your site a fresh appeal.
 
It would be foolish to believe that a web design today will be good enough for tomorrow. As web developers, we must appreciate the constantly evolving technology. Appreciate that you'll have to stay in touch with the art of web design, if you want your site to remain in touch with its audience.

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One of the most important processes to be undergone before a website can be publicly unveiled is the usability testing phase. If you're running a commercial website, this is a crucial technique to master and one which unfortunately, isn't particularly enjoyable.
 
What is usability testing? And perhaps, as you might be wondering, why isn't the testing carried out by the actual users?
 
Usability testing is simply the method by which we determine areas where a website may not be functioning correctly.
 
The World Wide Web is a giant network of information being exchanged across many different platforms. Not every one of those platforms is the same, and as such, a website may operate to differing standards on different computers.
 
One of the most obvious aspects of usability that a developer must learn to consider is the nature of web browsers. While one user might be using Microsoft Internet Explorer, another might be browsing via Mozilla Firefox.
 
There are many browsers on the market but the most popular choices include; Microsoft IE, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, Crazy Browser and Apple Safari.
 
Each web browser is developed to a different optimum of performance. While the general standard for HTML compatibilities and XHTML interpretation remains present on all of them, certain functionality might not. The w3 Consortium regularly reviews its policy for web standards, but you should be aware of the basic differences.
 
When you test the usability of your website, don't take the high route of expecting the rest of the world to employ the same browser as the one you happen to have installed. Usability testing is profession of its own, and to do a good job at it, you should have all of the major browsers installed.
 
If your website operates to the same standard on each platform, congratulations, you're in the successful minority. If it doesn't, what kind of errors are you getting? Certain browsers will render HTML components differently, while others will reject unstable code altogether. Be sure to stay up to date with the revolving web standards at w3, since every browser has to be designed with the consortium's approval before it reaches the mainstream.
 
You'll have to spend a good slice of time evaluating the usability of your website on each browser, and analyzing the core functions. But the fun doesn't stop there. You'll also need to employ usability testing for the absence of scripting technology.
 
Every user has the ability to turn JavaScript off in their browser settings. This is a remarkably scary proposition for a commercial website without both client validation and server-side validation.
 
It's not enough to provide JavaScript alone as the mechanical engine behind ANY aspect of your website. JavaScript is a complimentary technology, and one which not all users will support.
 
If you're going to implement scripting of any kind using variable technology, make sure that you offer an alternative for if the user has JavaScript turned off. There's a simple way to test whether your website is matching the usability requirements. Go to your Internet Tools (the exact location will vary depending on your browser) and disable scripting.
 
If your website still operates, give yourself an even bigger pat on the back, since you're now in an even smaller minority of successful web developers.
 
Another variable to consider is the usage of cookies. You've probably heard of the term, but you might not know what it is exactly. A cookie is a harmless slice of information stored at the user's end, and it can be beneficial for tracking activity across a website.
 
Some websites rely on cookies for instances such as shopping carts and member areas. These are scenarios where information has to be transferred from