John Pape Online Blog

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are five important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Avoid the use of splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered drop down menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Use audio wisely on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.   If you provide audio content like music, teleseminars, speeches, audio books then you need to embrace the audio technology available to push your content to the user.

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Item Attributes

• Created: October 15, 2009
• Design Style: Clean CSS
• PSD Included: Yes
• Valid HTML: Yes
• Layout: Fixed Width 960px
• Documentation: Well Documented – One RTF file
• Compatible Browsers FireFox 2, FireFox 3, IE6, IE7, IE8, Safari
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• Tableless layout
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• CSS Based Template (Layout based on Blueprint CSS Framework.)
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• Uses CSS Resets

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Technorati Tags: Blue, business, clean, corporate, css, HTML, jquery, Photoshop, PHP, PSD, valid css xhtml, Web Design, Web Template

I recently completed a project for TSM advertising.  My mission was to provide a fresh new look and feel of the site.

Here is a screen shot of the original site.

Tim Turner of TSM Advertising wanted something that “popped out” better than the muted blue and gray theme that was in the old site.  So I put on my thinking cap and here is the new design.

You can visit the site at:  http://www.tsmadvertising.com

As you can see it’s has more color and more vibrant than the original site.

As far as the site’s architecture, I basically kept the linking and page names the same.  I basically re-skinned the site with the new look and added a couple of new features.

CSS

The page layout is table-less CSS.   I used Blueprint CSS to create the layout grid.  Blueprint is a CSS framework that allowed me to quickly create the site’s basic layout.  The layout I used was to divide the page vertically in thirds.  The nice thing about Blueprint and other CSS frameworks is the ability to keep the vertical line straight.  That help with making the layout look a lot cleaner.

Navaigation

For the navigation, I used a technique call CSS sprites.  This technique allowed me to create one image file then let the CSS make to proper alignments and adjustments.  There are three states to the the menu.  Static, Active and Hover.  The advantage to sprites is there are fewer HTTP requests and the image is actually smaller that if it was sliced as separate images.

Slide Show

The large image slide show that is found on each page next to the navigation use jquery to create the slide show.  jquery is a framework that works well with css and javascript.  There are many resources for jquery and I’m learning more about it ability to create special effects.  I though that for this web site I would use jquery instead of Flash for the slide show.

Page Title

For the page title I used sifr.  With sifr I don’t need to worry about the user having the special font installed on their computer.  With the combination of Flash, javascript and CSS I am able to use any font on the website and it will show as I want it to show.  The font I used was Myiad SemiCondensed Bold.  Now some users may have this font installed on their computer, but I imagine not everyone does.  So with Sifr I am able to use display fonts.

PHP

As with nearly all the site I develop I use PHP quite a bit.  On this site there is no exception.  One powerful function that I love is the include() function.  This function will include a file into the web page.  For each page there are basically three include files 1) header.php 2) nav.php 3) footer.php.  What is nice about include files is when the code is exactly the same in each page there is only one file to maintain.  I had to do maintenance on static HTML files. One site I inherited had about 200 HTML pages.  One day the company wanted to update the site navigation and I knew that I had to edit each page.   It was quite time consuming, but I knew that if the navigation was in a separate file I would only need to edit the one file and be done.

Also there is a web form on the site and it used PHP as well.   There is the mail() function that is very useful.  Also, an auto-responder message is created for the form.  Also, I used jquery to validate the form.  Very nice and each to implement.

All in all this was a vary satisfying project.  I am pleased with the results.

Technorati Tags: css, jquery, Photoshop, PHP, Web Design