Monday 5 April 2010

How to build an effective website

Introduction
In the contemporary world, more and more enterprises consider internet marketing as a fundamental marketing strategy. Therefore, how to catch customer’s attractiveness has put on debate. Recently, researchers have shown as increased interest in website design, because they believe that website image represents the image of enterprise. This paper will focus on three basic fators which lead to successful website design and how to move forward.

Colour and Font
A website should have at least a theme colour. A theme colour may indicate personality. But too many theme colours may cause confusion and visual fatigue. Colour can not only highlight the content but also convey personality. “http://www.lastminutes.com” has used two theme colours: orange and blue. From a perspective of psychology, blue is associated with trustworthiness, which is what this website tries to build up and orange is connected with loyalty, which is what this website seeks from the customers. And different theme colours can also help to differentiate different elements on the WebPages.

Choosing font will also influence the user’s attention. Simple and familiar fonts are preferred. Don’t use too many fonts or sizes on a single webpage. “http://www.lastminutes.com” has introduced two main fonts. One is for the main navigation bar; the other is for body text. Both of these two fonts are quite familiar and popular. Font colour should also be taken into account. It should help to enrich contrast to the background colour.






Typography
What were children present growth of the Internet stations, a considerable part of the stick to the "static", virtually has lagged far behind the times. With the growing amount of information Web site, the gradual decline of a static website, dynamic website has matured, its "interaction" of less automatic update "," change from person to person by the time "and many other excellent features is no doubt well adapted to information age to make the site "dynamic" technology more popular and mature now that ASP technology. ASP as a set of dynamic web design server-side scripting environment that allows users to browse the vast majority of workload can be executed on the server, thus greatly reducing the burden of the browser, as long as the use of general clerical editing program, such as Windows Notepad , we can edit the development of ASP, it has a simple, effective, quick, changeable, and many of the advantages of making a site with a large amount of information transmission, user-friendly features real-time queries, all in all ASP worthy tool for making dynamic Web site.

Navigation
A common phenomenon internet users face on the web is ‘lost’ which means they lose their sense of location in a web site (Danielson 2003; Wen 2003). Nowadays, web sites are growing more and more complicated. Although customers can benefit from various product choices with detailed information, it is often difficult to find information relevant to the interests of individual users through huge amount of paths. This is time and patience consuming. Jane and Jaspreet (2006) defined web navigation as a system that is ‘designed to aid users in the creation and interpretation of an internal mental model that helps them find and examine data on a Web site’. It may include features such as links to other pages, search tools and so on. Easy navigation provides customers easy way to hunt their desired information, save their time, and help them achieve their final purpose. A good navigation system can not only improve the web site’s performance, but can enhance the customer loyalty as well.

Information and tools
Galleries and videos
Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. Photobucket's image hosting is often used for eBay, MySpace (now a corporate cousin), Bebo, Neopets and Facebook accounts, LiveJournals, Open Diarys, or other blogs, and message boards. People can find resourse by search engine.
WinCustomize is a website that provides content for users to customize Microsoft Windows. The site hosts thousands of skins, themes, icons, wallpapers, and other graphical content to modify the Windows graphical user interface. There are some premiums or paid content, however the vast majority of the content is free for users to download.
This website consists of thousands of free icons, animations, fonts and sounds.




Templates
It is a website with free web design templates.
OSWD means 'Open Source Web Design'.
This website classifies different kinds of templates in detail. It is very convenient for people to find what they need.




Fonts
It offers a huge selection of free fonts both for Windows and Macintosh.
This one involves more than 8,000 freeware fonts.
Dafont classifies fonts to fancy, foreign look, techno, bitmap, gothic, basic, script and dingbats holiday. It is a professional fonts website with over 10,000 fonts.
The special font-type 04




How to move forward websites
As the three main factors we mentioned above, these can be reasonable advices to build a good website. Moreover, other issues can influence on making a website move forward. There are 9 tips followed:
· Define target audiences: Basically, what kinds of people your websites want to achieve is the first factor we should concern.

· Think about contents: The contents of a successful website should be interesting to attract attentions of target audiences, because they have not enough time to read all contents.

· Plan a clear structure: With a sitemap of contents, audiences find useful information for them easily.

· Make a good out-looking: A good design of website means that people tend to interest in

· Limit graphic content: Although images are important to attract people, too large images always offer negative aspects with poor connections.

· Provide easily search function: Having a search engine and several tools on web pages are necessary for each website.

· Update information on time: The point can be included changing contents, adding new links and functions.

· Domain name: The domain name should be selected as easy as possible to make visitors to remember.

· Make websites interactive: If audiences want to communicate with author and manufacturers on websites, websites should offer an interaction regularly.

Conclusion
To sum up, a successful website design includes at least a theme colour,dynamic feature and easy navigation. By following above ten key steps to design website can build up bright image of enterprise. What is more, there are thousands of free design resources online except popular searching engines like google, yahoo and bing, here is a website list below, which can be helpful to web designers or market managers.

References
Danielson, D, R. (2003), "Transitional Volatility in Web Navigation", IT& Society (1:3), pp 131 -158.
Wen, J. (2003), "Posl-Valued Reeall Web Pages: User Disorientation Hits the Big Time", IT & Society (1:3), 2003. pp. 184-194.
Jane Webster & Jaspreet S. Ahuja (2006), "Enhance The Design of Web Navigation System: The Influence of User Disorientation on Engagement and Performance",MIS Quarterly, Vol. 30 No. 3 pp. 661-676.