Kelly Philips Erb contributed on the Forbes “You can be as serious or as snarky, as witty or as practical, as staid or as droll (you get the idea) as you want to be. Just tell me how you would you fix the IRS home page. New color combination? New layout? New slogan? Be specific and tell me why you’re suggesting it: green is the color of money, for example.”

With technology moving fast, redesigned websites are the way to be! At least that’s what Kelly thought, and we think that it’s commendable in itself. The advent of Web 2.0 led to some changes in the website layouts. This positive onward movement initiated in the further growth of the web design market. Newer customers and clients are generated and just like a new swanky car, more heads turn your way!

Brand new, contemporary, chic and the elegant is what grabs eyeballs! Be it the new hip Armani jacket, or the exclusive branded car, people turn to see the new and the hip! Same holds true for your business websites. It’s a sort of makeover, a makeover to make you come back into new customer acquisition. This change would keep you well-positioned; keep your website in the forefront. We redesigned some of our client’s websites and saw a direct increase in their sales. The most prominent was the success of Puretronics.com which we redesigned. Reintroduced with a new look, the website got a bigger and a better approach after ten long years. Improved visuals, nice clean fonts and easy navigational tools were all that was needed to do the job. Overwhelmed with the success of the website, we continued to pave the way for others. Redesign, reposition for better sales!

Sometimes creating the perfect Website can be tricky. But nothing is perfect in this world. Well it can be close to perfect. Your website is your distinctiveness identity in the virtual world. But before you go on to build a website, do a little homework. Follow some simple steps before creating a website for your business. Follow these simple rules:

• Define your website goals
• Budget it out
• Choose a good web design company
• Execute

Firstly, before you build your company’s website, list the objectives. This is really important before you meet us. Tell us your ideas that you would like to deploy on your website. We would discuss about the functionality that you would like to have. We will make it easy to navigate. The first 8 seconds of your visitor entry on your website is pretty vital for for us to hook them in. That is where design plays a big factor. And that is where pros like us make a difference. Now here is a recent website we did -  OC Health Solutions. Here you can manage the entire content from a backend. This is a Content Management System. Still some fine tuning is needed and our client is doing that.

So, when choosing your Web Designer make sure they are solid. And we are solid. Pretty rock solid with years of experience. Since 1999. Give us your ideas about what you want to accomplish with your website and take a note to his, mix and match the ideas and then lay off the best one. This is the best way to take when starting your website. Let us help you do that.

When you think about managing a website, CMS (Content Management System) is the word you rely on. CMS assists you to edit, update and make modifications in your website and with CMS it is cheaper and quicker to build a large or complex website. While dealing with it, Drupal and Joomla are the terminologies that you become familiar with. They are two popular types of CMSs.

Drupal and Joomla have been competing for the top gap from ages. Drupal users and developers find Drupal easier to learn and use and Joomla users and developers find Joomla easier to learn and use. But there are a few differences in their features and integrations. Like Drupal is superior for extensibility and larger sites, while Joomla is easier especially for the non-geeks. Drupal is enhanced in parts like documentation particularly when you go for core and module documentation. On the other hand, Joomla is easier for non-technical people, mainly when they want to pact with the CMS interface, its upgrading and maintenance process.

Drupal’s add-ons incorporate in a little better way with the core and their framework which makes it easier to extend its CMS’s potentialities. Drupal operate as a good support for multimedia, social networking, forums, blogging, document management etc. While for constructing new functional websites, teach clients how to deal with CMS easily are done healthily with Joomla.  Drupal can help you to ease with external integration, developing large complex website and also enhancing facilities in the website.

Therefore, the race result is draw as the choice of web CMS depends on what you are trying to do or what kind of website you want to design. Joomla and Drupal are the most popular CMSs that are used nowadays but who gets more votes depends on where you are using it.

Adobe Flash is a great software which can execute high quality pictures, sounds and movies into a seamless motion graphics. Web developers, like ourselves actually incorporate flash content in order to make a site interactive and attractive.

Here are some reasons why it makes sense to deploy Flash on your website:

• Flash gives a rich user experience
• Interactive
• Easy to reload
• High Quality output

Flash plug ins now run faster and better, as we are deluged with band width. While critics of Flash are there but we think limited deployment of Flash on your website will increase the conversion as you are able to give a better motion graphics experience.

If you have an E-Commerce website you know, it has never been too easy to sell products online. It’s a big challenge to have your products sold over the net. After you don’t want to be a loser when it comes to web conversions, I guess. It’s a tedious job to determine which referrers are trying to boost traffic to your site. Therefore it’s important to seek help of magic tools that help you achieve your goals faster and better.

I am going to discuss some of them over here.

• Analytics: when you have chosen an ecommerce website for your online store its important to read the analytics that state how and what and where your website stands in the entire cyber space. You get every details of how well it’s been doing so far. There expensive analytics packages available in the market which give you an entire picture of how your website can earn more.
• If you want to get quick grasp of your website data you need to select the “visualization” option.
• Try improving the product page of your ecommerce website.

These are some simple tools that can make a difference in the long run. Ask your ecommerce website design expert to incorporate these tools while everything takes shape.

You may need to go for a web branding that will rightly position your company; this is achieved better with the help of  the right set of ideas, with a definite  understanding  of your website goals. If you are a start up or a matured business, a website that connects well with your audience will strengthen your foothold on the web. A professional custom designed website could be a steroid to your overall customer acquisition process. Web Branding is far less expensive and is something that small businesses can afford easily.

Before you start the process branding your business on the web here are somethings you need to take a hard look at:

• What is my marketing goal ?
• In order to create effective conversions map out your target market
• In that target market dig out the demographics of your target audience
• Decide if you want to have web brochure, catalog or E-Commerce
• What is your USP – Unique Selling Proposition?
• How are you going to position yourself to this audience of yours?

Graphics have always seemed to add values to web illustrations. The web where billions of graphic files swim around is the place where you’d find these same files in different size and formats. Most graphic designers develop files considering distinct formats. Since these experts have knowledge about graphics, they are quite adept in picking formats which gel well with the entire scenario. Despite of the huge numbers of formats available today, only a few get picked by the web browsers.

Some of the popular formats the Orange County Web Design team works for, are GIF, JPEG, PNG and a few others. These are considered the most fluid formats valued by the cyber media.

Characteristics that make a graphic format picked by browsers are given below:

• The format which is more compressible is picked first. By compressible the web gurus refer to file that can be saved further as smaller ones.
• Transparency is another quality that is taken into account while selecting a format. It determines the degree of opaqueness and transparency of a file.
• When the visitor clicks on a file he’d like to view it soonest. Interlacing is a quality that enables the file to decode faster.
• Animation brings life to graphics. With the help of animation an image is turned into a motion picture.

So it’s apparent why only a few files get selected.

With the arrival of Androids and other Smartphone life has become faster and convenient. Do you know a huge percentage of the user base have switched to mobile sites? However setting up a mobile site and then running it isn’t too easy as it might seem to you. Today there are millions of visitors searching for desired results on Google’s mobile search.

The major difference lies in the fact that the formats are different. If you are a webmaster looking for a potential mobile user base, you’ll have to introduce extra efforts to develop a mobile website. The expertise involved is much different than that of a desktop version. The search engineer for mobile sites is required to view the scenario differently.

Most of the time the sites designed by the developers are framed keeping in mind of the viewing aspect in course of which they fail to consider the search engines.  This is simply where they go wrong. You have to make your mobile website searchable and then of course viewable for the huge user base.

First and foremost your site needs to be crawled by Google. I can help you out on this. Read my lines below:

What happens when your site isn’t showing up in the search results? Gosh you don’t even want to think about it. There are two reasons triggering such an effect.

Googlebot the crawler should first crawl down your site. In order to get it crawled your mobile website’s site-map needs to be submitted. This way you are notifying your site’s existence in Google.

Sometimes Googlebot is unable to access your site giving rise to a difficult situation altogether. It’s like a nightmare where your site gets lost in the middle of dark woods; it’s turned unsearchable. Get up!! You still have way to go. This crawler is specially adapted for mobile sites and it’s called the Googlebot-Mobile. Now you have to allow Googlebot-mobile to search your mobile website until it’s able to access the later. Often the search engine giant is found to alter user-agent details abruptly. Such a case needs you to search for Googlebot-Mobile at the header of the user agent.

If your website loads fast you get points on your ranking race. That is the recent Google Verdict. So here are simple ways you can improve the loading your webs pages:

1. Image Format – While JPG is widely used, and is suitable. You need to choose a file type that is less heavy. Like GIF is OK. PNG is fine too as this gives more true colors.

2. Image Optimization – You need to optimize your images that go up. When working with your image tool editor if you use the “save for web” option

3. Height and Width – All images have the height and width. You have to make sure the height and width are defined.

4. Optimize your CSS – CSS has become pretty standard for most of the websites. You need to make sure the CSS is clean.

5. Adding slash on hyperlinks – When you add a slash on your link for example  the link “www.mywebsite.com/products/”  Here the server knows that this going to a directory. So it will call the page quicker.

I guess, if you use the above tweaks, if you are already not doing, then you page load time will be faster.

Good navigation is what makes your visitor find stuff quick and easy. Believe me it not easy for the designer to pop this thing out. Be it web brochure, ecommerce or an informational site. When we talk of launching a website, the web developers make sure the navigation properly directs the user in terms of finding information on the website. Why? Simple, a website having poor navigation means you make it more difficult to find things on your site. The web visitors are impatient. They want it fast and now. A website with faulty navigation will have a higher bounce rate.

The graphic designer who visualizes the look and feel of the website needs to make sure the navigation is properly placed according to the business demands.  The  designers do this effectly by following some simple principles.  And here they are:

Entry: Your website visitors who are entering the website via Search Engines through inside pages of your website should be easily be to find things on the other pages.

Categorize: Remember that you need to categorize this information into Primary and Secondary navigation. Most important and what are the less important information. This needs to be clearly communicate this to your – Web Designer Orange County.If you happen to be hiring one.

Layout: The less your visitors have to click the better off you are. So when you at the identification stage of what navigation items go where you may want to decide what you will put where. By that I mean you need to identify your top, side, bottom navigation.

Left navigation: the typical of all, we mostly come across the left side navigation; the items can either expand or bear a single link.

Right Navigation: we don’t usually come across right navigation keys; still there are some sites with right navigation keys. In fact the right side navigation is mostly used for ads.

Top Menus: Just below the header of the page the web designer incorporates a menu bar called the top menus.

Bottom Menus: This menu bar can also be footer of the page.

In order to develop good websites designer make sure your website incorporate these standards.