Tips For A Great, Effective Web Site Design

While surfing the internet I have seen many different types and styles of web sites. The design of all of the different web sites on the internet varies widely. I have noticed that within the last five years there has been a tremendous move towards Flash web sites or Flash elements in web sites. Personally I am not a huge fan of a web site built entirely in Flash, because I believe that it is too much for the user to absorb everything that is happening. Also when a search engine crawls a web site made completely with Flash it will not be able to pick up any text in the web site that is embedded in the Flash images. Normally a search engine will rank a Flash-only web site lower than a non-Flash web site, because there are more keywords included in the paragraphs of the web site that are not made completely with Flash. However using some Flash elements in a web site design is a great idea. Flash can help make your web site pop, and give the user a focal point that will draw their eye into your web site.

Web site design is the most important element of creating a web site. The design of the web site is what actually brings the users into the site and keeps them there. A major aspect of your web site design is the web site navigation. If the navigation of a web site design is not very good, then the user will leave the web site quickly, without really looking at much of anything. If the web site is difficult to read, or the colors are not appealing to the user then they may also leave. A good, clean, and simple web site is the best type of site to create, because it allows the user to navigate easily, and find the information that they desire.

Some people like to use navigation on the side and some like to use navigation on the top of the web site. No matter which you choose you want to be consistent, so that the user always knows where to go to move to another page. Personally I like to use the main navigation across the top of the page, with the secondary navigation down the left side. The main navigation will have the main points of the site, and the secondary navigation will allow the user to delve deeper into any one of the main navigation topics. I prefer to use navigation this way, because it allows the user to navigate to almost anywhere within the web site with only two clicks. One of the clicks will get them into the main topic, and then they can get into more detailed information relating to the main topic using the secondary navigation.

Recently I have looked at a few web site design companies in the UK. These design companies have very nice classic styles that are very easy to read, and they relay the information to the user in a very nice way. UK web site design seems to use fewer Flash elements, and more CSS and JavaScript techniques to entice the user. I also prefer CSS and JavaScript techniques, because they do not require Flash Player to be able to see the effects. Also these techniques are much more subtle than Flash elements. CSS and JavaScript are just text markups, so the text can still be read by the search engines’ spiders, which usually translates into a higher search engine ranking.

For help designing an effective, attractive website, visit web design uk / web design Manchester.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gabriel_J._Adams

The Easy guide to making a robots.txt file

If you have a website you really need to have a robots.txt file. It gives search engine spiders specific commands and it is easy to use and easy to maintain. Here is an easy guide to a robots.txt file in five minutes.

There are times when you don’t want a search engine to index a page or a folder on your website. Maybe you have some information you just don’t want to have show up in google. This may include your statistics page, a page of notes, or a dynamic page. And, importantly, if you use google adsense and the search tool that displays search results on your website google mandates you exclude this page from search engines. Which means they mandate you having a robots.txt file.

A robots.txt file is a simple document named robots.txt and saved in the root folder of your website. Search engines see this and follow any commands it contains. Create a simple text document using any word processor program like notepad and put these two lines it:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The first line tells all spiders to listen up because the following command is for you. The second line means do not index any of the following pages. And it is here you put the url of any pages you don’t want spidered. So if you wanted the spiders to skip your private page it looks like this:

Disallow:/privatepage.htm

If you want the spiders to skip a whole folder you put the url of that folder with a slash like this:

Disallow:/privatefolder/

Simply place this text file in the root folder of your website and you are done. In the future you can add and remove commands easily.

The robots.txt file is a very easy file to write and maintain and it is a very powerful tool that will help you interact successfully with search engines. This disallow command is the simplest and most used command but there are also many other commands you can use and if you have a website it is well worth your time to have a robots.txt file and even to research it a bit further.

About the Author
For more interesting insights into being a creative webmaster and making your website work for you visit the authors site at: The Creative Webmaster – Forging the Iron of Creativity on the Anvil of a Website

What is Ajax?

by Ajay Sharma

We were getting a number of querries from our clients and friends, asking about what AJAX is?

With the development of Microsoft's Live, everyone is going crazy about AJAX. So, we at Xaprio Solutions thaught of publishing this small article about AJAX, which will help you guys understand it better.

Like DHTML, LAMP, or SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. In fact, derivative/composite technologies based substantially upon Ajax, such as AFLAX, are already appearing. The Term AJAX refers to, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

For a number of tasks, only small amounts of data need to be transferred between the client and the server, allowing a number of Ajax applications to perform almost as well as applications executed natively on the user's machine. This has the effect that pages need only be incrementally updated in the user's browser, rather than having to be entirely refreshed.

"Every user's action that normally would generate an HTTP request takes the form of a JavaScript call to the Ajax engine instead", wrote Jesse James Garrett, in the essay that first defined the term. "Any response to a user action that doesn't require a trip back to the server -- such as simple data validation, editing data in memory, and even some navigation -- the engine handles on its own. If the engine needs something from the server in order to respond -- if it's submitting data for processing, loading additional interface code, or retrieving new data -- the engine makes those requests asynchronously, usually using XML, without stalling a user's interaction with the application."

Traditional web applications essentially submit forms, completed by a user, to a web server. The web server does some processing, and responds by sending a new web page back. Because the server must send a whole new page each time, applications run more slowly and awkwardly than their native counterparts.

Ajax applications, on the other hand, can send requests to the web server to retrieve only the data that is needed, and may use SOAP or some other XML-based web services dialect. On the client, JavaScript processes the web server's response, and may then modify the document's content through the DOM to show the user that an action has been completed. The result is a more responsive application, since the amount of data interchanged between the web browser and web server is vastly reduced. Web server processing time is also saved, since much of it is done on the client.

The earliest form of asynchronous remote scripting, Microsoft's Remote Scripting, was developed before XMLHttpRequest existed, and made use of a dedicated Java applet. Thereafter, remote scripting was extended by Netscape DevEdge at around 2001/2002 by use of an IFRAME instead of a Java applet.

About the author:
I am working in http://www.xaprio.com. Xaprio Solutions is an India based IT Company revolving in and around Outsourcing. We aims towards the "Web Fulfillment" by developing and designing world class applications and products and by taking the Web to Next Generation.

What A Newbie Webmaster Should Know About Domain Registration

Domain Name Registration

Affordable domain name registration was extremely difficult to be found in the past. In fact, all domain name registrars used to charge a flat fee of $70 which was to register your domain name for two years.

Now there has been an explosion of companies that offer affordable domain name registration. Some will register your domain name for less than $15 a year, especially if you are registering multiple sites for a number of years at the same time. Be aware that you may have to have a number of variations of your ideal site name as you often find that the more popular terms have already been registered or reserved for future use.

If you are serious about your online presence then it is essential to consider a bulk domain name registration. The most obvious benefit of having a bulk domain name registration is that your site will appear higher on the search engines. That may be incentive enough but registering as a .net, .biz, http://.co.uk, .la or other domain names too has a far greater benefit which many people do not think about.

A major benefit of having a bulk domain name registration for your site is to prevent the more unscrupulous cyber sitters from piggybacking on the success of your website. Imagine if you could register as a google.au and benefit from the millions of people who use a Google site every day? You see how this could work to someone’s advantage if Google hadn’t performed a bulk domain name registration to prevent this. The extra cost to have a bulk domain name registration can be minimal and there are a number of web domain registrars who offer bulk discounts to their customers.

Wholesale domain name registration is an increasingly popular way for webmasters to register multiple domain names at the same time at a fraction of their individual costs combined. A new marketing technique has been sweeping the World Wide Web recently where webmasters create hundreds of websites with only a small amount of text to attract visitors by keyword searches and wholesale domain name registration has led to this process being simplified.

About the Author:

D. Goldberg is webmaster of Webhosting Specialists. Find out everything about web hosting and domain registration.

Read more articles by: Dana Goldberg

Article Source: www.iSnare.com