With so many companies these days relying on the internet as an electronic storefront for selling their wares, web page design has become a fast-growing occupation. However, there is still a lot of argument as to the best approach to designing a web page; with those having a background in graphic arts opting for a website that has visually appeal and those with a more technical background preferring web page design to incorporate elements that are appealing to internet search engines. These two approaches will often be at odds regarding the site’s structure, but the common goal is surely to drive more traffic to the website in question.

These two different angles, if combined, can often deliver the best of both worlds and not only help visitors to the site find the information they are looking for, but also make it easy for users to find the site. Design-oriented web developers may be forced to rely on advertising, such as Google Adwords, to bring visitors to their site. Developers who are more technically aware may not create sites with a strong visual appeal. However, they may end up attracting more search engine traffic.

Regardless of the approach, the important aspects of a website will always be the same: content, usability and design are the three most important elements to web page design and pages that are strong in all these three areas have a better chance of attracting an audience and being successful.

While many attractive websites may have an initial aesthetic appeal, if they are laden down with graphics, audio, Flash or video files, they may be slow to load. This can frustrate potential visitors and can lead to less traffic than would otherwise be the case. Each page in a website should take just a few seconds to download.

Content is also immensely important. Both search engines and humans are attracted to good content. If your site has original content which is not available elsewhere on the Internet, it stands to reason it will get visitors. If users visit a site and it does not contain the kind of information they want, they will simply leave in search of better information.

When planning and designing your website, one useful exercise is always to try to place yourself in your visitors’ shoes. What are they searching for? How much of it can you give them? How can you make your version of it more attractive than what’s on offer from your competitors?

Have you ever heard the old saying, “You shouldn’t judge a book by the” cover?” I’m sure that you have. Well forget about it, because everyone on the Internet is quick to pass judgment. You will only have one chance to impress your visitors.

After reading my Web 2.0 quick tips to successful web design you will have visitors willing to walk over broken glass to visit your website. Sit back Relax And prepare for the best web design tips on the planet. Let’s begin!

Web 2.0 User Friendly Navigation This point is the main failing point of most web designers. Sincerely ask yourself how many times have you went to a website and didn’t have a clue how to find what you were looking for. Web surfers want everything right now. They don’t want to wait let alone having to hunt for your navigation links.

A clean Web 2.0 layout with laser precise navigation will without a doubt enhances the users experience thus leading to a happy end user and higher return visitors to your web site. Unless you are an experienced web designer I highly recommend that you use pre-design graphics.

I have been professionally designing web sites for well over eight years. Until this day I still use pre-designed web graphics. What use to take me hours to achieve I can now do in minutes.

Here is another little design tip for those of you that have websites with several links, you should consider using a drop down menu. Personally I am not a fan of using drop down menus because the code that is needed to produce the menus makes SEO a nightmare.

Optimize Your Load Time This is hands down the foundation of your website. I’m referring to the speed of your website. This is a crucial factor to the success of your website no matter what niche you may be in.

No user wants to sit there and wait for slow graphics to load up on a page. The reason being is that they don’t have to. There are hundreds if not thousands of other web sites competing for the same visitor that you are. One way that you can speed up your pages load time is to minimize your pages graphics, flash and scripts. These things increase your file size thus slowing down your pages load time.

Web 2.0 Images Will Increase Your Conversion Rate If you haven’t heard of the term Web 2.0 I would like to advise you to come out from under the rock that you have been living under. It’s the current buzzword all over the Internet. Don’t take my word for it Go to “Google.com” and search for the term, “Web 2.0″. That keyword generates a competitive search of 330,000,000 at the time of this article. That is incredible! It is also the future of web design and all Internet interactions. Web 2.0 images are images that are well designed and well optimized, and will allow you to increase your web design time by 90%.

BE AWARE OF WEB 2.0 SCAMMERS I run across these guys all the time. There’s really not a lot that you can do except educate yourself on what is Web 2.0 and what isn’t. Since the term Web 2.0 is a relatively new term, most people do not understand what it means they just know that they have to have it. As usual there are always those bottom feeders that are waiting to take advantage of people like you and I. They scam people by selling fake Web 2.0 libraries.

Optimal performance is the number one priority in any website design. It is a huge mistake to assume the belief those visitors needs to be entertained with fancy flash works which usually requires long loading time, when the truth is exactly the opposite.

Follow these basic rules for website design when creating your site and you can be assured of an optimally designed website you can be proud of.

1) Do not be tempted into using splash pages

Splash pages makes up the first impression people have of a website. These are elaborately fancy pages with lavish designs and images along with words such as “welcome to our website Usually, they are pages of elaborate graphics that includes words such as “welcome or “click here to enter the site. These are merely distractions that can divert attention away from the purpose of your website. Visitors will be more likely to leave your first page without waiting for the exceptionally slow loading time due to the heavy graphics used.

2) Reduce the number of banners on your site

Although these can be at the foot of a web page, adverts like this are primarily placed right at the top of the page in what is called the ‘header’. Adding banner ads are actually futile efforts to maximize the use of your website as space research shows that people tend to ignore such advertisements. Instead add useful contents and add your affiliate links skillfully into the body of the text so that it would seem like a natural part of your text and not an advertisement.

3) Provide your site with an easy navigation system

The navigation should be made very simple that even a young child can manage to find their way around. Do not use any form of menus that will complicate users, drop downs and multi-tiers are not a good idea. There are so many websites competing for attention, if your menus make it difficult for them, they will leave. Your website design should include the construction a sitemap that will make it easy for them to find what they want.

4) Make it clear where the user is at the moment

When you have successfully captured their attention and enjoying the whole experience perusing your website, you will want to make them know where they are at the moment without feeling lost. This way, they can easily navigate the exact section they want. Make sure that every page has its own title and that some form of breadcrumb trail is used to track the visitors step throughout the entire website. If you confuse your visitors in any way they will leave.

5) Do not use audio

If you want your visitors to stay a long time and read the contents, do not irritate em with your audio. Whenever you decide to use sound, be sure not to let it loop continuously because this a huge cause of irritation to people browsing sites. Adding audios may seem cool but provide some form of user control such as muting ability or volume control so that your visitors can adjust accordingly. If you wish for the visitors to return to your site, learn to apply all these website design rules and you can reap the benefits of long term traffic.

Although not a new concept, video on the internet which was initially enjoyed as a form of entertainment has now become widely used and a greatly valued tool for instruction as well as the generation of more traffic to websites. Discovering as much as you can about using videos effectively to draw traffic to your site will result in time well spent. An increase in traffic is likely to be seen as soon as you have added a video to your website or to one of the video sharing sites such as YouTube. However, you need to ensure your site is up to scratch to enable you to take advantage of this newfound traffic and to successfully convert your viewers into buyers.

The commercials we see on the television on a daily basis are extremely useful sales tools and when you are producing a video to drive traffic to your website particular attention should be paid to borrowing ideas from these television commercials. Check out how other websites appearing in the top rankings use the power of video to generate sales resulting traffic to their businesses. A video is the perfect way to show the product or service you have to offer and to draw important visitors to your site.

Putting together a video to drive traffic to your website can be a great deal of fun, and by using tools which are easily accessible to the average visitor the whole process is cost effective and simple. Remember to keep things straightforward and make sure your total marketing budget is not blown on the production of a video.

Whilst producing your video bear in mind that it is going to represent your company. The images contained in your video need to be chosen with care. People enjoy watching something pleasant so keep it this way. The use of neutral accents is recommended and appreciated by all. Remember the picture painting a thousand words theory and you will find that videos work superbly for demonstrating instead of simply talking about it. Take care not to speak too slowly on your video as visitors listen at a faster speed than they speak. A slow dialogue will only lead to boredom and this will irritate your viewers. Be gently persuasive with your sales message because if you are too pushy, this will turn the potential customer away.

It is important that your URL is shown at the beginning as well as the end of your video clip in order to drive traffic to your website. It is also possible to watermark your URL into your video. Once the video is produced, it is time to get it to the masses and use that video to increase your website traffic.

A good place to start is to upload your video to YouTube. This site receives great volumes of traffic and is a regular spot used by other webmasters in search of content for their sites. All the other webmasters have to do is simply copy and paste a code for your video to be shown on their site. Naturally, this results in more traffic coming your way.

Of course, YouTube is not the only video sharing site around. There are at this time in the region of thirty other video sharing sites where your clip can be hosted. A revenue sharing option is provided by some of the hosting sites. Posting your video to all of these available sites can be time consuming, but it is very effective. Fortunately, there are services that will upload your video to all of the sites for a nominal fee.

This is not the time to drag your heels. It’s time to get started and produce an effective video to promote your website. More traffic will be generated by the use of a video and when picked up by other webmasters the increase in visitors will be phenomenal. With the dawn of inexpensive broadband internet connections and statistics showing young people, in particular, spend more time on the Internet than watching television, the power of using video to generate traffic to your website is a must.

Of course with the URL in your description this is a really neat way to get free backlinks by using video. This is even more effective if you blast your video out to lots of free video hosts using a service such as the excellent Traffic Geyser.

A web page consists of two main areas: the head and the body. The body contains all of the elements which will be displayed in the browser window and the majority of which will be visible to the user. The head element, by contrast, contains information about the web page; meta information as it is sometimes called. In this article, we will look at the different ways in which Dreamweaver allows you to modify elements within the head of a web page, beginning with the title.

The title element is designed to contain a broad description of the content of the page. It is very important that each page should have a title and that the title is pertinent to the web page that contains it. Dreamweaver always adds a title element to every new page containing the text “Untitled Document”. Perhaps the simplest way of modifying this default title is to enter a title in the Document Title box of the Document toolbar which is normally displayed at the top of the page. Another method is to choose Modify – Page Properties and then click on the Title/Encoding category on the left of the screen.

The title is the only element which is syntactically required to be placed within the head element. In addition, a variety of optional meta elements may be placed in the head element to provide further information about the current page. One of these meta element is created automatically by Dreamweaver along with the title: the content-type. This declares the character encoding of the page to the browser and is particularly important if you have a site with an international audience. To specify the character encoding, choose Modify – Page Properties, click on the Title/Encoding category on the left of the screen and then choose one of the options in the Encoding drop-down menu.

The meta description element is also very important since, along with the page title, it is often displayed when your page shows up in the search engine results. The description should consist of one or two sentences summarising the content of the page. To set the description in Dreamweaver, choose Insert – HTML – Head Tags – Description then enter a brief description in the dialogue box which appears.

Let’s just mention one final meta element: keywords. The keywords meta element should contain a list of the important words and phrases to be found on the current page. Only text that actually appears on the page should be listed. To create the meta keywords element in Dreamweaver, choose Insert – HTML – Head Tags – Keywords.