Website design is all about efficiency. If it doesn’t deliver results, it’s just not good enough.

We started off with this rider, because sometimes website developers and clients alike miss the plot. For them, design is all about creating a visual impression – if it looks good, it’s a success. End of story.

This thinking might have worked, say a decade or so ago. But, times are different now and the World Wide Web has become intensely competitive. This is the reason why flash website design alone isn’t going to translate into website success. There are plenty of other aspects that go into the making of a successful website design.

Here is how you can make your flash website design work for you:

Flash shouldn’t override Navigation

What makes a visitor want to go through your website – Navigation, Navigation, Navigation! Yes, this facet cannot be emphasized enough. Keep your navigation user friendly. On the face of it, the whole thing looks like a cliché. Of course, users need to know where to go and where to click! But the question is – Will visitors to your website be able to do that without any confusion? The answer to this question will help you design a flash website that is navigation friendly.

Flash shouldn’t blur your message

Sometimes designers get carried away with their creativity. They design an incredible flash animation that gets full points for creating the right impression. But, dig a little deeper and you find that the design is all Flash and no Message. The message that you wanted conveyed is lost in the beautiful maze of images, graphics and animation. Visitors will love your flash, but after that what? They will visit some other site – because they didn’t get the message they were looking for.

Make it SEO friendly

Without going into the technical aspects of SEO and how it can be integrated into flash website design, let’s just say that SEO friendly flash makes optimization a success. This improves the visibility of your website and will lead to conversions. After all having a website is all about conversions isn’t it?

It must be understood that it requires quite a bit of effort to ensure that your Flash website design is a success. It’s difficult but not impossible. The benefits of a site that has some remarkable Flash animation coupled with a user friendly interface are immense. So, try to get over the Flash fixation and make sure that your website offers a whole lot more than just captivating visuals. 

The strength of a corporate identity is in no small measure determined by its logo. A logo creates strong visual identity for the business and becomes an important part of the business’s promotional campaign. A logo needs to be well designed in order to be effective. Let’s just say your corporate logo has a job to do and it can only do its job well, if it has impeccable design. 

So, here is how a well developed logo lays the foundation of a strong corporate identity:

Facilitates Remembrance

It’s a scientifically proven fact; your brain remembers images more that it does words. A logo is like the visual identification of your company. Your target audience will be more inclined towards a visual association with your business.  It’s your logo that acts as a visual link between your customers and your business.

Expresses Credibility

An effective logo is a visual projection of the core values of your company. In doing so, it also sends out the message of credibility. A well developed logo enhances the reputation of a business. If you want to tell the world 'I stand for my Values', there is no better way to do this than through your corporate logo.

It differentiates you from the pack

Why would a client want to do business with your company? You might sell the best products and services money can buy, but your competitors might be generating more revenue. You might not want to believe it but the logo plays no small part in helping prospective clients choose a company to do business with.

An effective logo design helps you break the clutter and distinguish yourself from your competitors. Most business domains are becoming extremely saturated, and it helps immeasurably if your logo does some talking on your behalf. 

If they love all the thought that that has been put behind designing your logo, chances are that they will go for your products and services.

The essential branding tool

Most promotional campaigns will make use of your logo as an important element of persuasion. All marketing collateral, whether traditional or online, will give due prominence to your logo. The idea behind marketing campaigns is to strengthen your corporate identity. And the logo is like the adhesive that keeps it all together.

And all this won’t happen if you don’t work with an expert logo design company, who understand the various intricate facets of logo design. You need to choose the company that can offer you the kind of logo, which builds an enduring corporate identity. You could say that picking the right logo design company is a precursor to a strong corporate identity

Small businesses are now thinking big. They might be small, but they want to compete with the big guys and on their own terms. One of the better ways, they can do this is, by getting a website and leveraging their online presence for business growth. Yes, they do want their overhead costs to be kept at a minimum and No, affordability is not the only benefit they are looking at, when it comes to website design.

The Myth

So, how did this myth come about?

In the beginning, small businesses were perfectly happy with just getting their online presence up and running. For them, a website was not a means to improve business performance but more of a status symbol. And, they wanted to be online is as little cost as possible.

But, overtime the mindset changed. They wanted their websites to become vehicles of growth rather than just showpieces. Website design for small businesses graduated from being merely impressive to highly functional. This meant that affordability was no longer the deciding factor.

It’s surprising, in spite of proof that small business website design is no longer just about affordability, the myth continues to persist.

Small Businesses Want More

They want more and they are getting it! Website design for small businesses is no longer about using general web templates. It’s all about focusing on the core strengths of the business and a unique design that reflects those strengths. The design is also about SEO. It should be search engine friendly, which will help the website rank right at the top of the search engine rankings. This improves website visibility, which in turn leads to more visitor traffic.

It’s true that small businesses cannot afford to spend a fortune on website design. But this does not mean that they cannot optimize the use of website design for promoting their business.  A limited budget doesn’t mean they can’t expect something more. For them, affordability is just one parameter of small business website design.

What they want more than anything else is that their website design should give them the necessary competitive edge.

Let’s face it. Whenever we visit a site and want to evaluate its website design, it’s all about whether it’s trendy or not. It’s like we are obsessed with trends or something. Granted, when you pick a shirt or shoes, you want to choose something that is trendy and isn’t outdated. But, to apply the same logic to web design might not be correct.

Web design is different but still the same

Web design has made rapid strides over the past two decades or so. As you trawl through the World Wide Web, you will find many websites showcasing unique designs, which you might slot in the ‘trendy’ bracket. But, dig a little deeper into the site design and you will find that the designing concepts are just extensions of tried and tested web design concepts. The concepts of minimalism, negative spacing, and simplicity have been used for ages. Designer’s today are just using them differently.

Trendy does not mean Effective

Here’s another facet of the trendy or not trendy argument. Trendy doesn’t’ necessarily mean effective. You might have a stylish website design, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to attract more visitors to your site. Effective website is all about usability and not about great visuals. Your website should be a coming together of both form and function. Great web design is always user friendly. It shouldn’t confuse but persuade.

Look up any ‘top ten’ lists for websites with great web design. Yes, the website will be visually compelling, but they will also be offering excellent functionality.

User, User, User

Your website visitors are impatient individuals, looking for instant gratification. So, if your web design is difficult to understand, they aren’t going to waste time trying to understand it. It’s always best to use web design as a tool of expression rather impression. Your web design should help focus a visitor’s attention on the message you are trying to convey. That should be its core objective.

The rest is just details.

Since studies have revealed higher rates of abandonment for the websites where a page takes more than 4 seconds to load, web developers have got a new benchmark to achieve in terms of page loading time. Online businesses or Ecommerce sites need to ensure a faster loading of website, or it will leave a significant number of visitors frustrated, which may include regular visitors or customers, and find their way to other websites that load faster. Unfortunately, a lot of business owners, especially small business entrepreneurs, opt for cheap website development with inexperienced professionals and lose a significant business to their competitors having faster-loading sites.

Today, it’s very important for the web development professionals to know the techniques of reducing the loading time and serving the web pages faster. Here are a few ways how they can make a site load in lesser time.

Image optimization and the use of thumbnails

Using appropriate graphic tools, it’s possible to optimize website images to best suit the online use. Web optimized images will have substantially reduced file size and hence will allow for a faster loading. These tools are capable to compress the images up to 80% without disturbing its quality. Also, if using a large image is not essential, one may consider using a thumbnail, which is a smaller representation of an image providing an option to the user to click on it and view the larger version. It’s to be understood, therefore, that if a page has thumbnails as a replacement of the full images it will load much faster.

More use of static images and reduced animation

In contrast to the animated videos or graphics, the use of static images will remarkably reduce the time a web page will take to load. The static images are lighter as compared to the Flash animation and hence can be loaded faster in the browser.

A wise use of tables

If you are using tables as the framework of your site, make sure that you use them wisely. As a web browser waits until all the items are loaded in a table before rendering the content, it will keep a user waiting too long if your entire page content is sitting between a table and a table tag. The web page content should be divided in smaller chunks of data by splitting up the content into header, middle, and footer tables. This will keep visitors interested as they will have at least something to read while the page is loading.

Even if tables are to be utilized, the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to format and style your web page content can greatly improve your website’s load time as it cuts down on the long drawn out tags and substitute them with smaller class styles.

Use of common image folder

This will eliminate the possibility of image duplication when it is such that the same image appears on a number of pages and in different sections. If a common image folder is used, the user’s browser will be able to find the images with minimum efforts, resulting into faster loading. Besides, a common file for images is also part of a good file base structure.

Have a practice of monitoring the site speed

Monitoring your website’s speed on a regular basis will help you observe if it’s happening too frequently that the server on which your website is hosted is running slow. This may give you a timely indication if it calls for upgrading the web hosting package or switching to a better host.

Set limits to the database queries

Assigning limits to the total number of queries to be allowed to a particular web page can keep the load on the hosting server in control. If the information on the index page is kept to the point with an easy navigation structure, it will help the index page to be accessed real fast.

A slow website can lead to losses in many ways. On the other hand, a faster-loading website will make better sales and conversions as visitors could access the information and services quite quickly. If the abovementioned techniques are taken into account, it’s not difficult to develop a website for better profits.