Web design is a huge industry in the present days. Trillions of active users and steadily growing number of new websites launched online have made a profession of web designer highly demanded. In this article I am going to tell you some interesting facts about this artsy field of work.

1. Web design is more than just design. Search engine optimization is a key component. A webmaster should be well knowledgeable with skills in web development languages as well as SEO principles. Other requisites of an effective web design that should be mentioned are browser compatibility, CSS markup, social media compatibility and standards-compliance.

2. Design should be extendable for the future needs. The design of a website totally depends on its future goals. As an example, at some stage you may want to add some additional plugins or widgets to your website. Thus, it should be flexible for all sorts of changes. Creation of a website is not that simple process. It involves a number of considerations.

3. Visitors need to see lively graphics. As it’s been shown in practice, people pay a lot of attention to all the details in a web page.  Nice lively images would be able to speak for themselves. What if you need to convey a certain emotion? It’s not that easy to put it in words. This is where a nice photography could be an ideal solution.

4. An efficient web site represents that kind of information that a visitor is searching for. All flashy animations and ads can take off people’s focus from the main message, thus it’s vital to know where to stop and think of the quality. Besides, too many flash apps can cause a rapid increase in the bounce rate.

5. The load time limit should not exceed 4 seconds. Any website that takes too long to load can lose its potential customers. Abundance of websites spoils people. If the site takes longer than 4-5 seconds to load in, a customer can quickly switch to another relevant website. Learn the ways how to improve your website performance.

You may think that since the biggest part of population speaks English, it will be easy to create a website with the English content that can be understood all over the world. To a greater extent it’s true that the English language in one country is mostly the same as that spoken in another country. However, there are certain variations you may want to be aware of to be able to reduce misunderstanding when your website is read by an English-speaking user in another country.

The major distinctions between UK and US English

The most obvious difference is spelling. People from different English-speaking countries write a large amount of English words differently. As an example, a big number of commonly-used words is spelt differently in the US compared to the UK and most countries in the world. You might be surprised to find out but the list of spelling differences between US and UK is quite long. The suffixes -ise and -ize is one simple example of such spelling differences. However, this difference is not that problematic when the comprehension of the content concerned.

Different words for the same concept

Sometimes different English variants have different words for the same concept. That’s already more problematic issue. What UK variant calls “capital and small lessons”, people call “upper and lowercase” in the US. “Gas” and “flash” are called “petrol” and “torch” in the UK correspondingly. Therefore, if you want your content to be understood worldwide, make sure to provide it with explanatory notes and references. As a rule, webmasters don’t add explanatory notes and the reason is, because they simply don’t know about these differences. Sure enough, if you’ve lived all your life and used one word to name a certain object or concept, you won’t think twice about using it. The truth is, it can become a daunting task to constantly look for both variants in dictionary when you need to use a certain word.

Same words and different meanings

This case is far worse than those two mentioned above. This can become a reason for big misunderstanding. For example, “a public school” has got an opposite meaning in the UK and US. The same can be said about football. In the UK it’s a completely different game. In this case you need to explain what exactly your word means or use the alternative for the other variant.

I would expect that you’ve heard the saying “Content is a king” scores of times. And yet, you may not know what it exactly means. Let me try to explain. Basically, what all your potential customers are interested in is valuable content. They all want to know what your company offers. Search engines automatically look for the valuable content on your website. Those times when it was enough to quickly write a content packed with SEO keywords have become a thing of the past.

Today, websites are expected to provide their customers with valuable information that is relevant to the business field, unique and make sense. If you don’t do that, your website will lose the points in the competition. There are thousands of business owners who are ready to use all possible tools to increase a number of the prospects.

How is it possible to use SEO content to your advantage?

If your website hasn’t got a proper SEO copy and coding, it’s high time to reevaluate the priorities and concentrate on search engine optimization. When your targeted group of customers type in words related to your products and business on the whole in the major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! ideally you want your website to pop up on the search results page.

If you don’t think it’s important to optimize your website, you’re mistaken. If your competitors have optimized websites, they will benefit in sales and new customers.

If you don’t have the appropriate expertise, hire a professional copywriter who would help you create quality content, conduct the appropriate research, monitor the results and add the right coding. It’s not inexpensive, however you get what you pay for. A good and professionally optimized website will increase your sales and online awareness. Besides, you won’t need to spend time on writing, instead you can totally concentrate on your business.

SEO is really important. A good thing about it is that you can test it and see what actually brings in the best results and what your customers really want to read. If you fail to see the importance of SEO copywriting for your business, you’re about to lose a big amount of customers and money.

Before you make a decision to put a new business website among thousands of others on the Internet, you need to have a good plan first thing first. Try to picture the face of your company looking back at you from the screen – it’s got to be visually appealing, professional with eye-catching graphics and interesting content that would propel your customers to check you out and stay longer on the site. But before that, think over the strategy for your business website. Define a group of your customers and a mission, choose and buy your domain name, pre-plan all the images, texts and other graphic elements that you want to publish on the site. Budget is another important aspect that you need to consider.

Define your clientele

You may think that it all sounds against common sense, but the essence of your business website is not actually about you! Your website has got to present your business face to the world and look captivating. It is a tool that enables its owner to reach out a lot of new customers and sell the products and services across the country. Here it’s important to know your customers and answer all the questions they might have before they speak them out. By doing so, you can simplify the whole buying process for them. It doesn’t matter whether you’re creating a one or two-page site or a fully functioning site with hundreds of pages and possibly even shopping carts, etc., you need to provide your prospects with contact information such email address, phone numbers and prove them that their personal data are secure. Define your targeted group of customers. How old are they? Are they women, men or kids? What are their expectations? Where do they live? How do these places look like? How smart are your customers? Answer all these questions and see what type of prospects you’re looking for. Now you’re ready to think of website design. Remember, your business website needs to be different to those sites that your competitors have.

Choose your domain name

If you want to become a master of your domain, you need to give it a name. Use your company name if nobody else already owns this domain name. As it happens, a lot of people buy all variations of domain names with hope to cash in later. Search online “domain hosts” to find the most suitable and available domain name.

The content of the site should be customer-oriented. Don’t make it sound like an ad. Keep it simple, clear and yet, informational. If you use “we” referring to your company, address your customers using the word “you”. When writing the content, write it like you’re talking face-to-face. Your prospects will clearly see that here, on your website, they can find all their answers.

Drupal is a popular publishing platform that’s created and evolved by our professional community of web developers. It’s bursting with the potential. It’s always modified and updated with new features. You can use or snap in any of thousands of free designs and plugins to assemble website in a short time. Most of developers absolutely adore flexibility of Drupal CMS. Administrators find its scalability incredibly useful and handy. With Drupal CMS features it’s easy and convenient to manage and edit the website.

A great variety of tools helps its users to structure, organize and reuse the content. Drupal CMS facilitates creation of custom lists, friendly path urls, smart defaults for content creators and it also helps to associate content with other content on your website.

The user-friendly interface of Drupal publishing platform helps to manage the content. Flexibility of the system is able to handle countless types of content including video, podcasts, texts, blogs, real time statistics, optional revision control, etc.

Within hours you can build internal and external-facing websites without using any special programming. You won’t have to start from the beginning every time you need to build a new project. Installation profile “Drupal distribution” or multi-site configuration could be utilized for creation a new site.

If your company involves more than one person, Drupal cms is a great choice, either. It’s got great options for new user accounts and permissions. You can assign one or more roles to your users. Each of the roles can have its own permissions which would allow your users view and perform only those functions that are permitted by the administrator.

Drupal allows its web designers to create highly usable and interactive web designs that entice a bigger amount of users and increase traffic. You can opt for any already existing Drupal theme and give your website an instant identity! If there is no theme to your liking, you can try to create the one which would meet your special business goals and which others could use.