There is a realm within the world of web design that holds typography as the “holy grail” of design and aesthetics. Thousands of books, articles, and videos have been produced to focus specifically on fonts, their design, and their effectiveness. While many people are unaware this massive and ever-expanding subject, it is important to realize that the font on your web site sends a definite message to your audience. Fonts, their size, and style, convey meaning about your site or products and can transform an ordinary web site from ho-hum to a hot commodity. The most important aspect of choosing a font is thoroughly exploring your options. Google has an entire portion of its site dedicated to a growing number of new, attractive fonts that can put some meat on the Times-New-Roman-bones of your site.

First and foremost, every typographer agrees that you should never use Comic Sans. This font is widely detested because it is viewed as a cop out; it adds no creative or aesthetic value to a web page and looks generally unprofessional in almost any circumstance.

When you are trying to choose an appropriate font for a home page, blog post, or flyer, keep in mind the purpose of your writing. If you own a wedding planning business and are currently working on invitations for an upcoming ceremony, you want a font that expresses the sophistication and significance of the event. Most wedding invitations employ an elegant, serif (sweeping tail or stroke at the end of a character), so you would use a font with sweeping, dramatic tails at the end of each character. Basic serif fonts like Times New Roman, Rockwell, and Georgia, are commonly found in newspapers, magazines, and other print media. Sans serif (sans means “without”) fonts, the kind without any tails or strokes at the end of characters, are often used for websites and online material. The typeface for this blog, Verdana, is sans serif. Helvetica, Franklin Gothic, and Futura are all examples of Sans-serif fonts we see almost every day.

This is just a brief glance into the world of typography. If you find yourself mesmerized by the amount and variety of available fonts, there is an endless supply of resources on and offline that expound upon the subject of typography and how important it is in art and media. If you feel so inclined, much of the literature on the subject can also help you create and design your own unique font to give your web page or blog the ultimate personal touch.

One of the most important aspects of a website is usability. Web usability is defined as the flow of your website from page to page. In other words, it is a measure of how well your website is put together and whether improvements are needed to clarify or completely redo a part of the site. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com, are all masters of usability because their graphical user interface (GUI) is easy to use and accessible for even the least tech-savvy Internet users. There are a few steps and tests (like http://www.usability.gov/) that you can utilize to test the usability of your website.

The best way to test the usability of your website is to imagine situations related to visiting your website, and then asking people to act out these scenarios. While family and colleagues may be a varied (as far as Internet usage) and reliable source, the best results will come from people who are randomly selected. Ask the participant questions to make them feel at ease and discover their background (“How often do you use the Internet? How long each day? What do you use it for?” etc.) to better understand where they are coming from and how technologically inclined they are.

One of the most important aspects of the usability test are the scenarios that you provide for participants. For example, if I own a sporting goods store, I might give the user a scenario in which they must be able to find out if they can rent equipment, what the estimated cost would be, and how long they can rent the equipment. I may know that my business provides a special, 6-month rental deal but if the participant is unable to easily find this information on their own, then my website has a usability issue. Missing information, “dead” links (502 forbidden error), and a misleading or confusing layout are a few of the concerns that can be fixed after a usability test.

The goal of a usability test is ultimately to create clarity to your audience for all aspects of your site. Recognizing and deleting or renovating ambiguous terms or actions, as well as noting the efficiency (namely for eCommerce sites) of your site, will allow you to improve and strengthen your online presence. A web usability test is incredibly helpful and should be considered as an essential part of creating and maintaining your website.

Today almost everyone has a website of some sort. Whether it’s for business or pleasure, we are all connected to the Internet. Social media websites give you a generic, yet customizable theme that allows you to express yourself by posting text, pictures, videos, and listing your likes and dislikes. The World Wide Web encompasses so much information that it can be daunting to consider it on a holistic, international scale.

One element that all websites have in common is the language behind the images and information seen on a webpage. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the language that web pages use and translate to create the words and format of a webpage. Most likely, you will go your entire life without having an actual conversation in HTML but it is important to understand the language behind what our websites display.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, HTML code had to be painstakingly typed to the point of perfection for a webpage to appear the way you wanted it. While HTML and CSS (design/appearance code) are still major components for all websites on the Internet, sites like WordPress or Dreamweaver can now make the HTML-illiterate feel like the most tech-savvy person in the room by furthering your interaction with web design.

If you are interested in learning more about HTML and CSS, there are a plethora of resources available on and offline. Most colleges offer classes on HTML and hundreds of books and articles examine, explain and expand on HTML, its importance, and effect. Merely glimpsing at any webpage’s HTML code will make you marvel and appreciate the complex, attractive websites we visit daily.

There is a new wave of phishing spam emails hitting inboxes lately.  A “phishing” scam involves an effort to try and gather sensitive information from you, such as banking information.  These are among the most dangerous types of “spam” you can receive.

Some of the emails that scammers send have a branded appearance of a popular credit card provider.  The ones I have been receiving lately are branded with American Express.  Luckily, I don’t own an American Express card, so I immediately know it is fishy.  But the look of these emails is quite convincing, so be careful.

Banks and credit card service providers usually include detailed information such as your name or the last few digits of your account number.  But even this is not a “for sure” thing, so always express caution.

The body of the “fraud” message might even include a lot of details about a “suspicious transaction” that happened on your card.  In my case, it was a description of a real store with a large charge amount – something that might seem believable to me if I thought someone really had my American Express card.   But in truth, the transaction description is fake.

The body will also include links that try to lead you to a website.  The email will try to convince you that you need to visit that link and probably fill out information about you, your login, or your financial details.  They might try to convince you that this process is for you to “confirm” something about your account. The rule is – don’t click the links!

If you receive such an email and think it might be from your legitimate provider, try calling them first or visit their website directly through a browser (not by clicking any links).

We are a visually oriented society; from films and photography to illustration and art, we are stimulated in unique ways by endlessly varying combinations of pictures and motion. It follows that designing a website is a visually intense, interactive experience. There are many different aspects of style and design to consider. Whether aligning a page, picking the perfect graphic, or choosing a complimentary color scheme, website designs are full of visual stimulation.

After creating an attractive design for your site, you should consider adding a video to your post or page. Videos are incredibly effective website tools because people usually prefer to watch a video rather than read a large block of text. Video gives the site viewer information in a more accessible and appealing format. Inserting videos into your website is an efficient way to inform visitors about your site and persuade them to spend more time browsing. Adding a commercial to your site, as well as YouTube or Vimeo, allows your business to reach a wider audience. Keeping your site updated with videos of interesting and relevant content will encourage people to visit your website more often.

There are two major methods to using a video to your website: you can either have a professional, high-quality video made for your company or embed a video that is relevant to your business and deals with a subject that your clients may find interesting.  Making a video for your company does not mean simply sitting in front of a webcam and describing your business or successes. Your video should be created by a professional who understands you, your target audience, and what you want to say about your business and website.

To add video to your site, here are a few programs, like Video LightBox, that require you to download their software in order to embed videos. This type of program often includes features that allow you to customize the appearance of the video to help integrate it with your website’s design theme.

If you have a basic understanding of HTML, there is an even simpler option. Everything on the Internet, from text to links to dropdown menus, requires specific code that computers recognize and translate into a format that you are familiar with. This same kind of coding applies for embedding a video into your website.

First, find or create a video that you want to put on your website. YouTube is a great resource for uploading your videos or finding one you want to share. Then save the video to your computer using one of the various sites that translate the video code into a format (like MP4) that you can save on your computer and use on the Internet. Websites like SaveTube.com, SaveYouTube.com, and KeepVid are easy to use and effective, allowing you to save the video to your computer and then upload it to your site. If you use WordPress to edit your site, there are a number of easy-to-use plugins that can help you embed a video into your page or post.

Adding video is simple process that can dramatically improve your site. Videos are constantly watched all over the Internet and embedding one on your website makes the content more accessible and, if updated consistently, video will attract more and more people to your site. Video is a modern must-have for any website.

You are working on the most amazing blog post known to man, and you just need to adjust one last custom field before publishing.  But where in the world are your custom fields?  I just know they are supposed to be there – and my coworker who logged in yesterday could see them fine. Don’t worry, you didn’t just imagine that.

Welcome to the funky Screen Options feature.  In recent versions, WordPress introduced the little Screen Options tab in the top right corner.  If you select this tab, a series of options with check box fields will come up, and chances are your custom fields and some other options are not selected.  This means they are hidden, so just check the box.

These settings are configured per-user, so a different user logging into WordPress might or might not see the same fields that you do.

I am one of the first to admit it, there is a lot of web design talent out there.  In fact there are a lot of talented web designers right here in Austin.  But even the most talented web designer can fail at providing a good solution to the client.  A large part of the problem is lack of project management.

Working Inside the Design Instead of With the Client

Some web design professionals run through the same mundane steps they are accustomed to in their own special way, and they never once inform the client about what they are planning to do and what they have or have not done.  So how does their client know what to expect?  How does the website owner know what stage of the process they are in?

Will the website ever actually get done?

The Web Design Process

To establish good project management you must start with a basic plan, a blue print of what is about to happen.  For our customers, we offer a flow chart of the general phases they can expect to occur during the project.  For example, the first phase is mock up designs.  Based on the scope and desires of the customer, we give them an idea of the timeline for that phase and when the next phase should begin.

This gives the customer some peace of mind in that early stage when they are not yet familiar with us, and it helps them to plan their own tasks as well, like when to deliver their next batch of content to us.

Good Tools

Not all customers are alike, so not every one of them will want to use my preferred tool.  But in most cases I invite them to our project management software system, so they can login to a special area to see notes, communication, and files related to their project.  I always have at least one customer who prefers basic email communication or even phone calls over the website system, but we still use the system for our internal staff.

With our project management software, all of our staff can track notes and progress for a project, create task lists and check off items when they are completed, track milestones, and share important files such as programming documentation and mock up designs.

Steamlining & Succeeding

It’s a shame to hear stories from website owners who are disenchanted with the web design industry because they had a poor experience previously.  A great deal of those stories could have been prevented with some basic project management.  Unfortunately, a great designer without quality project management might feel just as overwhelmed and lost as the customer who is wondering what the status of their website is and why it hasn’t launched months after they originally planned.

Not everyone is prepared for a large e-commerce website development project.  Done right, a shopping cart driven website can be rewarding for a business, but it is also an involved project and it requires some comfort with the idea of managing orders online.

In other cases, a company may produce too many special order kinds of products to be able to offer a predetermined, fixed price item on a website.  Or maybe there are a vast number of special questions they need to ask the customer to get their order just right.

Along comes the order request form.

What I mean by this is basically a simple online email form, but it is tailored with the shopper in mind.  It asks specific questions or pieces of criteria that will help the merchant streamline that order-building process.  What size do you prefer?  What day do you want to make an appointment to look at samples?  How many batches would you like?

A simple order request form does not accept any payment.  It is a preliminary step to gather enough information to allow someone at the business to put together an appropriate order and contact the customer to pay offline once the final balance has been determined (or through a separate system).

It is also possible to create more sophisticated forms that do accept payment.

Some website owners will insert a two-step process that is not directly attached to the form.  For example, after you fill out the initial form, you get a “thank you for your request” page with a PayPal button.  The disadvantage with this set up is that the PayPal button is not directly linked with that form, so the payment is not as easily tracked, and it does not affect the success of the order fulfillment since they are submitted completely independent of each other.

A step further from this is a truly integrated payment gateway, working together with the form code.  This requires a little more sophisticated programming assistance, but popular gateway services like Authorize.net make it fairly easy for a web developer to achieve these days.  With Authorize.net’s “hosted order form” option, using the SIM (simple integration method), you can create a very basic request form on your own site, followed by the payment form on the credit card service provider’s site.

Setting up a payment form in this way is usually helpful for service-based businesses, because it allows their customer to enter a custom order amount (for varied invoices), and the cost of the credit card gateway service and programming needed to integrate it is reasonably low.

1. Email forms cut down on spam.

Whenever you have an email address blatantly published on your web page, even if it is not linked, you are at risk for receiving a lot of spam. Often, automated programs crawl websites throughout the Internet grabbing up email addresses and adding them to spam mailing lists.  They may also use those email addresses to forge the “from” address when they send out their spam messages to thousands of annoyed people.

Spam is a problem that is difficult to completely snuff out but there are ways to minimize the amount of spam you receive, and help keep your sanity!  By using a quality web form, you can hide the email address from the public eye.  By going further and adding something like captcha to the form (those funny codes you have to type in), you narrow down the abuse activity coming from robots (automated programs).

2. You can track your web leads.

A solid analytics program is great if you want high quality tracking of your website traffic, but that won’t guarantee that you can track all the emails and phone calls you received from folks visiting your website.  By creating a form, you have a new way to track visitors’ interest.  You can set up special reports in Google Analytics to track a certain form confirmation page, or set up a unique email account that receives all the requests from that form.

3. You can build your mailing list.

A brief request form can ask a few simple questions, or even just Name and Email Address.  By gathering this info from the opt-in requester, you can build up your mailing list.  At minimum, you can do one good email follow up with that person, and maybe close the sale.  Even better, you can run a regular email marketing campaign to your list of opt-in contacts, reminding them each quarter or perhaps each month about your business and offering the latest promotion.

Want a boring static website that no one ever revisits?  Of course not!  So how can you make your website more kinetic and engaging with just a little bit of effort?

A good slideshow is an effective feature that can bring new interest, updated information, and energy to your website.

I usually recommend including the slideshow on your homepage, while avoiding it on other interior web pages.  This keeps your front page fresh and intriguing, and as people start to delve into the rest of your content they are engaged enough to concentrate on the information rather than just bold visuals (or at least we hope so).

How Many Slides?

Think about the attention span of your visitors.  Most likely, you shouldn’t expect them to linger more than a few seconds before making a decision to click on something, call you, or some other action.  So how many slides can you really show them, effectively, in that time span.  Usually my answer is 3 or 4 maximum.  This may vary with your industry and the type of audience, as well as the type of content you will focus on.

Slideshow Content

Your slideshow can be ever-changing.  It is a good idea to revisit the content of your slides regularly to be sure they are focusing on the right products or services and the right message for the moment.  You can include things like:

• A new product
• A sale or special coupon
• Recent news about your company, like an award that you won
• Your company’s motto
• Your company’s success rate
• A key benefit that you offer to clients (how successful they will be)
• Customer testimonials (Let them sell your product for you.)
• Call-to-action (ex: download this or call us for a free demo)

Your slideshow is an ideal place for bold visuals – colorful photographs of your products, portraits of your customers using your product/service, humorous images, the cover of a publication or samples from marketing pieces.

How Big?

The dimensions of your slideshow can be big and bold, but ask yourself these questions first:

Will most of my audience be able to see the majority of my web page content?

If you know that 50% of your audience is using small mobile devices, your slideshow probably should not take up so much screen real estate that they can’t read it without scrolling, let alone the content below it.  If you know that a large chunk of your visitors use wide screen monitors and they are very visual and love graphics more than most, maybe your slideshow should be particularly large and in-your-face.

Is the slideshow more important than the content below it?

Your slideshow should highlight important factors about your business and the aim is to engage your visitor to convert them into a true prospect or customer.  But you might also require information below the slideshow area that highlights other aspects of your service, or maybe that offers online shopping tools.  You don’t want to completely hide these things, so be conscience about a slideshow that is too tall.  People don’t always mind scrolling, but it is a detour for immediate sales.

Here is an example of a large slideshow design; since this salon is very visual, it has a good impact on the customers.

Compatibility & Usability

Flash technology used to be the go-to for creating pretty slideshows, but that time has passed.  You can thank the rapid growth of iPad and iPhone for this, since neither supports Flash.  (As well as the fact that there are many more open technologies available these days.)  To ensure that 100% of your visitors can view your slideshow, it is best to use a more versatile technology like jQuery or HTML5 for the slideshow.  If you have a WordPress or other CMS website, many of the slideshow plugins support these accessible options.