We have mentioned that you need to monitor your website and computer to keep them up to date. There are several things you should do to make sure you don’t lose all of that valuable effort or maybe lose your website.

Be prepared for any situation that might occur. Even if you hate paperwork, or just don’t want to deal with the technical aspects of your website, there is paperwork you really should maintain.

First, find yourself a folder and label it with your website name. Then, find the emails that you should have received when you bought your domain name and web hosting, print those out, and put them into your folder.

The email was for your domain name contains information about your account with the company you bought the domain name through, including the log in ID and password. It also will tell you when your domain name will expire. The set of emails dealing with your web host plan carries information about your web hosting plan, again, including your log in information.

Now you might ask, “Why do I need to keep both when they are from the same company?” Well, they contain different log in sets of passwords. Most web host companies have accounts layered. You have your basic account, and then you have the web host account within the basic account. So you need both sets of log in information to get to your web hosting plan account.

Tip: Highlight the dates on your emails that show the expiration dates. It will help you remember when you have to renew the accounts.

While you might know you have all this on your computer, what happens if your hard drive crashes? You then have to call everyone and go through a lot of identification processes to get your information back.

So now you have the log in and account information all in one place. Very good! Now check to see when the domain name is going to expire. If it is going to be soon, say within 3 months, go ahead and get online and renew it now. You can renew at any time and for up to 9 years. If you do not renew and forget, it may cost you as little as $250 (Yes! $250 and up to $1,000) to renew after it expires and could cause you to lose it forever.

If you don’t know how many years you are going to maintain a website, go ahead and renew for a few years anyway. Here’s why: the domain name, if it is a really good one, is probably resalable. In some cases, a good or popular domain name is usually on a waiting list to purchase as soon as it expires. (I wonder if “google.com” is on a waiting list somewhere!)

Also, the more number of years you renew for at one time, the less per year cost it will be. Just check out some places online where you renew domain names and see their costs as you go up the number of years. Some are as little as half price per year compared to a one year price.

Lastly, it is recommended that you renew through the company you have your web hosting plan with as they can “connect the dots”, so to speak, between your domain name and web hosting account.

The home page is the most important page of your web site. It’s the page that most of your visitors will view. It’s the primary page that search engines locate first. Your site’s home page needs to be visually attractive, convey key information in a concise manner, and make it easy for your site visitors to find what they need. A poorly organized homepage serves no purpose and can eliminate any chance of achieving your site’s objectives.

When planning your home page, pay attention to all three factors — design/layout, graphics and content. If a visitor can’t find what they need within 5 seconds, they will go to another site. A page that is lovely to look at but doesn’t tell your visitors who you are and what you do means they’re going to go to a site that does. A page that is wordy and repetitive will bore your visitors, and they’ll move on.

Do not waste critical space on your home page by adding unrelated images and long, looped Flash banners that do little for your site. A good home page balances the use of images and well structured, SEO content.

Design/layout. There are three important elements here: navigation, legibility, and colors.

1. Navigation. Your site must have a clear navigational path for accessing site content. This may seem logical, but many sites ignore the “clear” part! Four things to keep in mind with navigation: (a) it must be consistent throughout the site; (b) it must be in a predictable location so the visitor can find it quickly — either above the header, just below the header, or on the left; (c) the navigation bar provides the visitor with a clue as to what page of the site they are currently on; and (d) a large site has a site map.
2. Legibility. No matter how good your content is, if it’s difficult to read, it’s going to be ignored.
   • Your font should be easy to read and the correct size for your audience. Don’t use Comic Sans font for your site if it’s geared to a professional audience. Don’t use a 10 point font for a site for senior services.
   • The background and text colors should complement and contrast with each other. Lack of contrast between text and background can ruin an otherwise well-designed site. No gray text on a light gray background. Dark text on a light background is easier to read than light text on a dark background.
   • Limit your use of capitalized text as it’s harder to read.
   • Allow sufficient space between lines (line height). Text that is tightly spaced is difficult to read.
3. Colors. Avoid the use of too many colors, non-complimentary colors, or overly bright colors. (For more information on use of colors, read our blog entry “Design Elements – Color and Whitespace“)

Graphics. This can be summarized as: (a) don’t make your web site out of one image; (b) make sure your graphics make sense — use your images and photos to illustrate what your company does, not just because they are pretty; (c) size your photos before posting them on your website to save on download times; (d) make sure you use the alt and title tags — both for visually impaired visitors who use text to speech output and for search engine optimization.

Content. When writing content for your site, keep these major points in mind.

1. Write and edit your content keeping in mind that your web site is not about meeting your needs; it’s about meeting your customers’ needs.
2. Make your site’s purpose clear — explain who you are and what you do. Concisely.
3. Start the page with a tagline that summarizes what your company does. Don’t automatically start your page with “Welcome” as your visitors have already made the commitment to go to your web site.
4. When linking to other pages in your site, don’t just describe what each page is about — use specifics and show some of your best content.
5. Avoid the “click here” link title; it’s much better to tell your visitors what they’re going to see when they click a link. After all, we’ve all accidentally ended up on a NSFW site.
6. Give your pages a search engine friendly TITLE tag.
7. Don’t use graphics for text!
8. And did I mention writing and editing your content with your visitor’s needs in mind, rather than yours?

By the way, these rules should apply to all your pages, not just your home page. Any number of pages on a site can be the entry (or landing) page. So take some time to evaluate your home page with a critical eye, and let us know if we can help!

A website menu is considered the most important element in website navigation. If the menu system on the website is not user-friendly, you will lose visitors very quickly.

Consider this. When you go shopping at one of the larger shopping centers for the first time, you won’t know where to go to shop for what you wanted. Unless you are the adventurous type, you will look at the large sign at the entrance that shows the shopping center layout to find out where to go.  You know the one that says, “You are here”.  Your website has to operate under the same idea. They must know all the time where they are while on your website.

Website visitors are usually those who are just browsing, and those looking for something specific. When the website is opened, the first thing they will do is look for the menu. Keep in mind that visitors usually will spend just seconds on a website looking for something they wanted. If the visitor has a difficult time finding the main menu in just those few seconds, you may lose them, possibly forever. It is always easy to remember those websites that were hard to use. (Remember the old saying about “first impressions”?)

There are horizontal, vertical, side, top, bottom, drop-down, sliding, and many other types and configurations of menus. We aren’t going to say any particular type is best because website content and design should dictate the best menu system. For brevity, however, here is a list of our ideas about menus:

1. They should be easy to locate and easy to read. Those flashing, exploding, floating, or framed menus may not only be irritating but are rarely indexed by search engines.

2. With your menu, visitors should be able to go to any page from any page. Remember that visitors do not always get to your website from the main page.

3. Menus should never drop down or slide out so much that the website content is covered up. If there are that many pages, consider a combined vertical and horizontal menu system.

4. The layout should be such that the visitor does not have to keep clicking through to get to the part they are interested in. Good website design means minimum clicks and won’t aggravate or lose the visitor.

5. From a design standpoint, the color and style of the menu should complement the website, not make it look out of place.

6. Numbers 1 through 5 above apply to sub-menus as well. Sub-menus, from drop-downs, slide-outs, etc., should meet the same standards as your main menu system.

Obviously this list is not all inclusive. There are many factors involved with menu systems on websites. Just like the website itself, the elements of design, colors, and operation of menus are just as critical in keeping those visitors.

When looking for a web hosting plan, you need to consider how much bandwidth you might need to have. Bandwidth, as related to how web hosts sells their plans, refers to the total amount of data that can be transferred to and from your website each month, usually advertised and sold by GB (gigabytes). This transferring data includes html files, graphics, audio/video, e-mail messages, and any other files that are a part of your Web site.

Tip: When a person visits your website, they are “downloading” the page they are looking at, so it counts towards your bandwidth usage.

First, a little math. One KB is 1,000 bytes, one MB is 1,000 KB, and One GB is equal to 1,000 MB. For practical purposes, one GB is equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes. (Always round off  KB or MB to the next highest number for your calculations.) Yes, I know that one KB is actually 1,024 bytes, but most web hosts use the 1,000 bytes.

We are going to use a practical example to show how bandwidth works. You are going to water your lawn everyday. The total amount of water you use in a month is what you will pay for. Bandwidth is similar to the water. The total amount of data you processed is the same as total bandwidth you used during the month.

Example: A MP3 song is on the average 4Mb in size. Let’s say you download 5 MP3s per day from a web page that is  2MB in size. Then, for the entire month, the bandwidth usage for only the MP3 downloads is:

6 MB (MP3 + page size) times 5 (downloads per day) times 31 (days) = 930MB. This is only an example if you are uploading or downloading files from your website.

So, the general formula for those websites that are not involved in downloading or uploading files for use by their customers is:

Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Number of Days in Month x Fudge Factor = Bandwidth Required

If you are just putting up a new website, you will probably have to do two things: First, best-guess at the missing figures, and two, monitor your bandwidth.

Here are some definitions for you:

Average Daily Visitors. Total number of visitors you expect for the entire month, divided by number of average days in month (30). For example, you have or expect 300 visitors per month to your website. So you would divide 300 by 30 to get a daily average daily of 10.

Average Page Views. The total number of page views in a month divided by the total number of visits in the same month. For example, you know the total page views in a month is 6,000 with a total of 300 visitors. So the average Page views, [3,000 total pages / 300 visitors], would be 10 average page views.

If you are starting off fresh without any real numbers, you could simply use the total number of web pages you have with the assumption that every visitor is going to look at every page on your website, (wouldn’t that be great?). So we will assume for this example that you have 10 pages on your website.

Average Page Size. This is the average size of all of your web pages AND files in your website measured in KB. If you have your website completed, add all of the totals of all pages and then divide by the number of pages you have. For instance, using our 10 pages you have in your website, you add each file size up, for a total of 190 KB. The average would be 190 / 10 = 19 KB.

Tip: When adding these up, always round up to the next KB, i.e., the file is 4.2 KB so use 5KB)

Number of days per month. While the average used is usually 30, we will use 31 to be on the safe side, as well as account for those months when there are 31 days.

Fudge Factor. This is where you can be as flexible as you want. We would recommend that you use either 1.5 or 2 for standard websites or small business websites. If you are going to have a lot of photos, product pages, etc., you may want to even use 3.

So, for the formula with our figures, we have:

10 Average Daily Visitors x 10 Average Page Views x 19KB Average Page Size x 31 Number of Days in Month x 1.5 Fudge Factor = 883,500KB or 1 GB Bandwidth Required (rounded up)

And there you have it. Obviously, these are only example figures but it should give you an idea on how to determine what you need.

Some final Notes:

1. When you check with the web host you want to use, see if they rate limit your server. This means they restrict the maximum amount of bandwidth that may be used at any point in time. For small business that have shopping carts, this could cause some problems.

2. Always check your Bandwidth Usage History through your web host. This will give you plenty of warning in advance as to whether or not your bandwidth needs to be increased. Better to upgrade to the next higher plan than get surprised with a bill at the end of month for what could be a much higher expense.

3. When adding up totals for the Average Page Size, make sure you include the size of all files and files within all folders in the directory where your website is stored. Web hosts often count those as well because you usually can not view a web page without use of some of the application files included at the server level, i.e., cgi-bin.

If you have questions, always ask your web host and/or your webmaster. Both should be more than willing to help you.

Web Hosting plan prices range from “free” to over $200 per month. We would like to stress that the web host price is not the most important issue. The first priority is to make sure the web host plan you pick meets your requirements for your website to properly function now and in the case of expansion in the near future. For any web hosting you pay for, our advice is: Disregard the advertised price. You have to look at the plan you pay for to make sure it will accommodate all of your needs. Why use “free” and then have to pay for every additional function you need to add? This can add up pretty quickly and a needed function may not be available when you need it.

Web Host Pricing

When looking at the plans, find the actual cost of the plan, not the advertised price. Some web hosts will advertise, “$5.95 per month”, but when you look at the plan closer, you may find that “$5.95 per month” is good only if you pay for 2-5 years up front or contract for an extended period of time.

Most web hosts require you pay for a specific period up front, while others have you pay monthly. Check to see what the set-up cost is going to be since that will be an additional cost. Once you have the information you find for one web host, we would recommend that you check out at least 3 more. Then compare plans you have found and see who has most functions available at the best price.

Several Things to Look For

There are some basic things you want to look at. Some of these are, but not limited to: Applications, customer service, technical support, downtime, bandwidth, and storage space. We will cover these very briefly and what you want to look for.

Applications. For simplicity, these are “programs” that can be run or used on your website. Here are some things to consider:

• If your website needs a shopping cart, is it available through the plan?
• If you want to make some changes to your website, is a content management system (CMS) easily available and included?
• Will you need to install applications yourself or does the web host do this for you?

Customer Service. Is customer service available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? If customer service is only available Monday through Friday, you may have to wait until they are available when you have a problem. Having to call on Saturday, leave a voicemail and then wait for someone to respond hopefully on Monday is not a good idea if you are running a business website. Look to see what hours they are open as well. There is nothing like having to call at 6:00 pm because your account “dropped”, only to find out they are in a different time zone and not open until the next day or week.

Technical Support. Just like Customer Service, do they have limited days and times? Murphy’s Law says if they do, you will have your website break 2 minutes after they close. Another thing to look for when dealing with technical support is how they handle requests. If the only way they will allow you to contact them is to complete a “ticket”, that puts you on hold until they respond. Ideally, you want someone who is readily available 24/7, especially if their server goes down or if your website suddenly becomes unavailable for an unknown reason. They should have an easy to find phone number to call, an email address to send to, and their hours posted.

Downtime. There is a difference between maintenance downtime and sudden disappearances of your website. Ask if the web host will notify you in advance of maintenance downtime and if it will affect your website. Find out how often they shut down for maintenance, i.e., monthly, quarterly, etc. See if they have backup servers and where they are located. It would also be a good idea to ask about their security.

Bandwidth. The higher the bandwidth you can get in your plan the better, especially if you are going to have music or videos on your website or items your visitors can download. You want to keep in mind that you, more than likely, will have multiple visitors on your website at any given time. All of these eat up bandwidth. Just keep in mind that if you exceed bandwidth in your plan, you might wind up paying more money, or worse, get your website shut down.

General consensus says most websites and small businesses won’t require more than 1GB bandwidth. To be sure, check with your web designer, especially if you will allow visitors to download files. The items listed in “disk space” below can affect your bandwidth requirements as well. (We’ll post a blog on bandwidth shortly.)

Storage Space. This one is a little tricky, if you are going to store music files or a large amount of photos on your website. As a suggestion, here are some of the things you need to consider:

• The total size of your website files added together, usually measured by kilobyte (KB).
• Size of the applications you may install on your website now plus estimated size of ones you may add later.
• Total of the estimated size of email files you are going to store online. (Keep in mind those attachments!)
• Total size of the files you are going to upload or allow visitors to download.
• Total of the sizes of photos you are going to upload on your website if not already included with your website now.
• The size of your back up files, if you are considering backing up files online.

Note: The larger and more established web hosts backup server files on a regular basis and usually have each completed backup available to you for a limited time.

That covers only some of the basics to consider when paying for a web host. To save a lot of stress later, research and compare plans first. Don’t consider “free web hosting” as an automatic benefit, especially if you have to pay to add anything else. Ask your web designer for help and don’t be afraid to ask the web host questions before you pay. Simply make sure you know what you getting for your money.

You now have a domain name and are ready to put up your website to sell your product or provide that critical information. To do that, you need a web host so you can upload your website.

There are almost as many articles about web hosting as there are web hosts. So which information do you use to pick a web host? We’ll try to simplify it for you but keep in mind that there are many parts of web hosting not covered here.

Some Definitions

For those who may be a little less technically inclined, here are some basic definitions:

A server is a large computer system that has a large amount of disk space. Some web hosts have multiple servers. There are specific types of servers used for eCommerce, gaming, music, etc.

A web host is someone who sells a certain amount of space on their server and provides a range of services.

Web hosting applications are those computer programs that are included on the server and may be available for you to use depending on the plan you pay for.

A web hosting plan is a combination of services bundled into one product for you to pay for and use. It is similar to buying a car with different options you can choose to include.

A web host account is simply an account that shows what you get on your plan when you pay for it. You get a unique ID and password to get access to your account and sometimes the files on the server.

Bandwidth is the amount of information you can pass through a connection, like uploading (new music for website visitors), downloading (visitors downloading your music), or running a file (a visitor looking at a website page). Web hosts sell, based upon anticipated usage, as Gigabytes (GB) per month allocated to your plan. (We’ll cover this in a little more detail in Web Hosting, Part II).

Types of Web Hosts

Some web hosts are run by a person or companies that own their own server. They sell space on their hard drive to those who want to load up their website or blogging files. In the general terms, this is called “shared” web hosting. That means more than one website is loaded onto that web host’s disk drive.

Other web hosts are actually resellers. This means that the “web host” is selling space on someone else’s server. For example, the reseller is located in one State and the servers are physically located in a different State and owned by a different company. When they sell the space, they get a commission for each customer from the actual server owner. So when there is a problem, you may not be able to get it resolved with the person or company that you paid for your web-hosting plan. Based on experience, you will be very lucky if you go without having any problems, even with the most technically proficient web host.

Customer / Technical Support

Customer and technical support is important in determining which web host you are going to use. If you are running a website for your business, a technical problem with your website may cause you to lose customers. If you are not sure about your website account, getting customer service to explain in plain language about a change to your account is always most helpful.

Some web hosts have elaborate systems set up to handle technical and customer service issues. Some even include a good “help” system as well. At the other end of the spectrum, technical support and/or customer service consists of filling out an online form, usually a “support ticket”, sending it by email, and then waiting for an answer. There are many web hosts in between.

Web Host Plans

There are general, business, eCommerce and personal plans. Mostly, business and eCommerce plans will include a shopping cart application with higher bandwidth and disk space although you will pay a higher price for these. Virtually all plans include email, although the number of email accounts included in the plans may vary.

If you decide later that you need to add a specific application, it may cost you additional to add to the plan you initially pay for. In some cases, you may have to pay, even if you add the application yourself to your website. Depending upon the application, you might need to pay for an upgrade to increase disk space and bandwidth.

That covers just some basic elements of web hosting. In the next segment, we will cover some additional details about web hosting.

Your website is one of your key tools for getting information out to your audience. The goal can be for a business to gain customers, getting someone to join a group, or subscribe to a newsletter. With a website, you want to be found on the Internet and get visitors to take the action you want them to.

Stay in People’s Minds

“Out of sight, out of mind”. That adage definitely applies here. You have a website and you need to make sure everyone possible is aware of it. This is where you can “advertise” not only your business, but your website as well. It is advertising your advertising, if that makes sense. You should put your website and email addresses on or in Newspaper Ads, Yellow Pages, Business Cards, Letters, Invoices, Online Ads, Emails, Flyers, Store Windows

You could even purchase some magnetic signs to put on your vehicles. Make sure your drivers have plenty of business cards since you never know when someone will ask for one. (I did, at the Post Office the other day from someone who was checking their mail.) There are many benefits to having your website and email addresses shown everywhere you can.

Online Directories

Another thing to consider is online advertising. Once you have a website, that does not mean you can now just sit and wait for people to start contacting you. Sorry, but there is more work to do. Online advertising does not consist of just your website. There are also those online directories that relate to your industry as well as those industries that relate to yours and some generic ones also, such as Merchant Circle and Craigslist.

Confused? Let me give you some examples. As web designers, we would join directories that deal specifically with web designs and web designers. We might also join directories that are for internet marketing, business advertising, printers, photographers, etc. They are not specifically web designers, but they relate to the interests of our customer base – advertising their business.

Another example would be for a house painter. He or she would advertise as a house painter and join those directories, but also would consider joining in categories such as house construction, house renovations, possible even real estate. After all, who does not get their house all prettied up when they want to sell it?

Website Coding

What about the website advertising itself? It can actually advertise itself. When you visit a web site, there is a lot of coding you do not see, hidden so to speak but there, created by the web designer to make the web page look like it does. One such piece of code is called a “meta tag”. This is a code that some search engines might use to identify or describe your website:

 <meta name=”description” content=” ” >

When you get on Google and do a search, you see a number of websites show up depending on the words you used to search with. As an example, by using the key words to search by, “web designs by”, here is what shows up:

Introduction to Web Designs by LAO

Web Designs by LAO designs new websites and updates existing websites with guaranteed results.

The first line of the entry shows the Title of the page the search engine found. The second and third lines are shown because that sentence is located in the “description” Meta tag of our website as follows:

<meta name=”description” content=”Web Designs by LAO designs new websites and updates existing websites with guaranteed results.” >

The search engine read this from the website and showed it in the search results. When the website was set up by the web designer, this information was properly placed in the Meta tag for the description, located in the main page in this case.

Each page can and should have a different description in the Meta tag. For the description Meta tag, it is recommended that you keep the information relatively short, usually no more than a couple of sentences long. Some say no more than 250 characters including spaces. The content of the information you place there should relate to the content of the specific page where you put it in.

Note: Not all search engines use the exact description you put into the meta tag. The search engine might disregard your Meta tag and simply take some of the content from your web page and use that instead.

So, there are just some things to consider for basic marketing of your website, business, or information resource. Happy Advertising!

Color.

One of the biggest roadblocks many of us have when designing is deciding on a color scheme. Whether it’s a logo, a brochure, or a website, the best layout design in the world will look awful if the colors clash with each other. (Have you seen some of the older websites out there? Have your eyeballs recovered?) Our reaction to color is almost instantaneous and has a profound impact on the choices we make.

Things to Consider When Choosing a Color Theme

1. Personality. Let the colors speak for your personality and image — whether it’s professional, fun, natural, whatever. Choose colors that align with your own style and taste. It’s why we ask our clients questions about they want to convey with their website. One of our clients Consoling Grace, is a church bereavement ministry. The color theme is soft, muted pastels of turquoise, rose and pearl gray to convey a gentle, supportive, soothing feel to the site. Bright reds and yellows would have been inconsistent with the purpose of the site. (Check out this article on Squidoo for a quick look at general responses to colors based on research, historical significance of color and word association studies.)

Remember that the color theme used in your website should also be used in your flyers, logo, business cards, whatever gets seen by others.(Obviously, not every color needs to be used in every piece.) Color is part of your identity!

2.  Too many colors. How many is too many can be hard to answer, but in general one can say that the risk of using too many colors is greater than the risk of using too few.  You will need a primary color (the main color of the page), which sets the tone for the design as a whole.  Pick a secondary color that “backs up” the primary color. It is usually a color that is pretty close to the primary color.  Select a highlight color which emphasizes certain parts of the design. It is usually a contrasting color and should be used sparingly. Depending on your image, more colors can be used, but remember that too many colors will make the page feel busy, cause eyestrain and make it difficult for the user to find the information he or she wants.

3. Contrast. Make sure there is a noticeable difference between your background, main text and link colors. Make sure the colors you choose are not too monochromatic or too similar to your text and links. For the most readability choose complimentary colors or stick with the classic black on white.

4.  Avoid Seizures. Super bright and colorful makes a theme very hard to look at.  While bright colors can be used as accents, if your site looks like a mashup of Pokemon, Jolly Ranchers, and an explosion in a paint factory, it will overwhelm the content of your site.

5.  Complimentary colors.  Complimentary colors are those which essentially make one another stand out — in other words they just look great together. They make people FEEL good when looking at them. It may seem crazy, but it’s a psychological response in humans. It’s also why the color wheel is used by many logo designers, marketers, and advertisers.  My art teacher used to say that if you mixed any two paint colors together and if the resulting color looked like any shade of ordinary mud, you’ve probably chosen complimentary colors.  Red and green are complimentary colors, but keep in mind that a darker shade of green and a lighter shade of red don’t compliment one another nearly as well as a darker shade of green and a darker shade of red do.  Remember too that darker colors are easier to see than lighter ones. If you choose a text color other than black, make certain it’s the darker shade of whatever complimentary color you’re using.

Color tools.

Thankfully, there are a lot of tools available on the web to help sort out color nightmares.

One of my favorites is EasyRGB.com , which lets you put in a hexidecimal color code and it brings up a list of complimentary colors.  This is great if you already have a primary color in mind.

Another great site is ColorBlender , a free online color matching tool.  Simply play with the sliders below the colorblend images and it will show you colors that work well together.

Whitespace.

“Above the fold” isn’t just a newspaper term. On the internet, it refers to the part of a web page that appears in a visitor’s browser without scrolling. It’s the most valuable part of the page – but don’t stuff too much inside too small a space or your design will look cramped (look at the example under #2 above)

“Whitespace,” or “negative space” is the space between elements in a composition.  Whitespace is space that’s deliberately left blank to better structure the page and emphasize different areas of content.  It is NOT empty or wasted space, nor is it necessarily white.  It is an integral part of a design.

A page with too little whitespace makes visitors feel uncomfortable because the page seems cluttered and hard to read. They quickly get overwhelmed and move on to another site.  Pages with too much whitespace, on the other hand, seem empty, as if there’s not enough content to fill the page. Visitors may wonder: “why bother with this?” and go somewhere else.

“Passive whitespace” adds breathing room to a design.  A common example would be the spacing between paragraphs of text, or between a header and the rest of design.

When whitespace is used to lead a reader from one element to another, it’s called “active whitespace.” It visually separates the navigation, content, header, and footer.

Take a look at these two pictures.   The content is the same, the photography is the same, the colors are the same, but they convey a very different image.  The one on the left uses little whitespace and  looks efficient, a bit outdated, and (let’s face it) cheap.  The one on the right uses a lot of whitespace and looks luxurious.  Which facial mask would you rather use?

Whitespace affects the look and feel of a design.  Use it!

The first step in starting a website includes getting a domain name. There are a lot of articles about what you should use as a domain name, but we are not going to cover that here. What we are going to do is tell you how to check who owns the domain name.

When a domain name registration is paid for, that domain name is being registered, not permanently bought outright. The domain name may be used only as long as the registration fees and renewal fees are paid. Usually these are renewed once a year although the option is there for registration of the domain name in increments up to 10 years at a time.

Many times, when the domain name is registered, it is registered by a friend, a relative, a web designer, or a web design company, depending on how it was going to be paid for. It is estimated that fewer than 50% of the actual business owners are the ones who set up the registration.

Most web designers and companies will do the domain name and web hosting registration as part of their “web design package” or as a convenience service for their client. When they do this, they will register the domain name and include the cost in their charges to their customer.

Some web designers register the domain name in their name as a matter of practice. Why, you ask? Basically, to make sure the customer pays the web design charges they owe the designer. It is usually a matter of standard business practice and is almost always included in contracts or the company’s Terms & Conditions.

It is also standard business practice to have the domain name registration transferred over to the customer once the customer pays in full for the initial job. Even if the designer is going to continue doing maintenance for the same client, it still should be transferred over because the customer should own the website, the website content, and the domain name once the job is done. However, the transfer is not always being done. We won’t address reasons why, as they vary.

When the domain name is not transferred, the problems start. For all purposes, the website and domain name is owned by the person who is the registrant of record. That means if a registrant has not transferred over the domain name, the registrant can in fact argue ownership of the domain name as well as the website.

How to avoid this problem? Make sure transfer of ownership is spelled out in the contract you sign with a web designer. Contracts should always be used when setting up web design projects, if nothing else, to avoid these type of issues. But that is a future blog.

To check to see who owns a website, go to WhoIs.com, enter in the domain name and look at the information carefully.

When the domain name is registered, and you look up the record of registration, the following is what you more than likely will see:

Registrant. The person or company listed here is the owner of the domain name.

Administrative Contact. The person designated to receive email, mail, phone calls, etc. from the registrar relating to the administration of the domain name. May be the same as the registrant or the company the registrant works for.

Billing Contact. The person who will receive email, mail, phone calls, etc. from the registrar about renewing the domain name by paying the renewal registration fee. May be the same as the registrant or it could be the company that the registrant works for.

Technical Contact. The person who is designated to receive contact from the registrar about technical matters dealing with the domain name.

Record Expiration Date. The date the domain name will terminate unless the renewal fee has been paid. This will usually be at 12:01am on that date.

Record Creation Date. This is the original date the domain name was registered either to the current registrant or his or her predecessor.

When looking at the registration record, sometimes most of this information will not be there. Carefully look near the bottom of what is listed and there will probably be a comment that “for further information” you need to go to another web address. Go to that web address and you should find the information you need.

Obviously being the owner is important – if someone else places himself as the owner, (such as your web designer), he can always decide to charge you for the use of the name later, and there is little you can do unless you have a written contract. 

When the project is completed, most web designers will do the transfer automatically, but may simply forget. Just tactfully remind them if you need to and they will usually do it without any problems. It only takes about 24 hours for the transfer to take effect.

One last comment: Make sure you keep a record of your domain name and web hosting information, including the passwords to log onto the account. You  don’t want to miss renewing your domain name and web hosting thereby losing all of that time, money and effort.

You can’t go to any website without seeing some type of image on the site – pictures, logos, etc. Many of these are files which are loaded onto a web host server and then displayed when you browse the Internet. We are going to talk about how to set up images and have them show correctly, avoiding the situation when they sometimes do not look so good or don’t show up at all. In this article, we will refer to  pictures but generally applies to any graphic you add to a website.

Start With High Resolution Pictures

For pictures to show well on the Internet, you should begin with quality high-resolution digital pictures.  The best display will come from pictures taken with a digital camera although you can scan them in and still come out with good images. When you download those pictures onto your computer, the files are digital and usually in a “print quality” resolution, meaning they will be 300 dpi or better.

Tip: ”dpi” is dots per inch and refers to resolution.  As a standard for the Internet, pictures should be loaded onto the web at 72 dpi. If you want to print that great picture, it should be a minimum of 300 dpi.

Another Tip: If you have to scan in a picture, make sure you set your scanner settings to 300 dpi. That way you will get a good file you can use to upload with.

You want to start with high resolution pictures even though you will reduce the dpi to 72 when you load them onto the Internet. Why? Because you may need to “crop” (trim) or enhance the photo before you save it to upload. That way you will not lose any of the picture quality.

Use the Right Code

Putting pictures on a web page requires a specific code in the web page. The standard HTML code format to show a picture is:

[<] [img src=] ["images/myhouse.jpg"] [border="0" width="170" height="200"] [alt="this is a photo of my house"] [>]

(When putting in the code, do not use the brackets. We just put them there in this example to help in describing each part of the code. )

The [<] in the example is called an opening tag and the [>] is the closing tag for the code. You have to put them in for the code to work.

[img src=] is the abbreviation for image source. This tells the computer that the information following img src= shows what the characteristics of the picture are.

["images/myhouse.jpg"] tells the computer the folder where the copy of the picture is stored. myhouse.jpg is the name of the picture file stored in the folder images/.  The apostrophes are required. When your website files are uploaded onto your web host server, you usually load a folder that shows all of your graphics, pictures, etc. The name of that folder is what is going to show first, followed by a / and then the picture file name. The picture can be a .jpg, .tiff, or .gif, and that should also match the actual file name.

Tip: If you upload your pictures along with the website files without putting the pictures in a folder, then you would only show the name of the picture file, i.e., “myhouse.jpg” without the images/ or the /.

[border="0" width="170" height="200"] tells the computer what picture size you want to show on the website and whether or not you want to show a border around the picture. The “170″ says the picture is 170 pixels wide and  “200″ says the picture is 200 pixels in height. The number of pixels (the standard measurement of photos) will vary depending on the size you want to show. The “0″ after border= says you do not want a border. 

Tip: You want to make sure that the width and height in the code matches your actual picture width and height or it might show up looking distorted, stretched or scrunched up.

[alt="this is a photo of my house"] serves several purposes. With today’s technology, those persons who are visually impaired may use software to “read” websites. By putting this code in, which is now a coding standard, the software will read the picture code and then tells the user what it is. Secondly, a side benefit is  it helps the person working on the picture codes  to identify which picture they are working on.

How We Get Photos Ready

As a web designer, we use Adobe Photoshop to work on pictures, images, logos, etc.  Once we know where the picture is to be placed, we determine the size it can be and then re-size it to fit the space.

Sometimes we have to “crop” (trim) the picture. For instance, we might have a real estate agent who wants to show off a picture of a house he wants to sell. Looking at the picture, for whatever reason, the house isn’t  centered in the photo and there is a lot of trees, sky, etc. What we would do is take the photo and trim it so that the house is in the center of the picture. We always trim before we reduce the dpi of the photo to keep the resolution quality of the photo. Once it is set the way we want, we then “save for the web” at 72 dpi, upload the photo file where needed and make sure the code matches.

Note: When reducing any photo resolution down to 72 dpi, the actual size of the photo will also change to smaller numbers. So it is important to make sure the width and height matches in the coding after the photo is set up for the website.

And there you have it. Questions? Feel free to email us about any questions you might have and we will see what we can do for you. Thanks for stopping by.