It is very important to know that designing a good website is not sufficient. This is only the first step that you have crossed to reach your destination. It is no use creating a website which is just attractive, it is essential to form a beautiful site that attracts more and more people. This is done by converting your PSD to XHTML, PSD to wordpress or PSD to HTML. It cannot be done by anyone, only well known and experienced coders can help you with conversion of PSD files. I have been running my online business for past few years now. Till date, I have created three websites with the help of Xhtmlchop. They are one of the best and professional coders. They make sure that coding is cleanly done that makes it easy for a website to get loaded. Their PSD file conversions are cross browser compatible. After gaining tremendous popularity and success for my first website, I made my mind to carry this relation for long term. They ensure that the website they are creating are search engine friendly, which will help to pull out the site to top rank page.

If you have been doing some research on the web you know there are high number of freelance web designers out there to choose from. You are not only to limited ones in your town because websites can be done through the net and using email. Now the question you need to ask yourself is how to choose from so many of them. How do you know which one is more suitable for you. Remember you are looking for a good relationship here and not just a one-off type. Why? Because it will save you money and time in the long, so find a good one and be his/her friend.

When it comes to hiring freelance web designers you need to first look at their portfolio. Their portfolio will tell you a lot of them. If you don’t like the style or feel right about the web designer you can always try someone else. If you know exactly what you want then you can see if the designer has something similar. It would wise to understand as much as you can about website design before you approach a freelance web designer. This way you can communicate effectively with them and get the results quickly.

When you looking the portfolios you should click on the website links to visit some of them. And try to contact the company to ask them who did the website for them. There are people out there who would put up fake portfolios to try to get work, so you need be careful and check everything. And while you on the phone to the company you can ask them about how good the web designer was and would they recommend him/her.

The cost is another thing you need to consider, unless you have a big budget of course. The great thing about websites is that you can hire someone from the other side of the world to do the job for you, and at a cost that probably none of your local web designers can match. However, but you need to consider the support and communication will not be the same. Also, if something goes wrong a few months down the road you probably won’t be able to find the same person who built your website in the first place. Which means you will have to spend the time to find another web designer, and hoping that he/she is trustworthy. There are goods and bads with both options; only you can decide which one is better for you.

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organised, focused and you really mean business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the “salesperson dressed shabbily” anology, and you will get my point.

Flash-based sites have been a craze since the past few years, and as Macromedia compiles more and more great features into Flash, we can only predict there will be more and more flash sites around the Internet. However, Flash based sites have been disputed to be bloated and unnecessary. Where exactly do we draw the line? Here’s a simple breakdown.

The good:

Interactivity

Flash’s Actionscript opens up a vast field of possibilities. Programmers and designers have used Flash to create interactve features ranging from very lively feedback forms to attractive Flash-based games. This whole new level of interactivity will always leave visitors coming back for more.

A standardized site

With Flash, you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. No more woes over how a certain css code displays differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. When you position your site elements in Flash, they will always appear as they are as long as the user has Flash Player installed.

Better expression through animation

In Flash, one can make use of its animating features to convey a message in a much more efficient and effective way. Flash is a lightweight option for animation because it is vector based (and hence smaller file sizes) as opposed to real “movie files” that are raster based and hence much larger in size.

The bad and the ugly:

The Flash player

People have to download the Flash player in advance before they can view Flash movies, so by using Flash your visitor range will decrease considerably because not everyone will be willing to download the Flash player just to view your site. You’ll also have to put in additional work in redirecting the user to the Flash download page if he or she doesn’t have the player installed.

Site optimization

If your content was presented in Flash, most search engines wouldn’t be able to index your content. Hence, you will not be able to rank well in search engines and there will be less traffic heading to your site.

Loading time

Users have to wait longer than usual to load Flash content compared to regular text and images, and some visitors might just lose their patience and click the Back button. The longer your Flash takes to load, the more you risk losing visitors.

The best way to go is to use Flash only when you absolutely need the interactivity and motion that comes with it. Otherwise, use a mixture of Flash and HTML or use pure text if your site is purely to present simple textual and graphical information.