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• XHTML 1.0 Transitional
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• A lot of advertising spots 125×125

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Note: Insurance Theme is Designed by Web Design Leeds and made free by Conservatory Designs

Important: Please give the full permission (read/write/execute) to the cache folder located in this theme.

Watch Live Demo

Features:

• XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• Adsense Ready
• Threaded comments support
• FeedBurner subscribe via email support
• A lot of advertising spots 125×125

Demo

Download

Note: Insurance Theme is Designed by Web Design Leeds distributed by SEO Company

Important: Please give the full permission (read/write/execute) to the cache folder located in this theme.

It is not just about starting a well decorated shop. It is more about starting a shop that will cater to your target market – in the best way they want. In web things are a bit different – the challenges are very different. For example, if one of your customers is not satisfied with something, you can get in and discuss different issues to solve his or her problem. But in your website, it will not be possible for you to intervene in the same way when the prospective client does not find what he or she is looking for. You need to guess, follow the best practices and constantly develop the website.

A website may seem good and charming to you with all of your intelligence and may not attract your viewers that much as you. You cannot take any shortcut to web designing if you are sincere enough to grow your business.

It has been noticed so far that even a single change of a shade or colour or repositioning of an element may leave a good impression on your visitors and improve ROI.

While designing a page one should understand the logic behind the business that the page is supposed to act upon. It is important to understand the logic of the business before you start. Depending on the logic the page will hold it’s elements and the chronological order of that should depend on their importance.

The look and the strategy behind the design of the page should be simple enough. The only possible way to make it simple is to understand and guess the user’s behavior in the website over a certain period of time. For example, google.com holds only the main criteria as ’search’ in the centre as a recent change and you will find other navigational links are visible only when the cursor moves.

The colour scheme is another important part of web designing. For the professional websites, it is enough to have two basic colours in it. You can always use various shades of the colours according to the need. It is recommended to look up for the colour schemes of other websites on the same industry since they more or less use traditional colours if you are not sure by yourself.

There was a time, not far past, people were accustomed with the Static HTML pages and that was marked as the standard. However, this is the time when various experiments are going on with web standard and a website can do much more than it was supposed to do earlier. The expectations and experiences of the viewers have been changed a lot and you should follow that if needed. Though, again, you should understand the relevancy of the change of the standard with your industry.

It is good to experiment with a website. However, it is very important that you make changes gradually and allow enough time to your existing visitors to get accustomed to it. Otherwise, you may loose visitors and that all important business.

It is important to understand what is the basic logic of the website? Business logic presented in simple terms is more important that making the website beautiful with ornaments. The basic purpose of design is to navigate the readers to the content rather than making them appreciates the design itself.

There is no point in adding functions after functions if it is not needed or if it is used seldom. Sometimes good web design follows the process of elimination rather than selection. In this process you eliminate unnecessary items rather than adding more elements. A seasoned webmaster is great at this process.

Before you add an element to your website, be sure that at least 25% of your users will use this element. Just asking yourself about each of the elements (may be a design or code or content) again and again is immensely necessary while building up a site. However, it should be backed by proper user experience measurement. The next tusk is to try to combine elements, if possible. Just look for the pages that can be combined into one. To simplify the stylesheets, try to adjoin the styles. If the website is not simple enough, there must be some elements that can be combined together and yet kept simple. 

Find out weather your website is consistent. The backend of your website should be as neat as the frontend. It is a general tendency of many designers to focus on the design of the frontend of the site while ignoring a clean code. Some sites look simple in the frontend and at the same time is just a mess in the backend. Be careful about the markup that is used in your site while making it as simple as it can be. Thus try to compose a good one, a standard and compliant markup (don’t forget to validate the code).  It could be useful to limit the number of stylesheets or the JavaScript count that is used for the site. 

Another important step is to choose a proper CMS since that holds the backbone of your site. Try to avoid the CMS that is really complicated. Some sites might be benefited out of the complexity of the CMS though it causes death for lots of sites. Try to find out the CMS that functions according to your need. Otherwise go for the one that allows you to turn on and off as required.

1. Follow the content or business logic: Many web designers just design a website without properly understanding the business logic. You will often find that most important content (like, sign up form) is below the fold or screen real estate or overtly visible in the main content area. To design a great website, you must define and understand the purpose of the page and follow the chronological order according to importance.

2. Keep it simple: Once you have identified the purpose of a page, focus on achieving it in the simplest possible way. Once you start making things simple, you will notice that it is really very tough to achieve simplicity. However, that should be your aim. Did you notice the recent change in Google.com home page! The top navigational links are visible only when you move the cursor. Otherwise, they are hidden for you to focus on their core business – “search”.

3. Color Scheme: if you are trying to develop a professional website, 2 basic colors are sufficient. You can always use different shades of those colors to get the best possible effect (you can search in Google for color scheme generators). If you are not sure about the colors, visit other websites in the same industry. Every industry has a very similar color scheme and you can follow the same.

4. Follow web standards: Web is developing very fast. To add to this, social networks are changing end user’s expectations and experiences while interacting with a website. Static HTML pages had been the web standard for a long time but today a web page can do much more than that. However, think twice before you add or remove something – will it really help to enhance user experience or meet the end result? If the answer is negative, there is no point in experimenting with web standards.

5. Follow conventions: Many web designers love to experiment with common norms. For example, some designers would remove common navigational links. This is good at experimental websites. But if you are doing business, these experiments may cost you a lot. Conventional structures are good, as the visitor already knows where to find what he or she is looking for.

Web 2.0 does not mean glossy buttons: There is a common misconception among many web designers that adding glossy buttons in a website will make it web 2.0. In fact, a lot of website owners ask for glossy button to get a web 2.0 site. You must understand that web 2.0 is more about user interactivity rather than glossy buttons.

A website is easier to navigate if it is simple. The basic requirement is to be just to the point but extraneous. To have less pages and sections prosecutes a site simple and that makes the design more accessible. It is easier to find out the navigation keys since many elements are not cluttered in a short space. The basic strategy should be to concentrate on a single or fewer things at a time. The consistency of the navigation is another important point to be remembered in the course. To simplify the main navigation, a sub-navigation can be used. Just put the less relevant elements under a separate heading. The navigation links may be grouped into specific categories using dropdown menu. It can effectively add a clear vision to the website.

It is easy to load a simple design faster for smaller file sizes. You should avoid multiple stylesheets and thousands of JavaScript files and on the contrary keep the code simple and slick. It also helps you to skip the increasing numbers of HTTP requests. The benefit of a quick loading and quick responding website is a improved user experience. And if Google launches Caffeine in 2010, the loading speed of a website is going to play a huge role in organic ranking.

The contents are more scannable in a simple website. Just focus on the most important part of the content and ask the visitor to take action. The basic logic is to get more attention from the viewers on the content – that matters most. Since the regular habit of the most viewers is to scan a page rather than reading, it’s better to help them rather than challenging the habit. The challenge is to make the page user-friendly.

Another important aspect is to write proper title of the pages and sections. This also helps in search engine optimization and marketing as well as helps the visitors to easily find the piece of content he or she is looking for. Many website uses fonts that are not supported by browsers and thus needs to turn them into images. This unnecessarily increases the file size. Unless it is very important, you should use common fonts.

1. It is important how you use your space. The empty space or the white space or breathing space is the most important design element. The viewers actually find it easy to discover the important elements of the page with the support of the empty spaces. There should be sufficient empty space between the columns and different page elements as well as between individual characters, lines and paragraphs. ALL the empty or white spaces are considerable and they add true meaning to the design of the page. Following the same rule, you should not use too many elements on a single page. Trust your viewers. They are willing to follow the navigation links if you put them relevantly. It is more comfortable to view short pages with related navigation links side by side rather than tons of elements in a single page among which most of the elements are extraneous.

2. Until and unless your web page is static you should exhibit the new contents and information. This does make sense for a good design. Viewers would like to revisit to find out the new elements or information if they get proper guidance. Unlike the blogging system you can create a separate system for new updates or entries so that the visitors do not have to hunt for the news feed.

3. Another very important element is links to internal pages. You should be definite about the links. The important step of designing a site is how the links are highlighted in the page. It is important thus to use separate marks or characters to highlight the links. It is a good practice to use a different colour to highlight the link or to underline the word to mark it as a link but better not to go for blinking text.

4. In a good website, the main elements are always kept within the eye-fold so that it can grab the reader’s attention at the very first chance. Ideally the page elements should follow each other depending on their respective importance.

5. Fix the font size of your web page and be conscious about its readability.

6. Do not use tons of colors unless it is needed (e.g. a painter’s website or a website designer’s website may have more color than an academia’s website).

Always remember that highlighting everything actually highlights nothing.

1. The most important criteria is to emphasise on your work. You should develop a template that displays your work rather than the design of its own. You will often find a site that has a good appeal, both visually and aesthetically, but do not get stuck on the get up. It is more desirable to complement your work and help to push you up in the forefront so that you can make a good impression to your potential client’s mind. If not so, the site is useless for you.

2. The site should have an user-friendly attitude. The navigation must be straightforward if it has a plan to sell something professionally. Be clear about the site weather it shows your contact information and other important parts of your portfolio clearly and vividly. The navigation must be easy to access, the clients should get a clear and easy view of your work.

3. It is necessary for your client to get your contact information including the e-mail address and phone number easily and without obstacles.
4. A good portfolio site would express you and your work only as much as needed. It should not speak much since you do not know the client’s psychology and the client too, do not know you other than the information displayed on the site. Since, the client is the one who is going to contact you, the information must be brief and to the point.

5. The site should build the design according to the mentality of your target clients. If you target a corporate office or a bank, the approach should be a bit more formal and conservative while creative clients can deal with some experiments.

6. There should be provision to update information easily in the site. It would be better if the updates or new entries are highlighted with some tricks.

7. To choose and display the best content or work done by you is another important job of the website. Also, the contents should be put methodically according to their importance.

8. There should be provision to include testimonials from clients in the website. The testimonials should be well placed and should be found easily.

9. The links of your social networking sites can be included like linkedin, twitter or facebook but only the professional one.

10. The site should have provision to download your resume directly from the site.

11. It is important to categorise your work properly.

And last but not the least – try to develop a brand rather than selling the product or service bluntly.

Contact us if you are interested in:

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BGLAM hope to become the number one web design and development agency in Leeds. We are recruiting a telented group of developers hungry for projects.

Amanda Wakeley – new estore with lots of virtual loggers on www.amandawakeley.com is a great site after a quick initial review its has lots of great info and even a blog showcasing things from in the press to all the latest fashion shows.

Some good stuff on London Fashion week.

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