Design your Website like a pro
From Wix.com
So you’re ready to design your first Flash website but you have no idea where to start— What color should your website be? Should you include animation? What fonts should you use? How should your site be laid out? Or perhaps you just want to learn more…The Wix team of Flash website designers has put together their tips to building great flash websites.PS Wix offers you a major benefit when designing a website – you don’t have to waste time or get stuck on technical problems and programming, even if you know how. With Wix you can bypass all that and focus on the fun part, your site’s design!
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Top 6 Benefits of Flash
Flash has become a popular option for web design.
It’s versatile, entices visitors to come back for more and with Wix offers you the chance to customize your own free website without any prior experience or technical know-how.
Six benefits for creating a Flash website:
1. Dynamic Memorable Visual Experience: More sophisticated than HTML, with Flash you are enabled to make a website that is rich with interactive components. This means you can easily provide an incredible visual experience, allowing you to create a dynamic memorable website for your users.
2. Greater freedom: Flash provides you with a degree of freedom of development that’s not found elsewhere. For instance, you can place objects anywhere you want without having to deal with tables and all sorts of coding nightmares…
3. Greater Interactivity: Flash is the way to create an interactive website: rollovers, color and image changes…incorporating mp3 and wav files, movies…background music. Perhaps all these features together are too much for you. No problem – just don’t add them.
4.Videos and animation – It’s much easier to incorporate animation and videos in a Flash website – and they look much more impressive than basic HTML elements. Not only that, Flash enables video to play directly from your site, no plug-ins necessary. Visitors to your website will be able to view videos easily, even if they haven’t installed QuickTime or Media Player.
5.Search Engine Friendly: Traditionally, a challenge with Flash was that it was hard for search engine engines like google to index. Wix has taken care of that – so you can build your Flash website in Wix and know that your site is read by search engines & your visitors.
6.Easy to Update content: The ability to modify the look of your entire website used to be hard with Flash. With Wix those days are over. We’ve made it as easy as editing a document on your computer. All you need to do is login to “My Account” find your published Wix websites, edit the way you desire and save. And your changes will automatically be updated on your Wix website.
Simple.Overall, if you are looking to create a free website, a Wix Flash website is the right choice: with its highly professional but at the same time user-friendly features, you’ll be able to deliver a dynamic content rich website – that’s also easy to update and search engine friendly.
Don’t know a thing about Flash website creation?
Don’t worry - even if you don’t know anything about Flash design you can create beautiful and dynamic website easily with Wix Flash website builder. And because Wix is also search engine friendly, you get all the benefits of creating a Flash website without having to worry about search engine robots.
Colors the World Wide Web
After great text, color has the largest psychological impact on your site visitors. So whether this is your first site or you’re a seasoned web designer, it’s worth spending a bit of time on selecting the color scheme that works for your flash website.
Whether we notice it or not, research shows that colors have an emotional influence on us and impact the way that we judge the reliability, quality and value of websites, products and services.
Though there are no good or bad colors, each color does have negative and positive associations. White can be viewed as calming and clean, but in another context it can seem empty and sterile. It is also important to note that different colors are associated with different things. For instance, red can mean love, passion and romance; brown can suggest the earth, home and friendship; blue is often associated with protection, communication and gentleness. Some colors say corporate, other colors say art…which colors speak to your Flash sites’ users? Wix flash designer, Kat, suggests that as a first step you look at what you already have, a logo, for example, and choose a color, or set of colors, that matches the concept of your site. “Start with picking 1-2 more gentle colors, and then adding a small splash of stronger contrasting colors, like orange, red or light green. These help make it clear to your users what you would like them to look at.” That’s because on the web, color helps to direct users to what they should look at.
Kat also warns that having too many colors per page is likely to confuse your users. Instead she recommends that you opt for a set of colors. Of course, some combinations of colors work better than others and for this Kat shares a little secret “There’s no need to spend too much time discovering meaningful color schemes. You can save time by checking out sites like this one: http://kuler.adobe.com/#.” They offer suggestions on which color combinations work well together.
It is also important to keep in mind that too much color or too bold color can take away from the content of your site. If your site has a lot of text, consider placing the text on a white or grey background as this creates a calming effect. Then pick stronger font colors like black navy or dark grey for the text. This calming effect is also helpful as people get tired reading text off their computer screens. That doesn’t mean you need to loose color altogether. Add colors to the buttons, sidebars, navigation bars, headings and banners on your site instead. Or add some key images or photos. If you have a site that is showing off a lot of images try using black or dark grey as your background color. And the last tip from Kat, “it’s easy to add and change your sites’ color scheme with Wix, so have fun with color!”
Adding Animation
When you are building a Flash website you have the opportunity to make your website as dynamic as you want. It is up to you whether you want a clean, static site or whether you prefer website design with a lot of action, animation and effects. Check out the following tips for adding animation that will help you to maximize your site’s effectiveness, attractiveness and usability.
The most important thing to keep in mind when adding animation to your site is to use animation to contribute to your design without taking away from your site’s content. Any website designer will tell you that the design is there to support the content use animation as decoration rather than as the centerpiece of your site. Unless of course you are building a site to display your animation abilities…
A good rule of thumb is to have one major animation per page. You can then add smaller animation or behaviors like moving buttons to keep that page dynamic. Another good thing to think about is what you are trying to highlight on the page. Then all you need to do is make sure that the animation you select aids users in focusing their attention where you want it, rather than distracting them away from it.
Another important tip is to keep your animation files small so that they can load within a few seconds. Most users don’t have the time or patience to wait around for your animation to load, and they may well move away from your site… to the site of one of your competitors. You can cut down on the size of your animation by using the smallest images possible with under 16 million colors. Frame-based animations should have a maximum of 12 frames per second. Additionally, the resolution of your animations should never be larger than the smallest screen resolution out there (640x480).
You don’t need to be a flash website designer to add flash animations to your website! Wix offers you a large variety of free Flash animation options including animated backgrounds, graphics, buttons, drop down menus, effects, behaviors and more. And of course it’s easy to upload your own animations with Wix, too!
Typography – fonts, headings and more…
Typography is the art of arranging and designing “type” - letters. Typography encompasses a lot of factors including font and font size, formatting, spacing and line length. You don’t need to be an expert in typography to design your own website, but these tips will help you on the way to creating a great readable site.
At its best, typography is used to create readable and coherent content that allows the reader to focus wholly on the content itself.
1. Choose fonts that are easy to read: Any web designer will tell you that if you choose a font that is hard to read people are unlikely to stick around to read what you’ve written. No matter how great it is. Make life easier for your readers and stick with a simple font group known as “Sans Serif” for the majority of your text. This group includes the popular font “Arial”. (All these fonts are available on Wix).
2. Size Does Matter - at least with font size it does. Once you choose a clear and legible font make sure that that is large enough that your readers won’t have to squint to read your content. Many of your readers are also dealing with low-contrast screens and slow refresh rates—if you want to keep them on your site it’s a good idea to draw them in with simple and clear typography.
3. Appropriate Font: Choose a font that fits your subject matter. For instance, it may make sense to use a font like Wix's “Bored Schoolboy” for your personal page, but it is unlikely to suit your business webpage.
4. Check to make sure the font you choose works in different browsers. These days people are using more than just Explorer to browse through sites. They also use Firefox, Mozilla…etc. So make sure that the font you select works in all browsers. If you are working with Wix to create a free website don’t worry, all our fonts are compatible across browsers.
5. Keep fonts to a minimum: If your intention is to have people read your content, too many fonts can be distracting or off putting to your site’s visitors. A good rule is to use one font for general text and another font for headings and titles. If this feels too boring consider adding color, animation or behaviors to make it more interesting.
6. Be Consistent. Once you’ve chosen your font/s it’s a good idea to be consistent throughout the whole website. Typography is also huge part branding. Look at Coca Cola, McDonald’s and Google. You’ll notice that they are consistent with their font everywhere including their websites, logos, advertisements and even their internal communication. There’s a reason for this – it means that every time people encounter you they recognize you, even if they haven’t read your content yet.
7. Punctuation: It is also important to make sure that your punctuation is correct and clear. Punctuation can make it much easier on your reader. If you have ever tried reading a huge block of text with small letters and no punctuation you know that this is virtually impossible. That said the writing for the web is a little different to print. It is perfectly reasonable to remove commas and a good idea to avoid apostrophes where possible - as these can be distracting.
8. Arrange your text with care: When you are working on your website design, keep in mind that the way you arrange your text should not be distracting. If you have a lot of content, consider writing it into shorter paragraphs and using bullets.
Now that you are ready to apply these typography lessons to your site let’s go ahead and see how designing the right usability can help you create a site that your visitors will enjoy and want to bookmark your site and come back!
Usability 101
These days everyone needs a website, but without usability – how user-friendly your site is – it’s unlikely they’ll stay! This article gives you a quick guide to usability…so you can get on with creating a site that entices your users to stick around!!
Whether you are building a Flash website or a non-Flash website, usability centers around how easy a site is to navigate, and find information on. Without it, even the best site will fail. And of course, having a site with high usability will put you at a huge advantage over your competitors. This article is designed to give you a quick overview so you can design a usable site that people want to stay on – and visit again and again.
According to usability expert, Jacob Neilson www.useit.com “on the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival.” Why? Because if your website is difficult to use, people leave. If people get lost on your site, they leave. If the homepage doesn’t clearly show users what the site offers and what they can do on your site, they will leave. If the information on the site is difficult to read or they can’t find what they are looking for, they leave. And if they can’t find the product or service they are looking for, they leave – and they didn’t buy anything either….
It’s up to you to give them an interface that is easy to navigate and use…so they stay. And enjoy their experience on your site.
Navigation: What pages and sub-pages does it make sense for your site to have?
These days people are in a rush and they don’t want to spend ages on your site looking for simple information. Most people will expect to find “Home”, “Contact” and “About” pages on your site. Be sure to clearly label these and design a menu or easily findable buttons so that your users can find what you are looking for. Even if your site is still under construction it is worth creating a simple page with includes a short about message and contact information so that visitors can get in touch with you to ask questions and provide comments and feedback.
An easy way to think of your website as a department store. If you go into a department store looking for a new pair of shoes you shouldn’t have a difficult time finding the shoe department. Most department stores have signs directing customers to each department, making the shopping experience easy and pleasant. Within each department there are also often sub-departments like sneakers, sandals, pumps, men’s and women’s shoes. These are your “sub pages”, or pages that fall under the larger page group “Shoes”. Write out all the headings for your site and organize them into main pages and sub-pages. This will make all of the content on your site easy to find and navigate so that your users won’t leave and go to a different site.
Quick Tip: Make sure that you place a link to your “Home” page on every page of your site so your users never feel lost and can easily navigate through your site.
User-test to improve usability: Once you’ve designed your site, and arranged your pages with easy to use navigation send a few of your ideal users to the site. And after, ask them to answer these questions:
- Is it easy for users to do basic tasks the first time the come to your website? And can they do them quickly?
- Is it enjoyable and easy use your design?
- Can they easily find the information they are looking for.
Don’t be afraid of their feedback. The good news is when you use platforms like Wix to create a free website, you can easily make any changes you need to improve your site’s ease of use.
These tips should help you on your way to an easy to understand and easy to navigate site. If your site is user friendly and they can easily find what they need, and they will probably come back again.
How Many Pages?
Everyday people browse through countless sites. And they tend to only look at one to two pages. The number of pages on your website plays an important role in how easy your site is to use, so spend a little bit of time planning before you start creating your site.
There is no “right” number of pages for a website—this depends on your site’s goal. That said, whatever your goal, this article is aimed at helping you choose the amount of pages for your site (and eliminate unnecessary ones) .
Helpful Questions: Take a piece of paper and jot down the titles of pages you want on your website and what content you would place be on each page. The following questions can be helpful during this brainstorming process:
• Which parts of my site are the most important?
• Which parts of my site do I want people to see first?
• Is there unique and interesting content on each of my pages?
• Which of my pages need sub-pages? What should the sub-categories be?
• Do I have enough text on each of my pages?
These questions also help you remove pages that are not unique or interesting, combine similar pages and add content to pages that do not have enough information.
Important Pages – Home, About & Contact: It’s good to be different and distinguish yourself from other sites, but these days, with the speed at which people look at a site, it is a good idea to include a clearly labeled Home page, About page and Contact page. When thinking about your Home page, it’s a good idea to make it welcoming, with good and clear information but not too busy. This should entice your visitors to move around on your site. The Contact section should also give users an easy way to contact you.
Use Sub-pages: It is also a good idea to distinguish between main pages, and sub-pages. For examples, for a department store, shoes would be a main page, while categories like sneakers, pumps, men’s and women’s may be sub-pages.
Less is More: When you build a Flash free website with the Wix site builder you have the option of adding an unlimited number of pages. However, this doesn’t mean you should build your site with tons of pages just because you can. Remember, particularly online, less really is more!
