The Necessity of Good Design

There are essentially two elements that compose a website: design, and function. Every good website needs to properly function. It needs to be easy to use and properly organized. So being able to make your website function and cooperate with the average browser is an utmost necessity.

However, what is it that takes a mediocre and mundane website and transforms it into an appealing advertisement for your business?

The answer is design: good design utilizes information in a clear, smooth, and attractive style, which can be exponentially more appealing than if done in a plain manner.

So why is good, appealing design so important? As an example, we'll be making a comparison between the old and revised edition of http://www.sportsgraphicsinc.com/.

First let's look at the former Sportsgraphics, viewable via archive.org, an internet archive that catalogues older or outdated website pages: http://web.archive.org/web/20060605095051/http://www.sportsgraphicsinc.com/

The website sports a plain white background with a steady, consistent color scheme. The information is generally parallel to the information displayed by the current site, and it is displayed in a clean and organized manner. However, the graphics of the site are of a generally low quality (meaning that the images are not as "crisp" as they would be if saved with a higher image quality.) Although the overall design is rather clean and organized, it presents itself with low appeal, and there is little depth for the eyes to fall into.

Sports Graphics Inc. is a business that designs and prints padding (among numerous, numerous other printing products) primarily for schools all over the nation to display in gyms or on fields. So, for a business based around appeal and design, it makes no sense for them to advertise their business through a website that is, frankly, plain and uninviting.

The new website, http://www.sportsgraphicsinc.com/, is not only clean and organized, but employs multiple layers of depth. There are high-quality images to be clicked, rather than plain text links. Figures overlap to give an overall cohesive feel -- the feeling that everything is united and uniform. Text jumps out at you and invites you to explore more of the site. Information is both appealing and easy to access. When a customer opens up Sportsgraphicsinc.com, they can be filled with the expectation of professionalism, which is one objective of professional design: to let customers know that you are professional, and that your business can be trusted.

By analyzing these two websites you should be able to see how good design jumps off the screen and leaves a lasting impression. And, if you compare the difficulty of making a stylish website function to a mundane website function, they can actually be quite similar in complexity. The difference is design, plain and simple. Design is how you notice appealing from unappealing, attractive from unattractive, etc. And as the complexity of the internet progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent how necessitated good design is. This is the goal of Websites to Impress: to give businesses the professional look and appeal to customers that they deserve.

All About Custom 404 Pages

A custom 404 page is a page on your site that appears when a user reaches a broken link to your site. You need one because it can help your search engine rankings and it can also prevent your users from leaving your site.

First, create a page on your site that directs people to your home page or other location with a message stating that they have found a page that no longer exists. Add the page to your site files.

Second, check to see if you have an .htaccess file in the root folder of your site. If so, you will want to alter this in Notepad (or similar editor). If you do not have an .htaccess file, create one with Notepad (or similar) making sure there is no .txt. extension on the file. Inside the file, you need to use this text:

ErrorDocument 404 /filename.html

filename.html should be replaced with the name of the file you created for the page you added to your site.

Third, test it out. Try a url that doesn't exist on your site to see if your custom 404 page is working. If it is not working, check with your web host. See our web design 404 page.

Search engines like to see that you have a 404 page covered and users appreciate not receiving a 'This Page Cannot Be Found' error.