The Silent Avatar Speaks

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

1. In order to make this happen 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.

2. 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.

3. Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate 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.

4. Ensure 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.

5. 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.

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

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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Many times I have read that in order to progress in business (no matter what the business) you need to outsource work which someone else can do better and quicker.

I’ve been reluctant to do this being time rich and money poor (just like most who are just starting out), but I bit the bullet recently and decided I needed to outsource a job to do a background pic for Rocket Themes Replicant for one of my clients.

Replicant theme is unique in that the site takes on the look of the background pic. Sounds great, but lots of considerations come into play when you stick a pic in the background and you find the picture can obscure important information making it difficult to read.

So after playing around for way too long I decided to outsource to Joomlancers to get an expert to come to my rescue.

I’ve looked at a number of sites previously like eLance and Guru.com, so I knew how the process worked:

Register – Post your Project and wait for bids to come in.

But is it as simple as that?

Well.. yes and no. If you want to get the best mileage out of using a freelancer to assist with building a website you need to be very clear on what you are asking them to do (and that takes time)

This means sitting down and nutting out all of what you require in your project brief.

By doing this the freelancer has all of the necessary information they require to accurately bid and successfully complete the project.

It doesn’t take long before bids come in and prices vary widely. It pays to check out who is bidding and see what their feedback score is and take this into consideration with what they are charging.

There are fees from Joomlancers on top of the bid, so factor this in also.

Joomlancers uses an escrow service to hold your funds until the project is completed so you know it’s safe.

Using freelancers from another country can pose language problems in describing what you want through text. I ended up having to do an “almost what I wanted” mock up PSD to get him on track with what I did want him to do. (He still did a way better job than I could have)

From the feedback I have read from others the freelancer I used only confirmed what most had said. He was professional, patient, and very accommodating with the goal of giving a good result.

Despite some of the difficulties with language I would still say this is an excellent resource to assist those who are starting a business to get the kind of expertise they need at a very reasonable cost.

Two thumbs up.

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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