This quote becomes very contradictory in its own way when it comes to the web design world. New trends hold a lot of importance when it comes to making new structures, layouts, designs and even for a single graphic to a website.

Technology changes every day with each click of the mouse. Every day at every single click a brand new trend or new technology emerges which changes web design trends. It undergoes a continuous and a very fast speed.

The web world of designs is going more humane, aesthetic, and functional in appeal. As the web industry is fickle, more and more designs trends are on their full pace. Sole web presence doesn’t really work. Incorporation of interactive and attractive designs in a website was, is and will always remain important and thus won’t hamper the new emerging trends.

The best way to communicate any idea in the world of web design is a good and a subtle straight-forward design. And it acts as an icing on the cake, when a website is launched with a creative and unique layouts. It does not stop at having a great content, the entire layout and how it has been structured, decides its readability and influence on the reader.

More and more effort is being put to take inspiration from the print world, which is accompanied by headlines, quotations, multi-column text, highlighted quotations, and indented text, supporting imagery, side notes and footnotes.

Print material ought to have a high impact on the readers keeping in mind that it should not dominate the informative part that is, the content of the website. We have tried and made an attempt to incorporate all the latest trends in web designs in the year 2010 with from especially print sources in this gleaming world of creativity.

Nature and Size of Font:
— Serif and Sans-serif: These fonts have proved themselves very apt for body texts because they are more visible and easier to read even while browsing at high resolutions.
— Big bold headings: These ought to grab readers’ attention as they are distinctly visible.
— Scrolling limit: As the web page is not bound by the constraint of a particular dimension as it happens in print. Nevertheless, a web designer has an option of the horizontal scroll bar, which is actually quite a big ‘No’ if we look it from the visitor’s point of view.
As it has already been mentioned in the starting that the new trend is inspired from the print world, and therefore, a strong grid system provides an organized structure to the web page where the designer can actually fit in the content removing all the inessentials.

JavaScript:
With the advent of the higher resolutions, and the ability to show any JavaScript, it has become much easier to avail the white space that is actually critical to the reader because it ensures proximity and a space to rest.

Info-graphics and multi-column Layouts:

• Info-graphics: As the name suggests, have always remained a help in delivering the complex relationships and rations and even statistics in a more simple and effective way.
• Multi-Column Layouts: As the world of information is increasing, and Internet is becoming the hub to put in the vast resource of knowledge, multi-column layouts are becoming more and more popular.

Go for CSS3
Gone are those days when we could only animate with GIF image files and then, flash. Today, we are loaded with Flash, Silverlight, GIF, JavaScript, and even CSS3 and now, CSS4, and CSS5 as well. Rounded corners, borders, backgrounds, text and box shadows are some of the advantages, which can be made use of— usable on the old browsers as well as on the new technologies with enhanced features. The basic advantages that you tend to grab hold of CSS3 are—

• Rounded Corners: With the use of CSS3, it saves the effort of the user of generating rounded corners by directly creating them in the browser. The rounded corners, which were once stimulated with CSS, JavaScript hacks and image files, became much more efficient without taking the pain to download additional files.
• Adding shadows is now possible: CSS3 offers some of the most creative effects to create shadows, be it— drop shadows to the inner shadows, embossed and imprinted effects, with no effect on the loading time.
• Mobile-friendly versions: With the use of mobiles and the rapid growth of mobile web, companies prefer to go for user-friendly mobile versions of their websites and spend heavily.

Other Techniques:

• Add Crisp Illustrations: With the new trends, it’s time to learn creating those smooth, clean, crisp illustrations that are marked distinctive and professionally illustrated designs.
• Micro-Textures: With the introduction of ‘micro-textures’, we are able to create subtle, barely noticeable textures in the background.

The use of watercolors and handwritten and script fonts ensures a subtle, distinct, calming, and well-crafted and planned way to communicate your ideas.

Social media — it is working as an explosive in the sudden growth of sharing and communicating your ideas, creativity and connecting you to the millions of people out there. Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, and many other social networking sites are the new ever-growing trends in the field of web designs. And being the need of the hour, designers are looking forward to the but, innovating techniques of creating a connection with the visitors through these social hubs.

“Even some of the greatest technology-led revolutions, or allegedly technology-led, really were only made possible because of trends already present” By Scott Cook

But of course, these trends have been, in one way or the other, inspired by the current trends and we, purely feel that web designing industry is subjected to changes at almost each and every hour. Contact us at extreme web design sri lanka if you need your web site to be modified, redesigned or build a new website. contact us  at  +94115050939.

Why Yahoo appeals to the 50+ demographic:

• Yahoo is a old fashioned portal which is a gateway to all kind of different content on the internet.
• As a home page it has a good set up in advance for its users and do not require or push for customization.
• People who are over 50 years were “leading edge” internet users about 10 – 15 years ago set up a yahoo email account when Yahoo was THE dominant search engine at that time and they still use that same account today.
• In a research carried out by  Cowan & Co, revealed that 57% of respondents were visiting Yahoo home page because they go there to check their Yahoo mail. Yahoo’s engagement with users remains high; 64% of respondents go to Yahoo.com at least once per week. In addition, Yahoo Mail is still growing (although Gmail has a much greater share of new personal email accounts).
• People over 60 are more often using the Internet for community and entertainment they aren’t using the web to “search” for data and information to support their career.

Google: a dominant “search” engine and online toolbox

• Google is the dominant search engine which is taking over the market share with over 67.3% in December 2009 across all demographics.
• Google gives its primary focus on “search” finding the information and data people look for, most often for research, work or career development.
• Google has loads of customizable tools such as iGoogle, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Maps etc.
• In the same research by Cowan & Co cited above, they found that “79% of 22- to 25-year-olds use Google as their primary search engine, compared to 63% of total respondents. Google usage is skewed toward younger demographics, high-income households, users with college and graduate degrees, and mobile Internet users.”

Bing: uncertain waters yet strong possibilities for the 50+ demographic

• According to the Cowan & Co study, Bing was chosen as a primary search engine by just 1% of 18- to 25-year-olds and 4% of 26- to 34-year-olds. Bing’s highest penetration rate is in the 55-and-over demographic at 10%.
• About 40% of respondents are not aware of the Bing brand. They are simply finding the tool because it is the default search engine in Internet Explorer which as of December 2009 is still the browser of choice (or default) of 50% of Internet surfers. Older users are much more likely to stick with the default browser than to seek out alternative software.
• Even after the huge media-blitz by Microsoft to promote Bing (spending perhaps as much as $100 million), its market share dropped in December 2009 to 9.9% from a high of 10.7% the previous month.

The question is, even if Yahoo and Bing have a smaller piece of the pie, if their user base matches your customer base, you’ll want to make sure you have a presence in their text and image indexes, directories, and perhaps even paid search. There are specific tactics you will need to take to accomplish this. Extreme web search engine consultants Sri Lanka are ready to offer you the guidance and coaching you need – just get in touch!

•  Choose wisely

While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO. While Google doesn’t comment on specific companies, they’ve encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. So be careful.

• Be sure to understand where the money goes

While Google never sells better ranking in their search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEO’s will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they “control” other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn’t work with Google because their advertising is clearly labeled and separated from their search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you’re considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.

• What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

One common scam is the creation of “shadow” domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client’s behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor’s domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

• What are some other things to look out for?

Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It’s far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

• owns shadow domains
• puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
• offers to sell keywords in the address bar
• doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
• guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
• operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
• gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
• has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google

Not sure which SEO agent to trust anymore? Are you on the look out for Professional, Industry recognized SEO specialists? Then look no further. Our specialized services at ExtremeWeb can help you to get to the top of the search results. We will help you by finding the best keywords for organic SEO and paid search marketing. We will also help you to optimize the content of your web pages for search engines, along with all aspects of successful link building and much more.

• Make sure each page in your website has something valuable to offer.
• Don’t distract your visitors with blinking or scrolling text, animated GIFs, or auto-loading sound.
• Don’t annoy your visitors with pop-up windows.
• Don’t use image backgrounds.
• Put some thought into organization. (Make it easy to find stuff)
• Minimize clicking!
• Include a way to get back to the home page, on every page.
• Include a menu on every page.
• Don’t use frames.
• Compress your image files.
• Don’t let flashy multimedia ruin your site.
• Use contrasting colors or simple backgrounds to make your text easy to read.
• Make the text large enough to read.
• Increase the line spacing (leading) to improve readability.
• Don’t type more than a few words in ALL CAPS.
• Never use more than one exclamation point!
• Don’t underline words if they’re not links.
• Explain what you’re linking to.
• Don’t open internal links in a new window.
• Use descriptive link text.
• Put your contact info, or a link to it, on the top and/or bottom of every page.
• Remove dead external links periodically.
• Include a “Last Modified” date on the top or bottom of your pages.
• Don’t steal content.
• Don’t hotlink to other sites’ images or MP3′s.

Are you interested in designing a new website for you or your company? Or looking to kick-start your campaign by getting ahead of your competitors? Then look no further. Our specialized services at Extreme Web Design Sri Lanka can help you achieve just that.

If you wish to design and optimize your website by top professional designers and SEO specialist, please do not hesitate to contact us on ++94115050939 or simply fill out the contact form and we will get back to you.

1. Having a Reasonable Goal in Mind

Having a reasonable goal in mind refers to whether you choose to spend lots of time fine-tuning your campaign yourself, or pay someone else to do it for you. For this, you will first have to get an understanding that this decision will be dependent on your strategy, resources and competency.

It would take almost up to a year, with consistent optimization applied in order to secure the more competitive keywords. Therefore, it is important that you understand the competitive thresholds for your keywords and the degree of trust required for your website to “break loose” and start climbing over competitors.

>>Read our article on “Choosing the right SEO tactic for low and high competition”

With today’s competitive landscape and the challenging nature of it, those who are easily discouraged and seeking short-term gratification can be overwhelmed due to the range of competitors fighting for topical relevance and keyword positioning.

Any given keyword will have just ten spots available; and depending on whether those keywords are candidates for commerce, would eventually determine the number of companies, businesses or individuals that will have them locked in their sights.

>>Read our article on “International Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics”

The main idea is to initially target keywords that are within your reach, and then build the more competitive keywords into the site architecture, link structure, and off page SEO in order to brand each page with a purpose, which then leads to the next point.

Found this article interesting? Then make sure to visit our blog column daily for the latest updates on our 6 SEO tips for launching a new website post. Next tip – “Creating Pages for Specific Purposes”.

Are you interested in designing a new website for you or your company? Or looking to kick-start your campaign by getting ahead of your competitors? Then look no further. Our specialized services at ExtremeWeb can help you achieve just that.

If you wish to design and optimize your website by top professional designers and SEO specialist, please do not hesitate to contact us on ++94115050939 or simply fill out the contact form and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Why images can help you to get more visitors

Depending on your search query, Google displays several images along with the normal search results. For example, if you performed a search for the term “Graphic Design”, Google will display the search results of your query as shown below:

The images can be found either at the top or in between other search results, and they will be linked to their respective web pages. For examples, if you were to click on one of those images, you will be taken to the web page which shows that particular image.

How to optimize your images so that they can be found

If you are maintaining a website about graphic designing, wouldn’t it be great if an image from your website was listed on top of the normal search results? Your website will attract more visitors, whilst increasing the popularity of your site.

There are a few steps you can take to improve the position of your images in Google Image Search:

1. Give your image a file name that contains the keywords for which you want it to be found. For this example we will name the image as graphic-design.jpg, separating the words with a hyphen.

2. Give an Image Alt Attribute text which is descriptive. You can use the same keywords that you used for the image file name here. Hence, the Image Alt Attribute would be “Graphic Design”

<img src=“graphic-design.jpg” alt=“Graphic Design”>

3. You should use the Image Title Attribute in the same way too:

<img src=“graphic-design.jpg” alt=“Graphic Design” title=“Grpahic Design”>

4. Larger images have a higher probability of featuring more often on Google’s first results page. The larger your image is, the easier it becomes to get to the top of Google’s normal results page. Make sure to include the Width and Height attributes in your image tag to show search engines the size of your image:

<img src=“graphic-design.jpg” alt=“Graphic Design” title=“Graphic Design” width=“700” height=“500”>

5. Textual content before and after the image which appears in your web page is also an important factor that impacts the position of your image in Google’s Image Search. Therefore, the text “Graphic Design” should appear close to the image in that particular web page.

6. Ensure to optimize the rest of your web page for the chosen search term. If you optimize the complete web page for that certain keyword, it would be easier to get a good listing for images which are on that page.

7. Lastly, make sure that the image you optimized for your keyword also looks attractive.  It would be pointless if no-one is interested to click on the image, even though your image can be found on Google’s first result page.

Google has indexed over a billion of images. If your image can be found for the right keyword, then this will help you get targeted visitors to your website. So, if you want your images optimized and attract more visitors to your website, then look no further because we at ExtremeWeb can help you achieve that.

Our professional graphic designers have the eye to produce well structured and creative designs that will best suite your needs. So please do not hesitate to contact us on ++94115050939 or simply fill out the contact form and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Clean Layout Design: A clean layout that uses a lot of white space will enhance your site’s looks. Try to keep the focus on your content; you can make use of Dreamweaver templates for this. Also, remember to use fonts that will be available on all computers to prevent your site from looking awkward.

Read our article on “Motivation for web designers”.

Nice and Easy Navigation: Navigation of links on your site will play a big role in determining the how long your visitor would stay and explore your website. A general area you should focus on, is to understand what exactly is it that visitors do as soon as they open your site? In most cases, they would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find any other page that interests them.

Optimum Load Time: Make sure your load time is low. For this you must:

1. Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: As they greatly increase your file size.
2. Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your site doesn’t have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
3. Use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever possible. Once the SSI files are called from the web server, they reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster.

Read our article “3 tips that you should consider when it comes to choosing a Web Design Service Provider”.

Program using pure CSS: The world is moving away from table based websites to pure CSS websites because it offers accessibility, reusability and considerably reduces file size apart from giving greater control over the look of your website. The single most important skill you can learn today to become a quality web designer is CSS programming. Even if you are not an expert at CSS you can learn to use the following simple CSS Styles Effects to enhance your website:

1. Cool Text Effects using CSS Styles: Text Links Rollover, Text Case Setting, Text Spacing, Line-through Effect.
2. Bullets in HTML or Dreamweaver: Using CSS Styles with bullets (shapes, decimal, roman-numerals, images, etc.)
3. Links without Underline: Use CSS Styles to display links without the appearance of the underline.

Design for all Screen Resolutions: A site that is easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay and read your content. For sites that have long pages of content this is very crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. Suppose your website doesn’t look good for a particular resolution, it is likely that the visitor will close the browser window feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. Designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and professional site.

Ensure Website scalability: Make sure that your code and design is scalable. As technology advances and configuration of computers & their monitors keep increasing and varying it will be almost impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and platforms.

Cross Browser Compatible: Make sure you check your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1+, Opera 7+, Safari 3+ and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the world’s browsers.

Are you interested in designing a unique custom-built website for you or your company too? Then look no further. Our specialized services at Extreme Web Design Sri Lanka can help you achieve that. We even offer special packages for affordable small business web designs, website development, brand building and online marketing strategies as well.

If you wish to design your website by top professional designers, please do not hesitate to contact us on ++94115050939 or simply fill out the contact form and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Therefore, it is imperative that you keep yourself updated with the latest SEO strategies if you wish to stay ahead of the rest. Below are some of the international SEO best strategies and tips for global search engine optimization which we have gathered for your reference:

1. Use Local Domain extensions
The most effective strategy for international SEO is yet the most obvious one. For example, if you are trying to optimize your website for Google.lk and your domain has a .lk extension, you will have a great advantage. In addition to the domain extension, Google might also look at the IP address location of your server, in order to determine the geographical relevance of your website.

2. Translation alone is not sufficient
A lot of people assume that a word-for-word Google translation of existing website content will result in a high ranking on international SERP’s. However, those who have read a word-for-word translation from another language to English realize that this is not a very feasible idea. Although this technique might get you into the SERP’s, chances are of you converting your visitors into customers are slim to none.

3. Get links from International Domains
For example, if your website consisted of a good variety of incoming links from many domain extensions (.ca, .fr, .co.uk, .cn), Google will then start to identify your website on the non-US versions of Google.

4. Links to International Domains
Although this step will not directly help you to improve rankings, it will at least show that you are participating in a global community by linking your website to international sources.

5. Keyword + Country Landing pages
According to our research, we’ve found that searchers at times will perform a keyword search and append their country name to it. (e.g. “hotels lk”) By optimizing a landing page for this combination, you can start ranking for the terms.

6. Perform International Keyword Research
Getting your keyword suggestions and counts from keyword tools which only show US results does not make any sense at all. Therefore, you should use SEO keyword tools that not only allow you to get keyword data from the US, but also from various other countries as well.

7. Know and understand the Local Lingo
Any person who has traveled to different English speaking countries will notice that there are some significant differences in local lingo. For example, the word “store” is more often used in the US as opposed to the word “shop” which is widely used in many European countries.

8. Take into account the Local Search Engines
Although google.com is still the leading number #1 search engine internationally, there are some local engines such as Voila in France, Yandex in Russia, or Ansearch in Australia which are very popular among its local users. If you intend on targeting a certain local audience, it would prove to be quite useful to understand the algorithms of other engines besides Google.

The internet has now made the world a smaller place. We predict that in the near future, many forward-thinking companies will look to gain immense benefits from world-wide search traffic, and not just limiting it to their own country.

Now you too can reap these benefits by subscribing to our specialized services at Extreme Web. We will help you and your company to follow the proper guidelines for Global Search Engine Optimization and thus improve your site’s brand awareness both locally and internationally.

If you wish to have your website optimized by only the best, please do not hesitate to contact us on ++94115050939 or simply fill out the contact form and we will get back to you as soon as we can.