How to name your website

March 4th, 2009

Now that you are already working on your site design and its overall appearance and feel, have you chosen how to name the website ?

Starting a successful online business requires several important tasks to do, one of the most important among them is choosing a right domain name. The domain name identifies your website just as your name identifies you. To be successful you need people to remember your name so that they can find you easily.
So what is a domain name? Specifically, domain name is an alphanumeric unique name that fingers individual web sites on the Net. It can be up to 67 characters, that can be 26 English letters, numerals 0-9 and hyphens (-).
Note: domain name can contain several hyphens, but can not begin with one.
Domain names have extentions or TLD (Top Level Domain). These are based on the type of organization they are associated with.
Common extentions include:

.org     nonprofit organization
.net     commercial network
.edu     educational institutions
.gov     government agencies
.mil     military
.com     commercial business

There also are additional domain extentions: biz, bz, info, tv etc.

It is a common knowledge that the best domain names are long ago sold, but don’t get upset right away better be creative.

First of all remember that your domain name should be:
- short,
- memorable,
- related to your business,
- hard to misspell

Shorter domain names are easier to type and remember and the possibility of a mistake made is far less, but every rule has an exception. Some long domains can be easier to remember. For example ltspck.com is set of unrelated letters and is difficult to remember, but LayoutsPack.com that stands for ltspck.com is much easier to remember ;) .

You should also consider hyphened names. Along with some disadvantages there are great cons in them. Disadvantages of hyphened domains are:
- Hyphens can be easily forgot when typing a name.
- When a person recommends your website verbally he/she most likely will omit the hyphens in your domain.

Along with these minuses are great pluses:
- Search engines can better distinguish keywords in your domain name
- Your desired non-hyphened name can no longer be available, but the hyphened one most likely will be there. In this way you can get your desired domain name.

Now make a list of the preferred word combinations and start searching for the availability of these domain names. And don’t get upset if the first ones won’t be available. Remember to be creative and success will come to you!

What are the main issues YOU follow when choosing a domain name?

Tags: , ,
Posted in General Talk, How To | 5 Comments »

Key features of a small business website

February 3rd, 2009

LayoutsPack, a premium provider of high quality web templates, continues providing you with useful pieces of advice to help achieve successful results in every aspect of your business. So today we will touch a topic of small business websites creation and dwell on its key features.

Building your small business website is a very responsible task as it will predefine the customers’ attitude towards you and your activity. If you present your business by incomprehensible and disorganized web presence it may scare away your clients with no wish for return. Not an encouraging perspective, eh?
So let’s identify the main mistakes you should avoid when creating a small business website.

1. Huge text blocks on main pages. People are not interested in reading pages of text, often they just scan your website for usable content. So think over the main pages text thoroughly and give your potential customers sufficient but laconic information about your business underlining only its main features.

2. Leaving your clients without explanation of their next steps. After you have told about your business let the users know what to do if they are going to continue collaboration. After the viewer has familiarized with your website he needs to know what to do next to make use of the services you offer.

3. A lot of sections. If you really want to make your website simple to navigate don’t put a lot of links within it, otherwise the viewers will be totally confused. Think thoroughly over each section of your web presence and remember that the less pages your website has the more friendly it will appear to the customers (if provided with sufficient information, of course).

4. Flash surplus. A website that includes flash elements in general looks rather attractive. But too much flash never adds to your small business website’s reputation. Be careful not to overfill your source with flash technologies or it may annoy your potential customers and make them forget about the main purpose of their visit. Moreover, you can’t be sure that all the flash applications will always run properly.

5. Half-done pages. Always think thoroughly over each page’s content. If you want your small business website to be competitive and worthy you should make it complete in every aspect.

Except the mistakes don’t forget to take into account such elements that your small business website should have in order to be called good one. Pay attention to business news section as it demonstrates credibility and attracts links. Think about your SEO goals and innovative SEM campaign until it’s too late. And remember that your small business website’s design should be closely related to the content and combine with it harmoniously.

Meanwhile, browse our collection of Business Web Templates to find the most brilliant website designs for your or your customers future online presence.

Tags: ,
Posted in General Talk, How To | 2 Comments »

3 Ways of Applying Style Sheets to a Web Page

January 14th, 2009

I already gave you some basic CSS tutorial, but I’m pretty sure you’d like to know more. So, in this post I’m going to give you one more simple tutorial on CSS, specifically on applying style sheets to a web page.

Well, just to remind you – CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language and the most common way to style HTML and XHTML pages.

There are a few ways to apply style sheets to a web page.

Inline styles:

To use inline styles you need to place a ’style’ attribute in a HTML tag. This attribute may assert any CSS information.

<p style=”color: white; font-sizer: 12pt”>
Web templates membership </p>

Remember: You need a ‘;’ to separate the properties.

Internal Style Sheets:

When a web master wants to give a  particular look to a particular web page that distinguishes from others in a web site he usually uses internal style sheets. Internal style sheets are usually placed between the head tags in a HTML document. CSS is applied with the use of <style> tags.

<head>
<style type=”text/css”>
body {background-color: #3e5e11;
text-family: arial;
text-size: 12pt}
</style>
</head>

External Style Sheets:

It’s probably the most popular way of applying style sheets to a web page. With external style sheets a separate document containing all the CSS information is created.
You need to place <link> tags in the HTML document so the browser can read the information from the style sheet document. The <link> tags are placed between the <head> tags.

<head>
<link rel= ”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”style.css” />
</head>

Insert the name of your style sheet file in the ‘href’ attribute and the browser will read the info in that file and format properly.
You have to save your style sheet file with the .css extension. As your style sheet document has already been saved as a CSS extension it doesn’t need any <style> tags.
Here’s an example of how a style sheet file can look like:

Quote:
body {background-image: url(“image/logo.jpg”);
font-family: arial;
font-size: 12pt}
p {color: green;
font-family: aria}
h1 {font-size: 14pt}

Well, these were 3 ways of applying style sheets to a web page. Now feel free to have a look on some of our CSS web templates.

Tags: ,
Posted in General Talk, How To | 1 Comment »

Basic CSS Tutorial, part 2.

December 16th, 2008

In my previous post I gave you the brief tutorial on CSS and promissed to go on with it. Well, as promissed, here is some usefull info on Pseudo-classes and Pseudo-elements and Cascading Order.

Pseudo-classes and Pseudo-elements

Pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements are specific “classes” and “elements” that are automatically recognized by CSS-compatible browsers. Pseudo-classes distinguish among different element types. Pseudo-elements refer to sub-parts of elements, for example the first letter of a paragraph.

Rules with pseudo-classes or pseudo-elements take the form:

selector:pseudo-class { property: value }

or

selector:pseudo-element { property: value }

It’s better not specify Pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements with HTML’s CLASS attribute. Normal classes may be used with pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements as follows:

selector.class:pseudo-class { property: value }

or

selector.class:pseudo-element { property: value }

Anchor Pseudo-classes

Pseudo-classes may be set to the A element to display links, visited links and active links differently. A visited link could be defined to render in a different color and even a different font size and style.

There can be an interesting effect – an “active” link displayed in a slightly larger font size with a different color. And when the page is re-selected the visited link can be displayed in a smaller font size with a different color. The sample style sheet looks like this:

A:link    { color: red }
A:active  { color: blue; font-size: 125% }
A:visited { color: green; font-size: 85% }

First Line Pseudo-element

The first line of text in a newspaper article is often displayed in bold lettering and all capitals. CSS1 has this capability as a pseudo-element.
You can use a first-line pseudo-element in any block-level element (such as P, H1, etc.).
An example of a first-line pseudo-element:

P:first-line {
font-variant: small-caps;
font-weight: bold }

First Letter Pseudo-element

To create drop caps and other effects use first-letter pseudo-element.
The first letter of text in an assigned selector will be reflected according to the value assigned. A first-letter pseudo-element can be used in any block-level element.
Example:

P:first-letter { font-size: 300%; float: left }

creates a drop cap three times the normal font size.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags:
Posted in General Talk, How To | 3 Comments »

Basic CSS Tutorial

December 9th, 2008

CSS, or Cascading Styles Sheets, is a way to style HTML. While the HTML is the content, the cascading style sheet is the presentation of it.
With CSS you are able to add new looks to your old HTML, restyle a whole website with a few changes to the CSS code, use the style you crate on any webpage.

A style sheet is made up of style rules that tell a browser how to represent a document. There are few ways to link these rules to your HTML documents. The simplest method is to use HTML’s STYLE element. This is the element that contains the style rules for the page. It is placed in the document HEAD.

Note: the STYLE element is a good method of experimenting with style sheets, though it has disadvantages that you should consider before using this method in practice.

Each rule is made up of a selector (an HTML element such as BODY, EM, or P) and the style that is to be applied to the selector.

Style rules are formed as follows:

selector { property: value }

Multiple style declarations are separated by a semicolon:

selector { property1: value1; property2: value2 }

The following code segment defines the color and font-size properties for H1 and H2 elements:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>CSS Example</TITLE>
<STYLE TYPE=”text/css”>
H1 { font-size: x-large; color: red }
H2 { font-size: large; color: blue }
</STYLE>
</HEAD>

These style sheet tells a browser to show level-one headings in an extra-large, red font, and level-two headings in a large, blue font. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ,
Posted in General Talk, How To | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »