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Description of the work or scope of the work
Initially, most of the people think that they will know this automatically, but as go on with the work, you will come to know that most of the clients do not have any idea. Clients think that they know what they need but in reality, they do not have most of the clues. The idea is not to plan the entire course of the work, but to acknowledge that the time that you’re working on is very much valuable and the client have to meet the expenses of the plan that you will be drawing up. Whether or not you have to make your client agree to that and you have to draw up the work contract. The contract should include the scope of the work that you’re doing. The contract should include

Number of pages that has to be built
Number of scripts or the CGIs or the programs that has to be built
Number of graphics that has to be created
Total amount of content that has to be written
The margin of error that has occurred
Make sure that the client agrees to the contract and then make the move towards the work that has to be done.

Project dates
A contract which is good includes dates. It will be pretty tempting to leave this upto the client and all of the clients will want the site to be fixed. Most of the clients will forget about the dates as they will get busy with other works. So you have to include the dates. Some of the dates that has to be included are
Due date of the signed contract
Starting date of the work
Designs or the plans completed
Approval of the designs and plans by the client
Due dates of the client
Designer milestone releases
Dates of invoices
Competition date of the site
Due dates of the clients review
Updates date
Client’s final review
Launching date

Payment
You should not only include the project’s cost but also how much have to be invoiced. You have to take some percent of the project cost as the deposit and will thus ensure that the client is pretty serious about the work and will definitely give you some amount of cash for the work to move ahead.

Revisions
Mostly, clients will always want to make some of the changes in the project. So if you include number of revisions in your contract, you will not be in the trouble of sticking in to the never ending work of revising the work.

Source files and copyright
The contract that you have done should include and mainly specify the entire copyright of the content, graphics, designs, programs and the multimedia and also you have to specify of who owns the rights of source files. The source files include
Images
Multimedia
Scripts and programs
Design of the website
Content written for the site

Credits
Along with the files rights, you should also specify the on how you will be credited for that wok that you have done. So you have to mainly specify
Where will be the credit displayed?
How the credit will be done
For what things you will be credited

Webdesign’s basic principles are true for both the Web design and other type of designs. These principles show you how put your design elements in a manner which is more effective. Design is nothing more than slapping the HTML tags onto your pages and by using some the basic principles of designing, you can build designs that more useful and pleasing.

These principles include:

Balance:
Balance in design is nothing but the distribution of light and heavy elements on your page. Than smaller and lighter elements, those elements which are darker and larger appear heavily on your design. The balance principle will show you how to lay out your pages so that they work pretty well. There are 3 types of balancing your design and they are symmetrical, asymmetrical and discordant or off balance.

Contrast:
When there is a thought of contrast, most of the people will think of colours or white and black. But the fact is there is more to contrast than your colors. In contrasting, you can have contrasting sizes (small vs large), contrasting shapes (circle vs square) and contrasting textures (rough vs smooth). It is just an accentuation of elements differences in your design. It can work with any kind of design. In a design, contrast can be implemented in several ways like: change the fonts, links, headlines and images.

Emphasis:
In any design, emphasis is the place where everybody’s eyes are drawn. It is one of the ways to provide stand out for the important element in your design. It’s very much tempting to provide equal emphasis or to give emphasis on everything in a design but if equal emphasis is not given to your design; it might look flat and bland. To avoid this problem of flat look, as a designer, you have to determine the page’s hierarchy and then you have to apply your emphasis to elements that are based on your page’s hierarchy.

One of the biggest mistakes done by the designers is that they will emphasize all the elements in their design. When all the elements in the design have equal emphasis, the page looks too busy and your design will be unappealing and boring. So you have to emphasize the elements which are most important. In Web designing, emphasis can be implemented in few ways like by using semantic mark up and by changing the font size.

Rhythm:
It is also called as repetition. Rhythm brings comprehension for humans and is pretty easy for the humans to comprehend and also this repetition offers patterns that will make you sites easier to comprehend. It lets your design to develop its own internal consistency and this makes your customer easier to understand. Anything in your design can be repeated to produce rhythm to your design.

Unity:
In design, unity is also known as proximity. If you want to have cohesiveness to your design, unity provides you that. In your design the element that are positioned farther apart are relatively less related and those elements that are close to each other are more related.

A site plan is nothing but it helps you to create your own business website so that it meets your business and customer needs. At the beginning of creating a site if you take more time, you can avoid all the kinds of pitfalls and can ensure that you have all the contents required to get your site off to a good start.

When you’re building site, your plan should include

The purpose of your site:

What is the main point for which you’re creating your site? How is your site going to fulfil the main purpose better than many other sites that are available in the Web?

The site goals

If you do have some smart goals, these goals can help much better to take a mediocre site and you can make it great. If you the goals for your site, you can go and play around.

Your customers

For whom you’re creating the website? Try to be precise as possible as you can regarding to your targeted customers. Include the details like hobbies, age, job (titles) etc. you might envision that different people will be visiting different parts of your website and it will not be a problem at all. It’s important to know what kind of audiences you’re targeting at. Already if your website is active or live, you should include some more data to the targeted audiences that you currently maintain.

The content

It’s important to know what content you have on the site, will the content that you have will change regularly, are going to sell your products without any product page or will just focus on providing the product details through some articles. You have to decide whether your site is going to have only text, multimedia or images, do you have already created content or you have to get the content newly.

The design of your website

When planning the site, you have to think what colour will match your site. Keep in mind that design aesthetic will vary across different demographics. So if you planning your site for cutting edge designers, it definitely have entirely diverse look than the one that is designed for stay some designers who are called as home dads (this except for the designers who stay at home). The website’s designs include things such as graphic element, fonts, colours and typography. If you have more plans in your head before you create the site, then it will be easier at the phase of design.

The timeline

If you have all the plans altogether at once, you have to take decision on a particular design. While fixing the schedule, do not forget to include time for revision, feedback and testing.

Altogether write down your plan

If you have several plans altogether, you can plan in lots of ways and capture many ideas so that you will be in a better shape. Sessions of planning will quickly become a brainstorming session. Fortunately this is good, but don’t let that to make you down.

If you want to decide what kind of Web developer you would like to be, this question is very tricky. There are several options where you can choose from.

Design:
It includes “Layouts” and “CSS” as well as “Graphic Designing”

Programming:
Writing “Flash Applications” or “Ajax Web2.0 Applications or “CGIs”

Content:
In this there will be creation of images and also writing the text that will be displayed on Websites.

Databases:
“Database Administration”, “Working with XML” and “Connecting Sites to Database”.

Information Architecture:
“Setting up of informatics behind Websites” and also “making the Websites easier to navigate and use”.

Metrics:
In this it is only to watch the page views and to track in order to validate the efficiency of “Web design work”.
There are many more options where you can choose from

If you want to be a Web Programmer, some of the languages like Perl. C++, JSP, ASP, Java or PHP will be heavily featured in your works daily. But, usually content writers and Web designers do not use these languages at all. C++ is one language you may use to write scripts and CGIs in order to make your WebPages more interactive and to have dynamic look.

In the field of Web, there are several other jobs that will not require any kind of programming and these jobs will be having the titles like program manager, designer, content co-ordinator, information architect and several other titles. Here you can choose either programming or non-programming route. Here you will be working with designers who will know programming and also with designers who will not know programming.

Money and job prospects in this Web Programming

It may or may not be true that only Web programmers are the ones who could make more money than Web designers and other than these both DBA would make more money. If you do Web programming only for the sake of money, you will not be able to do it and if you do it also, you will not be good at it. Here you will not be making money like the people who really loves doing Web programming and also the person who is really good at Web programming. This is also true with Web designing and with DBA as well. Before taking up any job, you have to be interested first.

When you take up a particular job, you have to even work on all the segments like content, code and design where you have to do some part of the equation as well. If you work with designers who do not know code writing, they will come up with the design the way that you might work and also the designs that they want to look. Then you might work on building some of the codes (JSP or CGI or other languages) that will be used to make the design work.

You have to focus on some parts of the job and have to enjoy working and you will get better.

Whenever you create or design a Webpage design, the Layout of your Webpage is the most overlooked aspects in you design. Most of the people think on “how to do layout but forget the basics of Web layout.

Space and whitespace

You have to make use of the space that is available as a whole but do not be specific. In other words, you have to use layout sections that are relatively sized on your WebPages so that they can contract and expand to fit correctly fit the browser’s window. Here you have to keep in mind the screen resolution. Keep in mind that most of the Web designers have moved far away form the resolution of 640 x 480. Having only the logo on the monitor is not a good customer service.

Do use colours in order to define spaces. If at all you want to have specific width to your page, center your page on the browser screen and add a different colour to the background. By doing this way, it will help the page appear resizing for different browsers. Browsers which are large will have more background colours and the smaller ones will be having fewer colours.

Graphics and images

You need to align your images properly. Nowadays, the most common layout mistakes that is found is to put up images in to the pages in such a way that it looks more willy nilly without a proper or forgetting the layout. If you are just using the “img” tag and later write some text to follow the image, then you will be having the image and one line full of text to the right side of it. Make use of this “align attribute” and this will help you to make images to be the part of layout.

On your page, do balance text and graphics correctly. Along with animations and images, it’s pretty easy to get carried away and these both animations and images will make the page to read really hard. Whenever you’re considering the layouts for your WebPages, keep in mind that images are one of the major parts of your design bust not afterthoughts.

Width of your text

You have to mainly think of your text width. This text width is often called as “the scan length” and this refers that how many words will be displayed in one line. Many people will be able to read 7 to 11 words on a single line. If the line is longer than 11 words, it will not be able to read and it gets hard. If there are more words it will be very much distracting to read. When you are in to designing your layouts to your pages, ensuring that major areas in the page will display the text and that should be with readable width.

It is inadvisable to centre your text. The first technique that is learned a new designer in page layout designing is the center tag. Centring the pages is too hard and it is very much difficult to read.

Both usability and accessibility are becoming increasing important as well as critical for any kind of internet experience. These are the two important features which are most commonly missed out. In fact, usability is one of the most important features for the survival of any website. If your web page is difficult to use, people will leave it immediately. And accessibility means that developing those sites that are accessible to all the users who are interested in using them.

Accessibility can be defined as designing those websites which have an easy access by all regardless of their disabilities. You can also refer these sites as Universal Web Sites. Although the World Wide Web is increasing and gaining its popularity on a regular basis, yet there is large number of users who use speech browsers, have disabilities in the form of visual or hearing, do not have latest plug-ins and graphical users surf the web through slower mediums or reside in low lying areas or make use test only browsers and do not support graphics. In such situations accessibility is a major topic of concern.

Accessibility not only increases benefits for website providers but also for users to a great extent. It is quite critical issue for the success of any website. Once the website becomes accessible, the users regardless of their disabilities, barriers or constrains can now access the information, buy the products and can talk to the people associated with each and every web site. To sum it up, you can say that if a user is satisfied, he becomes loyal and ultimately keeps on using the web and recommends to others as well.

And with this the provider also gets benefited in a way that the targeted audience is increased, efficiency and the maintainability is further improved and as a result reputation is regained and enhanced. Therefore one single factor is responsible for delivering a win-win situation for both the end users as well as the providers.

Usability in generic terms can be described as the measure of the user’s experience whenever interacting with any system, website, technology or a product. If the web page is either not easily usable or is not able to describe its functions and features properly, people would not like to use it further. The web site should be very intuitive as well as should support an extremely well user interface because no user would get down reading the user manual or details and descriptions about its usage.

The website is usable if and only if it is easy and quick to learn, allows rapid recovery from errors, efficient to use, usage is enjoyable, aesthetically easy and last but not the least easy to remember. If the website with the above characteristics is prepared, it will not only benefit the users but also the providers. Users are satisfied, able to achieve their goals effectively and efficiently and therefore are able to cultivate confidence in both the product and the website. Similarly the providers reduce on time, cost and a lot of errors. It has been proved that this feature alone is capable of providing very high return on investments.

Therefore, always strive to make your website usable as well as accessible so as to make your users happy and thereby making your wallet more comfortable.

If I was to state one thing that makes me uncomfortable and I dislike most while browsing any website, my answer would be its load time. It is the most common and the biggest problem that websites take a long time to load and is surely disliked by all the users. It a well known fact that every individual has a very short attention span because of which a person can keep his attention focused for not more than 8 to 10 sec while waiting for a web page to be loaded. Although, the most ideal response time for any website would be 1 second, but this is really not practical considering the bandwidths available. This is where the HTML optimisation plays an important role.

HTML optimisation is a method or technique of minimizing the HTML file size without compromising on the appearance and the functionality of the web page while maximizing the speed of the page display and thereby offering maximum reader satisfaction. Therefore, it is very important for any web designer to consider three main aspects while designing any web page which primarily include optimising the web pages, brutalizing the graphics in your web page and structuring your site for speed. As the complexity and the need of web design is increasing by day, web designers are ignoring the importance of the load time.

There are a lot of extra characters such as spaces, comments, redundant attributes and returns that are very commonly being used in the web page. Carefully removing or deleting these characters will definitely not affect the appearance of the web page but will definitely help in reducing the size of the web page. Web page is all about balance between bandwidth and beauty. A skilled web designer is able to draw that thin line between functionality and appearance and can wisely design pages that not only appear good but at the same time display also quickly.

Try to eliminate all the leech graphics, leech here means that a graphic that is too big and heavy to sustain its load on its own. Icons should not be confused with graphics. An icon need not be realistic; it just needs to be recognizable in order to be effective. Therefore, avoid the use of very large icons in your website. It is always better to have text based navigation rather than ubiquitous image maps which would chew up a lot of bandwidth. A great way to unify a website visually would be to use a well optimized and well placed logo graphic instead of the un-optimised banner graphic which can only kill the web page’s load time. GIF images of words are nothing more than just being wasteful. Simple plain text transmits faster than anything on the net.

It would not take much of the time to do optimisation of your HTML but it has remarkable effects on the load time and definitely the user satisfaction. It is practically quite easy and achievable to reduce the load time to half without really compromising on the appearance or the looks of the web page.