If you are a web designer, at least once in your life you must have faced this dilemma, “Where should I place the main navigation of the website? Should I make it vertical or horizontal?”

Incorporating navigation in your website may seem a minor prerequisite to a user-friendly website design, but if done without proper care, it can seriously disrupt your website’s design symmetry. Overall performance of the website depends on the navigation process. If the navigation is user-friendly, you will have thousands of loyal visitors within a few days, and if not, your business is doomed.

Vertical/Side Navigation

The problem with side navigation is that it consumes too much space, and also that space for advertisements reduces. Most websites earn their revenue from third-party or Google ads, and the sidebars are the best places for advertisements. Even sites, which don’t place advertisements on the sidebar, place widgets on the sidebar. If you search popular WordPress themes, rarely will you find any vertical navigation option.

So, is Side Navigation Completely Out of Fashion?

Fact is…side navigation is only useful when you have a very large website and don’t want to disturb the top banner frequently. For example, think Yahoo! – they keep adding various services to their homepage and have a vertical navigation. When you have side navigation, you can accommodate any change in the menu without disturbing the layout. You are never out of space.

If you want to use side navigation, then place the menu at the left side of your website, because majority people are right-handed and right-hand users generally look at the left side of their screens. You can reserve the right side of your website for widgets and advertisements.

Should You Use Side Navigation?

If your website offers various services, then vertical navigation is a wise choice. Some of the most popular ecommerce sites use vertical navigation from where users pick products from categories they want.

Vertical navigation is also used in email sites. If you are designing an email website, do what Google has done. Gmail is the best example of vertical navigation.

Also, if you are designing a mobile website, side navigation is a much better choice than horizontal navigation. In several handsets, drop down menu do not support horizontal navigation, and due to its small screen space, drop down menus look bad.

Should I Avoid Top/Horizontal Navigation?

Most websites use top or horizontal navigation with primary pages like Home, About, Services,Contact. Most times, designers use dropdown menus to accommodate sub menus. Then again, if you have many pages in your website, your drop-downs will probably become too cluttered and can also flow into your banner and hide part of text above the fold.If you want to use horizontal navigation on your website, think carefully and consider future expansion of the site. If it’s not properly planned, you might have to redesign the site sooner than you think to accommodate new pages you add. Before finalizing any type of navigation, think how you are going to categorize your pages and whether it will accommodate all pages or not in your navigation. Both horizontal and vertical navigation have their advantages and disadvantages. If vertical menu looks beautiful in one site, it does not mean it will look good in another site where it has no purpose. Consider usability, plan for future, concentrate on visual aesthetics and use horizontal or vertical navigation accordingly.
In the end, a combination of both is always good.

Website designs play a major role in the SEO of a site. A big part of search engine optimization responsibility lies with the website designer. Unfortunately, an alarming number of website designers are not fully aware of how a good SEO site should be built. Instead, most designers concentrate on color schemes and images they think will make the site more attractive to users.
A good website design is a lot about creative, innovative ideas. More importantly, it’s about user appeal. A web page is only attractive so far as users find it attractive. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if you, as a designer, think its ugly. If it works for the user, it’s a good design.
Let’s take a look at the fundamentals of creating an effective SEO web design:

1. Pretty Codes – Always use a semantic code. Search engines find it easier to read descriptive tags and understand content thereof. Besides, your site’s styling is much cleaner using semantic code.
2. Stop the Abuse – Keywords must be used to describe your content, and make sense when they do. Use keywords in the main body of content only where required. Avoid keyword stuffing – using keywords as many times as possible without sentences making much sense. Additionally, limit keyword usage to url, title tag, and heading tags.
3. Simplify Navigation – Do not use Flash no matter how stylish the drop down effects are. Search engines don’t read Flash, which means your links will not be followed.
4. Make them Unique – Each page should have a different page title. Using the same page title across all pages will mean you are duplicating content, which search engines disfavor.
5. Image Description – Search engines don’t read images. They read text. Use the alt attribute to describe an image to make sure search engines list you in image searches.
6. Don’t Generalize – Link to relevant content but don’t forget to use a keyword in the link to describe the content you are linking to. Links with ‘learn more about puppies’ is better than a generic link that say ‘learn more’.
7. AJAX Use – enhances user experience but try to use it sparingly. AJAX content cannot be linked to. So, if you have an individual AJAX generated page, avoid using it.
8. Quick Indexing – Submitting your site to Google works but usually takes a number of days to be indexed. For timely indexing by search engines, a better idea is to get your site linked with another popular site in a relevant niche.
9. Allow Incoming Links – Quality incoming links will improve your site’s search engine placement. If your site has quality content that is informative and useful to users, let other, good relevant sites link to you.
10. URL Consistency – Use or drop the ‘www’ and stick to it. www.abc and abc.com will be taken as two sites with similar content by search engines, and this doesn’t scale to well with them.

The career of a website designer demands for constant innovation that challenges his creative talent at its best. It is important that every designer maintains a constant endeavor to improve and excel to stay in sync with the latest developments. But to stay above mediocrity, there’s something more that you need to do to have your career achieve an upscaling growth.

A designer should always focus on learning new things that are out of the league of normal web design activities. In this article we will know about some guidelines that you can practice to give the required boost to your career. Read below to stretch your knowledge and skills further to improve your creativity and career:

1. Direct Interaction with Clients

As a designer, the best way to improve your knowledge is to interact with your clients directly. When you work as an individual, you get to know the changing trends and requirements of clients better. It definitely helps open new gateways of learning opportunities such as client security, time management, finance management, meeting deadlines and lots more.

2. Try Your Hand in New Layout Designs

There is no hard and fast rule of website designing that calls for a fixed width and alignment in all your website design. Challenge yourself afresh and try something new and different every time you work on a new project. Don your creative cap and sharpen your skills in web design dimensions that you haven explored yet.

3. Accept Criticism and Feedback in Good Stride

Feedbacks and criticism are part and parcel of every designer’s career. But the most important factor that helps a designer stand tall among others is the ability to accept client’s feedback positively and try efforts of improvement. You can also ask your fellow designers to provide with honest and constructive criticism.

4. Start Blogging

Start making active participation in blog writing as you kickstart your career for betterment. Publish your posts and designs in various blog sites to let the world know about your works easily.

5. Answer Questions on Forums

There are lots of website design related forums where you can indulge in active interaction with other people. Look through the works of other designers to be influenced by new styles of designing that helps in self improvement. Also ask questions and answer to other’s queries in forums to hone your knowledge better.

Website designing is more like building a house that needs for a rough architectural outline. Though it’s quite tempting for many website designers to skip the wireframing phase, it definitely makes an important need of web development. Making things easier for a designer, having a rough draft at hand surely has its benefits. Here in this article we will be discussing about wireframing and its various benefits that can help create a well structured website design with much ease:

What is Wireframe?

Before we discuss about the benefits of wireframing, let’s take a pause and know what wireframing exactly means. Speaking candidly, wireframe is actually the skeleton or blueprint of your website design, i.e. it is the rough visual representation of your website design that you will be working on. With its basic layout structure and navigational schemes, a wireframe makes the work of a designer much more organized and structured.

Benefits of Wireframe

Used to decide on the final arrangement of a design, wireframing is the grayscale outline of where the different design elements will be placed on the page. Designers can effectively use the benefits of this practice to the maximum as given below:

1. Wireframe allows making changes in design more systematic
   As a designer, it is accepted that you will need to modify and change your design once or twice, according to your client’s likings. At the same time, you also know that when you produce a finished design to your client and he asks you to modify some portions of it, there are multiple changes involved which may increase your costing.

   This is where wireframe can help you best. Produce a wireframe to your clients initially and ask him for feedbacks. Need to make the header a little small or big? Its easy; just note it and have it changed in the final design. Not only wireframing comes across as a handy tool for designer, but it also helps you save a lot of time and cost.

2. It Makes Site Navigation Easy and Better
   Easy navigational access makes an essential need in website designing. With users becoming more web savvy, a negative navigation can drive away your targeted audience. With wireframe, designers can have their web design well tested beforehand to ensure proper working of every elements such as dropdown menus, page routing etc.
3. It Makes Content Development More Friendly
   In content development too, wireframe is a great help worth trying out. Instead of using big blocks of text that most readers do not read through, designers can have the content layout planned in wireframe. It makes the work easier for the designer as he decides on the final use of fonts, bullets, headings, sub headings etc in the web design.
4. Helps a web developer
   A wireframe definitely helps a web developer with a clear and comprehensive idea of the designing. It not only clarifies the objectives of the design but also enables the developer to decide better about which web technology and techniques to use so that it results in a comprehensive result.

Failure is not an option when it comes to website design. Since website is fast becoming a (online) brand ambassador of an organization, clients are giving importance more to every minute detail about it like never before. Unless you are well versed with every little change of website development industry, you will never be able to make it large in this industry. New trends are continuously emerging for making this platform more interactive, user-friendly and more featured rich. Therefore, it has become imperative, if not necessary, for every designer to hone his/her designing skills on regular basis. But before anything else, you need to have a fair understanding of some website design tricks, which are described in detail below:

Consider It As a Canvas: No need to get overawed. Just take it as a simple canvass and your part is to fill it with some graphical elements to produce something that will be equally impressive and user friendly. No need to add something just for sake of filling up the void. White space can serve a good purpose in website design since it gives users a chance to concentrate on other important elements of website design for example content, special offer etc.

Use Of Impressive Graphics: – The best way to differentiate a website from the rest of the others is by using some good quality graphics. You should not compromise with the quality of the graphics because it can have serious backlash at the end. Images should play constructive roles. Besides that, they have to reflect the very nature of the organization otherwise; it might snowball into a major crisis. Make sure that the images are good enough to seize the attention of the readers at the very first glance.

Enhance Common Elements: You would not have to do anything extraordinary for making a great website. Instead, what you have to do is to do minor tweak here and there to make it look really gorgeous. However, an in-depth knowledge and fair understanding of different tools are needed for this purpose. Try to do something different or try to break away from the designing tradition, and if you manage to do this, it will surely add freshness in your website.

Engage Your Visitors: – The only way you can increase interaction with your visitors is by making them engaged. If you can manage to do this, it will go a long way in increasing the popularity of a website. However, you need not have to add flash or JavaScript for that purpose. You can make your visitors engaged by using some common elements.

These are some of the common tricks that can help you a lot to spruce up your career prospect in the field of website design.

Talent is not the one and only determining factor when it comes to success in creative field. It depends on how a person is promoting his art or talent without making it too obvious. Personal branding, self-marketing, promotion or whatever you call it, you cannot deny its ever increasing and all-encompassing importance. Being a website designer, I know how challenging it is for a person to attain perfection in a work of art. Website design is more or less a form of pure art where technology and creative are intertwined for producing something unique. But just having a flair for creativity is not the only thing that you need to have to become successful website designer, you need to a strategy or .. let face it; you should have a self branding strategy to make things work for you. Here are some things that you can try to establish yourself as a successful website designer:

Start With Your Name
Launching a website which has punch lines in but this will not make any significant difference in bettering your prospect as a good website designer. Why not launch a website in your own name! This may sound crazy, but this is actually a cool concept. You will have to your own identity and this will surely make things simple for people to find your out.

Be Truthful To Yourself
Now, I am not a preacher nor I am here to dictate my philosophy. What I want to convey through the above mentioned line is that a website designer should not take the credit of others work. To put it into simple English; do not steal other concepts or ideas because this can have far reaching consequences in near future. Your works reflect what you are and which is why you should make it as unique as possible. However, success may appear elusive at the embryonic stage, but things will certainly change in sooner or later. Just hone your skills at the meantime and wait for the opportunity.

Be Focused and Consistent
In majority of cases, a large section of website designers fall into the trap of doing too many things at a time and ultimately find themselves in a typical situation at the end of the day. Do not waste your positive energy for doing something unfruitful. Try to keep it intact or preserve it until you get the ideal opportunity.

Do not compromise with the quality of your work. Take a leave for from work if you find yourself blindly groping for great ideas. Your brand value can take a sharp nosedive, if you fail to meet the expectation of your clients. So, be focused through our career and try to upgrade your skills as far as possible if you want to emerge as a successful designer at the end of the day.