One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to pay a lot of money for a website but then hide your contact details away.

This is a shortened version of the full article about making sure your contact details are clear, which you can read here.

Your phone number should be a clear beacon, immediately visible above the fold (preferably at the top of the page) in large font that can be read even by those who are partially sighted. Especially by those who are partially sighted. They are the ones who need it most as they will find it frustrating to browse the website.

You should offer an email address and get a decent junk mail filter to deal with the spam that is inevitable from publishing an email address on the internet. You can also take steps to obfuscate your email address from robot crawlers. Not offering an email address because you're afraid of spam is like slamming your door in people's faces. Not good.

And you should also have an enquiry form on the contact page (or even at the side of all pages), as some people prefer having the guidance of little boxes to fill in, because they don't want to expend the brain power involved in composing an email from scratch. And who are you to argue?

And finally, you could offer an online chat service but you need to be careful with this or it could do more harm than good. If it's constantly unavailable, or if the people take ages to reply (possibly because they're trying to deal with too many chats at the same time) and leave your customer sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for a response, or if your customer service agents are impolite or abrupt, then your customers will be turned off.

By utilising all these methods (effectively), you give people every option they could desire and reduce the likelihood of them getting turned off and heading to one of your competitors instead.

If you liked this blog post, you might like to read our article on Five elements of great web design or web design and colour.

Sentiva web design make websites, software and mobile apps.

What are Cascading Style Sheets or CSS?

A cascading style sheet is a document which is part of any modern website. As a normal user, you won’t see it directly as you browse the website, but you will definitely see its effects.

The style sheet gives design direction to the website elements, telling it what colours, fonts and sizes to use, where to put various elements, and hundreds of other visual elements.

By using a style sheet to contain this information it means we don’t have to specify these things on each of the individual pages – which would lead to a lot of repeated code and a nightmare if we ever wanted to change – say – the background colour.

By swapping out one style sheet for another, you can completely change the look of a website so as to make it unrecognisable.

There are various ‘standard’ tags you can use in style sheets which will work in any website at all, but if you find that too limiting you can also make up your own brand new ‘classes’ and ‘ids’ which you can apply willy-nilly wherever you like.

Because you may have elements nested within each other, they may end up with multiple styles applying to the same item – for example, a paragraph of text. This is where the ‘cascading’ bit comes in. CSS sheets have priority and the closer to the element, or alternatively, the lower down the sheet, the high priority it will be.

Cascading Style Sheets will make even the most basic website easier to work with and more elegant and at the top end of the scale they can be used to make smart, responsive websites that do all kinds of clever things.

If you want to learn more about cascading style sheets and have a more detailed and at the same time straightforward explanation of exactly the role they play and why they’re so awesome go and read the full article on cascading style sheets.

If you’ve found this article useful you might want to check out our resource bank, which includes articles about why you shouldn’to utsource your web design to India, whether you should put music on yoursite (No! A thousand times no!), all about web hosting – and, you’ve guessed it – much more.

Choice of colour is very important in web design and will strongly effect how your website comes across, including everything from how professional it looks to the kind of personality the visitors project onto your company.

Please note that this is a shorter version of the full article on colour in web design, which you can read here.

Human beings are designed to have strong emotional responses to colour, this helps us identify things that are safe and dangerous, as well as a range of other more subtle aspects. The problem is that different colours have different representations and associations in different countries, for example white means pure in the West, but death in China. See a list of common colours and associations here.
If you use too many colours, then the website will come across as busy and tiring to look at, so it's a good idea to stick to a small range of colours that match your brand and the impression you want to give.

Contrast is an important factor. If contrast is too strong than it will give a garish impression, however, if contrast is not strong enough then it will make it difficult to read and will affect accessibility.

Colour can also be used very effectively in calls to action. You can make buttons leap out from the page and draw the eye, encouraging clicking and further desired behaviour from your visitor.

You can read loads more articles about good and bad web design in our web design and SEO resource bank.

Or, if you're looking for web design in and around Leeds, find out more about our web design services.