Professional website design Website design is one area where all the three factors that is technology, creativity and business come together, and in fact, unless these three can come together effectively, the website design would not be a success. By website design the first thing that comes to our mind is designing the website – and here there are 2 aspects, which are the programming part and the images. The programming behind professional website design: Much like that of a coin, there are two sides of a web page – the front end that the viewer sees and the back end that actually creates the page. The programmer writes scripts that make this backend and in this, there can be many alternatives such as HTML, XHTML, ASP, Java Script, PERL and others. In professional website design, programmers go for one of these two kinds of pages and they are static pages and dynamic pages. In static pages, the content of the page does not change whereas in dynamic pages, the content changes based on the input that the user gives such as filling out a form. Then there are some websites that use CSS file wherein the codes are kept in one central place such as the Font and others. This is convenient because then the same codes need not be repeated in all the pages of the website. All pages in such cases refer to the centralized CSS file. Then there are those web pages that also contain audio and video. In recent years, web pages have started to be more dynamic than before where the user’s data such as his/her location and other demographics are being analyzed to offer the visitor a customized web page. In case of online stores, such data can also capture the links the visitor had clicked on an earlier visit through cookies that are in the browser to offer these links above all else to the visitor on a repeat visit. Professional website design also needs to consider browser compliance when the pages are being created. The fact is that, the same page may appear different in different browsers such as IE, Mozilla and Safari. This has to be kept in mind because an increasing number of people are now trying out other browser options as well. The creativity behind professional website design: A professional has to do a good job when doing the design work for the web page. Yes, the images need to be attractive to grab the attention of the viewer because otherwise the person may want to leave the web page. But on the other hand if the images are too heavy then the web page will take too long a time to load and this may put off many visitors. On the Internet people have so little patience and there are so many options (so many websites), that it is necessary to capture the attention of the visitor with the images and the content and the page needs to load quickly, because otherwise the person may simply click the Back button or exit the page. And one visitor gone may be a customer lost. The designer also has to decide whether the images will be static or whether the page will have flash. Flash movies also take a longer time to load. It also needs to be kept in mind that not all people have flash plug-ins loaded in their browsers, and these people would not be able to view the flash part in the page. So many professional website designers opt for two versions of the website – a flash version and a HTML version. The business behind professional website design: This is of great importance because it centers around the root cause of the existence of the website. Creativity often needs to be controlled because the website exists to do business after all (be it an ecommerce or a lead generation website or one that just builds a brand) and creativity can often come in the way, but not always. It starts with the navigation structure of the website. The navigation has to be user friendly because the visitors must have an easy time of finding all the relevant sections of the website and should be able to go from one page to another easily. There are some websites that do not carry a link to the Home page from the inside pages – this is simply unacceptable. There are many other usability issues that need to be considered by the designer. Such as for ecommerce websites, it has to be decided where the products would be displayed – on the Home page or in the products page and how the “Buy” links would appear – as a text link or as an image. The positioning of such links also needs to be decided. The professional website designer also needs to consider whether there should be any cross selling or not from the shopping cart page.