STARTING UP !
Video International, Inc. uses only basic HTML, Digitizing and compression. We also use small file size graphics. Give Your Website a Professional Look - The menu system and categorization should make navigation easy so as to give purpose and order to your site. Add a small paragraph introduction at the top of each major category. Remove unnecessary ads from the sidebar for a clean uncluttered look.
You need to plan to speed visitors to the information they Seek. If they become lost deep within a site, they may give up entirely. Getting customers to information quickly is the goal of your navigation system. What do you want to accomplish? Get the visitor to fill out your questionnaire? Sign up for your newsletter? Phone you to find out more? Order a catalog? Make a purchase online? Work through these questions before you design your navigation system, The more important the objective, the higher on the menu it belongs. People's short-term memory can handle about seven pieces of information. Keep your top-level menu to seven sections or less. Beyond that visitors suffer information overload and quit. Visitors want their questions answered. Web surfers are used to such terms as Contact Us, Home, About Us etc. When your visitors first get to your web site, does it load fast? Is it compatible with the main browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator? ... All our designs are!
If people are coming to your site and are only staying for under a minute, then you really have some problems with your text. Ask this of yourselves: Have you ever gone to a web site and wanted to ask a question, but were too lazy to hunt down the email address and type out a detailed letter asking the question? .
A trademark is a graphic logo or a unique name that is used in
trade to identify a business, product, or service. In general, the
first company to use a name in trade owns it. If you plan to use a
trademark, you should place the letters "TM" in superscript next
to the trade name to indicate your intention to use it as a
trademark. To protect your right to use a particular business
name, you ought to register the trademark with the official
government agency in your country, and other countries where you
expect to do much business.
US Patent and Trademark Office http://tess.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=6a1nm0.1.1
Canada http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/cgi-bin/sc_consu/trade- marks/search_e.pl
UK http://www.patent.gov.uk/dbservices/tm.html
Australia
http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/trademarks/T_srch.htm
Fictitious Business Name Statement. Local government. $10 to
$50.
Many of the most heavily trafficked sites have gone back to using hypertext links. They're efficient, fast to download, and look good. Search Engine Spiders can follow hypertext links, or images which have been made "clickable" through a hypertext link. They are blind to image maps and disgusted by frames. Serve them hypertext links from page one, down through every level of your site if you want to keep them happy. Include a bar of links in small type at the bottom of every page in your site such as: Home | About Us | Products | Services | Contact Us. People are impatient with pages that say, "click here to enter the site." They don't care about your graphics display. Get them to the content they desire as quickly as possible. The use of left-side menus is widespread. They allow your customers to get deep into your site without clicking through linking pages They also display the structure of your site more. Make the larger sections bolder, with lighter face pages below them in the left-side menu.
FRAMES are difficult for search engines to index, Many sites are low in the search engine listings because of frames. They make it difficult to bookmark any but the main page, so customers who like a particular section of your site won't be able to get to it quickly.The scroll bars look ugly. Some browsers don't print content from frames correctly. Frames make it clumsy for people with 640 x 480 monitors to browse your site. Fixed-width frames often hog too much of the screen, leaving just a small area to read the text. Stay away from frames entirely. ...Buttons (separate graphics) each hyperlinked to a destination. The advantage of buttons is that when used with ALT tags, a site can be navigated without images - Image Maps - Neither browsers with images off nor search engines can follow them. They're also more difficult to maintain than either text or button menus.
When you look at the newspaper-on the newsstand, for example-you may only glance at it for a few seconds. As a result, the main information-especially on the front page-needs to be provided in the part that is directly visible. The major headlines, subheads, leads and illustrations are provided to give you an overview of what is inside. This is the information on your site that should be visible when the page first comes up, without scrolling. Newspapers are divided into many sections-news, sports, living, arts, and so on. This lets the reader quickly go to the section that they're interested in. Your website can be organized into sections Newspapers title their stories in a way that makes it easy to determine their content. Headline styles include: informational, teasing, cute, etc. Titles can be used the same way on your site. The first sentence or two of a story is called "the lead". The lead sums up the story. It tells you what is covered in the story and what to expect to find if you read further. The goal is to be short-but not too short. Articles in the newspaper are usually written in an inverted pyramid style. This means that the basic facts to the story are written first-often answering the questions: who? what? where? when? why? how? A similar style could be used for your website.
To insure your site always makes sense to the surfer 1. Provide a linear path that takes you through the site step by step. 2. Provide a non-linear navigational structure that is: a. Easy to understand b. Easily Recognizable c. Consistent - For example, they might say: "Look, I just want to download the software." That is where the non-linear navigational structure comes in. You'll see that the "nav-bar" (the series of buttons on the left that tell you what else is available on the site) has the following three features: 1. It is easy to understand. By looking at the label of each button, you immediately know what you will see if you click on it. 2. It is easily recognizable. That is, it is where you would expect to find it. The person looking to download or purchase the item will immediately know where to go.On each page, the nav-bar is in the same position. That is, you don't have to hunt for it each time.
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