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Major points on web hosting and web design

By: Michael Horny, Mon Jan 18th, 2010

Both web design and web hosting are considered important tasks while creating a web site. Web design means creating web pages. Elements such as text, graphics, images, font sizes and colors are used in designing and producing pages for a web site.  It’s important to know that there’s more that goes into websites than just graphics and text. Other services include creating flash, animation and e-commerce functionality. Flash introduction is a popular web design service, presenting the site’s visitors with a short piece of animated content. E-commerce is another important web design service for web design purpose which can range from basic online shopping to user-friendly and integrated purposes. Other e-commerce functions include shopping carts from which users can view the items they’ve chosen and their total costs before proceeding to checkout.  

Web hosting is a process where designed web pages can be viewed by any person who uses internet.  Web hosting is a service which allocates space for customers to showcase their websites on computer servers that are connected to the Internet 24/7. There are different types of web hosting. For professional purposes also there are web hosting services that offer commercial packages that bundle business tools, like point of sales packages and credit card processing.  Web hosting company can work on contract basis with individuals to provide bandwidth and space on a server where the website can actually reside.  Some finest web hosting companies provide automated controls and notifications so that site owners can know when traffic is coming close to exceeding current bandwidth restrictions. Prices for web hosting vary from free to hundreds of dollars a year, depending on your needs. Some hosting services have policies that restrict certain content, scripting languages, functions or users.

Some people think web design and hosting are one and the same. But this is not right. Both are two different things.  But one company can provide both types of service. It is also possible to purchase web design and hosting services from two different vendors.  If anyone is interested in creating or reworking an existing web site they should investigate both options and determine which solution would work best.

Some basic points of web design are as follows:

•    Always think small like 10-12KB per image.
•    Based on the content use graphics
•    Avoid blink images
•    Stick with standard layouts
•    Use graphics in your layouts
•    Whitespace is very important in a web layout as in paper layout
•    Avoid different fonts. Try sticking to one font.
•    Use standard font families
•    Treat ads as any other image
•    Try to test your pages in multiple browsers
•    Make sure your content covers topics that your readers want to read.
•    Test your pages in multiple browsers.