If you are going to design a website for children, you need to really think out-of-the-box! The traditional minimalism, restricted use of colors, call-to-action buttons, etc that you otherwise use in corporate web design, won’t work here.

To design a child-centric website, you must keep the following in mind:

Know the Age Group- Children can be divided into three age groups. Each of these three groups has different interests according to which you must design a website.

• Very young kids (3-5) – Use themes inspired by nature, soothing colors and a variety of graphics in the layout. You can use 3D animation, sound clips, etc, in the website to make it lively. Avoid text in the website and include some very easy games for play.
• Mid-range (6-8) – Mid-ranged children like to see more texts and play comparatively tougher games. You should use bold texts in the site and offer challenging games to retain their attention.
• Older kids (9-12) – Grabbing the attention of this age group and encouraging them to visit your site regularly is a challenging task. To engage them, offer character creation games and let them create their own team of superheroes. You could also include a facility to play and compete with other players all over the world, online.

Use Bright Colors- You can go wild with color combos in a children’s website design. Use as many bright and lively colors as possible and don’t be afraid about visual clutter. When you add various elements in your web pages, you increase your target audience’s inquisitiveness and grab their attention. You should add lots of pictures in such websites as kids don’t like to read much content; also, wherever you use text in the website, keep it very simple and use large font sizes.

Include Interesting Games to Play- Games make your website popular and create a loyal audience. To retain your target audience’s attention and get repeated visits, you should add games, quizzes and other interactive elements in the website.  However, you must know your target audience’s gender to design a game that will interest them. For instance, if the website is targeted at girls, you can design a dress-up game, while car racing games will be more popular in a website for boys.

Besides entertainment, you can design educational games like fill-in-the-blanks to create a word. You can also design a “downloads” page and post some coloring pages there. This way, you can ensure when your young audience is not in front of their computers, they are still playing with the items you have provided them with.

Animated Characters- Animation helps you set the mood of a children’s website. Use animated presentations of their favorite cartoon or comic characters, include sound effects, and make the site interactive. The mouse-over and mouse-click animation is preferred by kids.

Easy Navigation- The navigation process has to be absolutely simple so that children face no difficulty finding what they are looking for. You should use large buttons and graphical icons instead of text links. The “map” layout design is very useful for a children’s website. Don’t make a page so big that it needs scrolling; kids generally don’t scroll a page to find content.

Give Them a Reason to Wait- Due to the heavy use of graphics and Flash animation; children’s websites take a long time to load. To help them wait patiently till your site gets loaded, you should design interesting pre-loaders. Pre-loaders can offer attractive graphics that can hold kids’ attention and prevent them from closing the browser window.

Your website may be beautiful but if it doesn’t show up in the search engines, the target audience will never even know that your website existed! So, the next time you create a website design, you should consider some very important SEO factors to enhance your site’s visibility in search engine results.

Designing A Complete Site in Flash and Images Is Not a Good Idea

Search engines don’t read the texts embedded in images and heavy Flash websites are also often neglected by search engines. I am not saying that you shouldn’t use Flash or images in your website, but you should use them less in a website and place them intelligently.

No doubt you can enhance any website’s appeal with Flash, but developing it completely in Flash will increase page load time and hamper accessibility. People now access websites from their smartphones and tablets, while some of the major smartphones such as iPhone does not support Flash content at all. That means, iPhone users won’t be able to view your website and you will lose many potential customers. Instead of Flash, you can use jQuery for animation in the website to make the pages lighter and faster.

Do

• You can use jQuery instead of Flash for animation to keep the site SEO-friendly.
• Use Flash animation in some parts of the website such as Flash intro and Flash header to enhance the site’s appearance.
• Use the images as gradient background or bullet points in your site.

Avoid

• Don’t build a site completely in Flash.
• Don’t use large size images in the site.

Descriptive Meta Tags

Not only do search engines look at meta tags, but users’ do so as well. When a user searches a website in Google, the links appear with a brief description about the site’s content. If you write a short but informative meta description, users will be more interested to visit your site.

Do

• In the meta description, describe your website’s purpose.
• Giving a call-to-action statement in the description will increase conversion rate.
• Give important keywords related to your business in the meta description.
• If it’s a local business site, mention your location.

Avoid

• Don’t make the description boring and informal.
• Don’t use too many keywords.

Balance SEO and Usability

Search engine visibility is an important factor for a website’s success, but that doesn’t mean that you should compromise on the usability features. You need to maintain a perfect balance between a site’s usability and search engine friendly features to achieve success. If the website ranks high in search results but the site looks disoriented, users will ‘bounce’ away from the site.

Do

• Use lists and highlight the main topics of every page.
• Use headlines in the content.
• Make the site user friendly by uploading an easy-to-fill contact form.
• Use divs and avoid tables in the CSS.
• Give your contact number at the top or bottom corner of a page. It will help the smartphone and tablet users to directly call you.

Avoid

• Don’t overstuff the homepage with content.
• Don’t keep any broken links on the website.

CMS with Blogging Functionality

Popular CMSes such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, offers various functionalities. With the help of an opensource CMS, you can develop a dynamic website, maintain the CSS easily, add as many plug-ins in your site to increase its usability, and also improve page load time. Among these CMSes, WordPress offers the best blogging features and with the help of a blog, you can publish regular content to remain on top of the search engine results.

Do

• Build your site in an opensource CMS, preferably WordPress.

Avoid

• If you hire a web designer, don’t give him total control over the website.

HTML and XML Sitemap

Your website should have both HTML and XML sitemap. The sitemaps give the search engine robots easy access to the site and helps them to index the pages comfortably. The HTML sitemaps are used by visitors to check the pages of a website, while the XML sitemaps are used by search engines for indexing a website.

Do

• Have both HTML and XML sitemap.
• Use a plug-in that will automatically modify the sitemap when you add or edit any new page.

Avoid

• Don’t just design a sitemap and then forget it. Update it regularly.
• Don’t forget to link the sitemap in the footer of the website.
• Broken links in the sitemap can drop your page rank.

After designing and uploading the site on the server, give some time to both search engines and users to scan your site. Keep an eye on the search engine ranking and ask the users to give feedback about the usability of your site.

A website’s aim is to communicate ideas to its web users through text and images. While images help gain a better understanding of ideas a website wants to convey, content defines it. However, well-researched and well-written content is not enough to hold a reader’s attention. Text fonts, which have both visual and emotional impact on readers, can either increase, or decrease readership.

Before you create a website design and include content, you should consider the fonts to be used for content. If fonts don’t compliment content, your website will fail to attract the desired online traffic. Before choosing fonts therefore, bear in mind:

Font Readability- Don’t pick a font based on its style, but based on its readability. Fancy fonts look great and you might be tempted to use them to enhance the overall beauty of your webpage, but such fonts are hard to read. Web users will typically scan parts of text instead of reading them line-by-line. If fonts hinder visual scanning, your readers will have difficulty understanding your message.

Select the Font Gender- Pick fonts based on its gender. Serif fonts are considered feminine fonts and bold fonts are considered masculine fonts. Depending on your site’s content and target audience, you should use either masculine or feminine fonts. For instance, if your website sells beauty products for women, using a feminine font (like Monotype Corsiva) will help, while if the site sells car accessories, a masculine font (like Bank Gothic) would be more suitable.

Italics are very commonly used in women-centric websites, and straight-lined fonts in men-centric websites.

Serif and Sans Serif- There is no scientific proof that sans serif fonts are better than serif fonts. Fact is, most designers like to use sans serif fonts for websites and serif fonts for print.

Fonts create a visual impression of your company before its target audience. The connection between business, content and fonts is very important therefore. However, no matter what fonts you choose, its readability rules.

The pricing factor alone does not determine the fate of an online business, but the services it offers as well. Offering only web content writing services will not help you increase your client base. If you really want to increase your profit margin and attract new clients, you should offer website design and development services as well.

When you start offering web design, development and content writing solutions under one roof, clients will be more interested to hire you. You will become their one-stop solution for all web related needs. Consequently, you will get more clients and increase your profit margin.

Here are some of the advantages of offering content writing services with web design:

• When you design a website for a client, he lays out certain specifications before you, according to which you are required to design his website. For instance, a web page may require a heavy footer, long left-side navigation and a number of ads on the right-side, and a video file in the middle of the page – all of which ultimately leaves little space, or need, for content.

As a designer who is already aware of just how much space is available for content, you can advise your content writing team to write minimum content for that specific page, thus saving them time and effort. Content compliments the design as the designer and content writer works cohesively. Because you are working with the client from the early stages of the project, you know everything about the client’s business and can write suitable content to complement their brand image.

When you offer only content writing services, you may have to churn out a lot of words, which ultimately gets slashed to accommodate design.

• The possibility of a project delay is less when you handle content assignments with design. You don’t need to wait for a third-party service provider to deliver content. As the design progresses, your content writers can supply content for each page to help the project complete faster.
• Good quality content helps increase conversion rate of websites. If your company provides good content, you can be assured that the client will hire you when he needs to update the content of his site, or add new articles in his blog, etc.

If you offer keyword rich content to the client, his website will rank high in search results and he will be pleased with your work. This will improve your reputation as a quality web development company.