Developing Dynamic Website with PHP&MySQL - 3 - Homepage Design
26 January 2008Someone may ask, why do you talk about homepage, why not talk about how to write PHP code. As I said before, the purpose of this series of posts are not entirely for PHP coding. You can find many good tutorials online talking about how to write a specific module such as member registration and login system. My main idea is to present how I get all the ideas together for my website.
So why homepage? That’s because the homepage is the first page your visitors most likely to see when they visit your site. The layout and colour scheme will be used across the entire site. So after you have planned out what modules you would like to have for your site, found a good domain name and a good hosting service, you should decide what you want for homepage.
Usually for a homepage, you will need a logo, navigation bar, main areas of the content and a footer. The design of logo, navigation bar and footer will be used across the site to unify the interface. For the main content area, it depends on the property of the site. If it is a news site, you will put headline. For my site, I put the recent posed articles’ links on the homepage as well as the newly uploaded 3d models and textures. I also put a search box for products as a side bar so users will have a handy location to find my products. For search engine optimization purpose(I will talk about it in details later on), you want to pay some attention to the homepage design. I prefer to put more contents for the search engine to index my page. Google’s spider will come often to index your site if you put new contents on the homepage often. I usually update my site 3 times per week.
1. Logo design:
2. Navigation bar :
3. Side Search Box:
4. New Products Section:
5. Latest Tutorials Update:
6. Footer:
The reason these elements are on the homepage is because they provide information to visitors and tell them what’s new on my site. They will know what is happening the minute open up your site in their browser. And I believe this type of first impression is very important. It tells the visitors that you do care about them.
Just have a look my homepage , you will understand what I was talking about.
-next post I will talk about how to design a member registration and login system.
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