Web Design Tips
1. Be
short and
concise:
Write
concise,
purposeful, and interesting text. Use paragraphs, headers, and links to
break
up large blocks of text. People read text off a computer screen at
about 1/4th
the speed that they do paper.
2. Make your titles on
your web
page make sense:
One
of the core
attributes of a web page is its title. In between the <title>
</title> tags you can specify the page's title as it appears in
the
browsers top title bar and in the search engine results.
3. Show date and author
So
user knows
when page was last updated and whom to contact for questions, error
reports
4. Keep graphics files small.
Don't
use
big graphic or background music on your web pages! Graphics and music
files
usually take long time to download. Most surfers will not think that
it's worth
the wait.
5. Be
consistent.
Do
keep the
structure of your web pages consistent throughout your website.
6. Do use standard styles for
your
navigation.
Apple
and Microsoft
have found that left side navigation and top navigation is what people
are used
to. Scrolling web pages vertically (top to bottom) is ok, as long as
it's not
more than two and half pages or so. But scrolling horizontally (side to
side)
is really bad and annoying to visitors.
7. Do make you
web pages viewable at 640x480 or 800 x 600 resolution.
Many
web
designers have computers that can display higher resolutions like
1024x768 and
1280 x 1024. They design there pages to fit in that resolution, when
someone
hits those pages with a computer that can display only a maximum of 800
x 600,
the visitor has to scroll to see the page properly. In a nutshell, you
want to
design all your pages these days for 800 x 600; they make up about 40%
of the
web audience!
8. Do create a
site map page.
A
site map is a simple web page with text links to all the websites
sub-pages organized in proper categories; a lot of people will use a
site map
if they can find one.
9. Do keep your web pages under
60k in
size.
If
someone
has to wait over 10 seconds to see your page, you are probably losing
most of
your potential audience. High speed Internet is growing steadily, but
the majority of surfers are still on old
56k dial-up modems.
That means that you are begging for trouble if your pages are over 60k.
10. Do provide
alternate text (using the 'alt' attribute of the image tag) for all
your major
images:
Alternate
text is
text that you insert in your image tags (<img
...>) that is used by text only browsers. Text only browsers are
used by the
blind to surf the web since images won't help them very much ... the
alternate
text in your image tags is read by the text only browsers in place of
displaying the images.
You
should put
meaningful information in the alternative text that will benefit those
who
can't see and it will also help you with the search engines. The
alternate text
is inserted in your image tags like so:
11. Don't use
too many colors in your web site:
Color
is a way
that people identify things; that is why the Coke label dominantly red
and the
Pepsi label is dominantly blue. Keep the color scheme of your web site
limited
to a couple of colors and keep it consistent across your site unless
you want to denote some major
section.
13. Flash intros:
A
few years back
Flash intros were the hottest things (not sure if anyone knew why we
‘needed’
them), but as it turns out the ‘skip intro’ button is the
2nd most clicked on
the web today. Don’t waste your time on Flash intros and in my
opinion Flash
should be only used in special situations.
14. Under-construction
pages:
Website
is always
a work in progress. If the page is not ready, don’t put it up. If
you have
links that are pointing to the pages, disable them until your page is
ready.
15. Don’t use page
counters:
Page
counters do
nothing except make you look like an amateur, mess with your design and
tell
people information about your site you probably don’t want them
to know!