Friday, February 16, 2007

Website Design Tips

1. Avoid Complications: Animations and sounds on your webpage can divert attention of the visitor. Users who have slow dial up connection seldom like websites with these features, because animations and sound increase the loading time of webpage.

2. Use Small Size Pictures: Webpage with pictures is a good idea. But large size pictures increases the load time of webpage. There are numerous graphic software applications available in market which can compress graphics files so that webpage take less time to load on your visitor’s web browser. This will ensure that the visitor gets a fast website to look at and navigate through.


3. Contact information of your website: Your website visitors may want to ask some questions related to your website or goods/services offered on it. So don’t forget to include your contact information or link to it on each page of your website. Make yourself available to the visitors.

4. Check Website Links: Check your website periodically to ensure that it works correctly. If your website contains links to other websites, check it periodically because the target webpage may have been removed or some problem might have cropped up with the web link itself. Also, ensure all links to other web pages of your website are operational at all times.

5. Website Content: Use proper color, text size and fonts for your content. Never use too dark or too light colors. However you can increase the size of text to improve readability. Never underline the text to highlight it because underlined text and links look same and it is difficult for visitor to differentiate between them. Standard fonts used are “Verdana”, “Arial” and “Times New Roman”.

6. Include Navigation: Navigation links on webpage helps user to explore your site. If your webpage is too long never includes navigation links in the bottom because user have to scroll down to get to them.

7. Load Time: One important thing that you should keep in mind while designing your website is its load time. A webpage that loads quickly is always appreciated by the visitor. You can reduce load time by minimizing the use of images and animations. Also, follow HTML and CSS based coding. Avoid using too many scripts on a webpage. They slow it down. Remember – keeping website content (both text and graphics) short, crisp and simple would do wonders for your business website.

8. Browser Compatibility: Check your website performance with different web browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Opera. These are the main browsers used worldwide. Your corporate website needs to look and perform same on different browsers. If your website has JavaScript operational on it, there is a good chance that it may behave differently on different browsers. Ask your designer to test it on multiple browsers and weed out any browser compatibility issues.

9. Text link Information: Adjacent to the text link on your webpage, include a brief description about the link or about the webpage it links to. This will helpful to visitor to find what they looking for and will help them to make decision on whether to visit those sites.

e.g. – Best Design Services provides premium quality web banner ad (web banner ad samples) design services at highly affordable charges.

10. Manage Webpage Width: Maximum width of your webpage should be not more than 770 pixels. This allows visitors having 15” monitor to easily see your webpage without scrolling left to right. Manage the website content in such a way that it does not need to scroll left or right.