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No amount of good content can make up for bad design. In this article we will be discussing a couple of dos and don’ts for your website. Remember sometimes “less is more” for visitors who are looking for quality content instead of wanting to being subjected to all kinds of fancy elements that do little information-wise and only serve to harass users utilizing a dial-up connection.
- A picture can speak a thousand words. How true is this old adage in web design? Having a few, content-supportive images that are tasteful are necessary to make a good webpage but going overboard with tons and tons of images that are huge will only make loading the page slower and be very inconsiderate to users using a slower internet connection. A good practice is to keep your pages up to 30k and to use alternative text (alt text) with all your images. Also use lesser number of images and use the “height” and “width” attributes as they will help the browser to understand how much space to leave when loading a page. Using thumbnails will help your user to choose if they really want to see a certain image.
- Your page should be readable in all possible resolutions. Making a page for a 1024x768 resolution would not only be inconsiderate but deter your users who would rather prefer going to another site instead of having to scroll to the extreme ends of the page –for every page.
- A dark background with flashing lights and light colored text “that looks good in the dark” is just painful to see in the daytime and a bigger pain to print. Leave animations and moving elements like scrolling bars to a minimum or better still don’t have them at all and have a light colored background with bold text that’s at least in web-safe colors (just use black if you are uncreative) and your visitors will thank you for it.
- Nothing and I mean nothing can make up for bad content. Always use a word processor to check spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Make sure that your offered content is relevant and up to date.
- Test your pages in all possible browsers before publishing - IE 5.5, Netscape 7, AOL 8, Opera 7 to see if they are suited to all possible browsers.
- An important part of your site is Navigation. Don’t have as site map for a small site but make sure you have a place navigation either along the left side of your pages or along the top and then again in text along the bottom of the page, on every page. A good way of letting your user know where they are at a particular time is very helpful. Try something like this to display on the top part of your screen.
Home> PageA> PageA1>PageA2
Your user won’t be lost and making these links clickable would ensure that they can easily jump between pages at any point.
- Broken links are a complete no-no. Also “Page under construction” makes the user feel they have been waiting for incomplete pages all along so don’t publish pages that aren’t complete.
- Make sure you use fonts that are standardized. A font that you may have downloaded and looks amazing to you will appear as the default font to someone who doesn’t have your fancy font loaded on their machine. Use Times New Roman instead because everyone is sure to have it. Avoid too many different fonts, colors and styles. All your webpages should be uniform to look like they are bound to the same site.
- And while all this is for site in general, avoid splash pages at the beginning of your site unless needed – what purpose do they serve except an extra click? And having those pompous flash intros for dial-up connections? Don’t even think about it.
These are a few tips that will make your pages simple and sensible. When in doubt, keep it simple.
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