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First the basics:
Web Design Tips - Tips for Effective professional
web site design
Listed below are some rather important tips for designing
a professional and high quality web site that everyone can
view.
Easy to use Navigation: Navigation of links on your
site plays a big role in determining the stickiness of your
site (how long your visitor stays and explores your site).
Ask yourself this, What do visitors do as soon as they open
your site? They would probably read the content of the present
page and then look around to find any other page that interests
them. Read our article on Web site Navigation Tips.
Simple, Clean Layout Design: A key to professional
web site design is a clean layout that uses a lot of white
space enhances a site's looks. Try to keep the focus on your
content, use a template for this. Use fonts that will be available
on all computers to prevent your site looking messed up.
Optimum Load Time: Make sure your load time is low.
For this you must:
Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They hugely increase
your file size.
Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your
site doesn't have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
Use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever possible. SSI
files once called from the web server reside in its cache
so on subsequent requests they load faster.
Design for all Screen Resolutions: A site that is
easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay and read your
content. For site with long pages of content this is very
crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. Suppose
your site doesn't look good for a particular resolution it
is very probable that the visitor will close the browser window
feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. Designing
stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that
you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and professional
site.
Read our article Designing for all Screen Resolutions for
more.
Ensure Web site scalability: Make sure your code and
design is scalable. As technology advances and configuration
of computers & their monitors keep increasing and varying
it is impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and
platforms.
Cross Browser Compatible: Make sure you check your
site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Opera
7.0 and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the
worlds browsers.
Design for the visitor, not the search engines, and
not the clients ego. What? Well, these days the search engines
are getting VERY smart about completeing their mission to
provide the sites with the most, and most relevant information
to people doing a search. If you want good placement give
that. Lots of content that is actually about the subject at
hand. 16 pages with at least 500 words per page is a good
place to start, but if your site is about "Web Design
Tips", you can't get by putting up information about
squirt guns and radiators. It needs to be useful information
about designing a website. You owe it to yourself and your
client to do everything you can to support them is understanding
this.
Image formats: You can only display .jpeg, .gif, and
.png files in a web browser. Here is the simple way to know
which one to use when saving an image.
1. Fewer colors with large areas of one color, save as a
.GIF file for best quality and file size.
2. Lots of colors, and tons of details, like a photograph,
save as a .jpg with the compression level above 80% quality.
3. A file like the .GIF above, but you want letters under
text to have a shadow, use a .png in true color mode.
POP up Windows: Pop up windows have always been handy
in website design, but think about it. How many attempts have
been made lately to sell you pop up blockers? It is definately
possible that if you are not careful, parts of your site will
no longer display if you over use popups. The content in them
is not read by the search engines either. And, last but not
least, lots of javascript in the HEAD area of your page can
bog the search engine robots down or even stop them. The simple
"open window" code should not do that, but in general,
use as little javascript in your page as you can manage. Good
web site design will include calling all CSS and Java from
another page. Pop up windows should be used sparingly in Professional
Web site design.
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