Undertaking Web Design Practices
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Here are a few tips for creating a user friendly website. Remember that your website is where your business resides, therefore it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible. Read on the articles below about website design practices.Web Standards
Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
Paragraph Size
Keep your paragraphs a reasonable size. If they are too long, split them into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
Use of Images
Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are unnecessary. If you think images are essential, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size. If it takes too long to load your site, or move from page to page, visitors will become impatient and leave for a more user-friendly website.
Simple & Clear Navigation
If your visitors don't know how to navigate through your site, they won't stay there very long so it is vital that you have clear navigation directions. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so visitors can navigate around without confusion. If someone is deeply engrossed in browsing your website, you want to make sure that person knows which part of the site he or she is in at that moment, and you want your visitor to be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily.
Don't confuse your visitors, because confusion means "abandon ship"! Navigation should be so simple and easy to follow that a young child will know how to use it.
Do not use scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.
source:goarticles.com
0 comments:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)