Website Design

There are many things to consider in your website design. Unfortunately every year hundreds of sites receive awards to being absolutely awful and having terrible design. Perhaps it is because creating a website is not that difficult or maybe it's because we have a tendency to play with color or layout, and to add every bell and whistle to our websites just because we can. You can avoid this, however.

Website Design Principles

Below are some time-honored tips to website design that if followed will result in a website that is attractive, simple, and most importantly usable. These are a few general principles to follow so you're sure never to be honored with a "worst-of-the-web" listing.

Meet Your Goals and Objectives - How Will You Measure Success?

After you've identified what you want to achieve on your website and have outlined your website objectives, you should design your site to that it meets them. Create a list of the content that will achieve your goals and objectives and will also be of interest to your audience. Then separate the list of content and create separate web pages for each. Create compelling content that your visitors will want to keep coming back to.

Know how you measure success. If you're trying to make money with your web site, then a successful site must receive lots of traffic from search engines. If that's what you're trying to do than your website much provide valuable information to its visitors and motivate them to link to it and share the website with their friends.

Keep it Simple

You can put a lot of bells and whistles into a website design, but unless they serve a meaningful purpose, just don't do it. Don't let the glitz of the latest trick or gimmick overshadow and distract from the your site's content. Your visitors came to your site because they wanted good content that you're offering. Don't annoy them and drive them away with frills.

Usability and White Space - not Clutter

In addition to keeping it simple, make it usable. Make your visitor's experience a good one on your site. You text should be easy to read, content should be easy to access and easy to understand. They should know exactly what your site is about in the first few seconds. Avoid cluttering your Web pages. Use spacing and content to display your content in clean and simple layout. It's not about having too much content, it's how you choose to display your content.

Be Consistent

No matter how organized and logical you think your website design is, your visitors probably won't think the same way you do. To cut down on the confusion from one page to another, try to be as consistent as you can. Align elements on the page. Use similar page organization, headings, similar graphics and links or a single navigation bar. Keep things in the same location from page to page. Use consistent colors. These practices will help make your visitors comfortable with your site.

Understand Your Audience

Know who your website visitors are. Knowing and understanding who your audience is is important to making your website effective. In addition to knowing your audience, you need to know something about their computer and their Internet connection.

Good website designers are careful not to include things on their website that their audience doesn't have the ability to view. For example, if your audience is mostly on a slower Internet connection, using video on your website is probably not a very good idea. Now granted, most Web surfers nowadays have a broad band connection, but not all. Many of the website that I've created are for K-12 education. I know that most school districts block sites like YouTube so using embedded YouTube video on those pages is out of the question because most would not be able to view it from school.

Other concerns for Web developers are what kind of monitor is my audience using? Can it view millions of colors or just a few thousand? How big is the monitor? What is the resolution? One of the worst things you can do is to make your website so wide, that your user will have to scroll horizontally to view it.

Fonts and Text

Use fonts that are large enough to be easily read. It's hard enough to read text on a monitor. Don't make your text so small that your visitor needs a magnifying glass to read it. Use at least 12 or 14 pixel font size. This is 14 pixels. As screen resolutions continue to increase it will get smaller and smaller. Never use less than 11 pixels for your font size.

Use a sans-serif font such as Arial or Verdana for the body text of your web page. If you want to add a second font use different one for headings and titles, but never use more than two different fonts on your Website.

Make it Easy to Navigate

Have you ever been to site where you just couldn't find your way around? Was it frustrating? Your website should be easy to navigate. Your visitors, especially those who find your site in a search engine, may not enter it through your home page, so every page on your site should have a consistent and easily identifiable navigation system that includes easy to understand links back to other pages. Make it intuitive. Don't force the user to have to figure out how to get around. Make it easy and simple to undertand.

Use of Color

Use contrasting color and text weight effectively. Make your website easy to read. There is a reason school buses use black text on a yellow background. It's easy to see and read. That doesn't mean that your web page has to be yellow, but the contrast between a light background and dark text makes the text easy to read. It's easy on the eye. Use black on white or black on yellow. Be cautious about using dark text on a dark or loud background. Use color or organize and group elements on your website.

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