Standard Procedures to Follow Before Designing a Website

Feb 07, 2012, by admin

The aim of most web designers is to produce a beautiful, handy and efficient website that will encourage the visitor to do something. Creating such a website needs good graphic design, easy and spontaneous site navigation, logical site layout and good web copy. The pursuing proposals are common web design principles.

Website Content

You want the visitor to see you as a familiar information source and/or a upright business. deprived grammar and spelling will instantly reduce your reliability. Remember that people use the internet to find information. Whether you are selling your own product or urging someone else’s products, you must first offer valuable information to the visitor or they will click away and find a website that gives them what they what they want.

Cross Browser affinity

There are at least a hundred dissimilar browsers in use. You should design your website to work correctly in the most generally used browsers. To do that you may not be capable to use all of the really huge special outcomes that are accessible because they may not be sustained in most browsers.

Even though most web browsers are free, people do not essential bother to promote to the latest versions. The average surfer may not know how to promote their browser or have the manner, “If it works, don’t fix it.” Remember your visitor may have a PC, a MAC, a Linux box, a PDA or a cell phone and they all use dissimilar browsers.

Good web design needs your web pages to work in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera and Safari at a minimum. Validating your HTML code will help but the final test is to view your website in dissimilar browsers running on dissimilar platforms.

Visuals and Pictures

Web surfers are annoyed and studies show that most people will click away if a webpage takes longer than 10 seconds to stack. Always optimize your photos and other graphic files to have as small a size as probable without give up picture quality.

Always use the height and width elements on the picture so the rest of the page can stack while the graphic files is downloading. Use the ALT HTML tag so people with graphics turned off and those using hand held devices know what the picture is presumed to be.

Using Background Colors

If you use anything other than white behind text, be sure to identify link colors otherwise the user’s browser defaults will decide what color the links are which can make them illegible.

Multimedia

Multimedia is created of flash movies, video clips, audio clips and background music. Always use flowing media because it decreases download time. Make sure the visitor can stop and start multimedia files or in the case of flash introductions, skip them if they want. That way people with slow connections or devices that don’t sustain multimedia can disregard them.

Also, put any important information presented in multimedia in text as well so the visitor has access to that information without using multimedia. If a plug-in is needed to use the multimedia, always offer a link to it so the user can install it. Finally, always remember the 10-second rule for site loading when deciding to use multimedia.

Site Navigation

Site navigation should be simple and instinctive. Studies have shown if a visitor cannot access the information they want within three clicks, they will leave the site. This is called the 3-click rule. Every area of your website should be accessible within three clicks from anywhere else on the site. If you use anything other than simple text links, make sure to test your navigation in all the major browsers.

Links

occasionally test all site links to be certain that they are valid. Nothing chases a visitor off faster than broken links. There are numerous free online services that will occasionally check your links.

Frames

Avoid using frames, since they make it hard to bookmark entity pages on your web site and you want people to bookmark pages so they can come back.

Summary

Good Web design is a arrangement of common sense and good planning. Your site should be good-looking and easy to use and most significantly offer the user with the information or services they want.