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Web Design Tips
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Fast Loading pages:
The most important factor to remember when designing your website is to be sure that the
pages load quickly. A beautiful website that loads slowly will have few repeat visitors.
The goal for any web designer should be to have the page you are working on load in 15
seconds. Remember, you might have a great design but very few people are going to see it
if it takes a long time to load.
Easy to Navigate:
Once a visitor has come to your site, you need to help them to easily navigate the pages.
Make sure all your important links are at places that are easy to find, preferably right
on top. This is where most visitors will look.
Design your website for all Resolutions:
There are computers with all kinds of resolution available and there is not one-type of
monitor resolution that your visitors will use. Resolutions range from 640 x 480 to 1024 x
768 and higher. The recommendation is to design your site for all these resolutions. The
easiest way to accommodate every resolution is to design your site in terms of percentage
and not pixels.
Browser Compatibility:
Make sure your site is browser compatible. Your web site should look good in Netscape as
well as in Internet Explorer. Don't stop designing your site as soon as you find that it
looks great on Internet Explorer. Usually Netscape will display your site differently than
in Internet Explorer, especially when you are using complicating tables.
Examine your site's source code
and ensure that your primary keywords or phrases will be spidered first. When search
engine spiders read your pages, they read the source code from left to right - top to
bottom. Search engines place higher relevancy on keywords and phrases which appear closer
to the top of a page. You may be able to achieve higher rankings by adjusting your layout
and placing a well written search engine optimized paragraph at the top of your page.
Readable and professional looking fonts:
Don't use all CAPS, bright colors such as bright pink or green, or unusual fonts.
Remember, sometimes "less is more". When visiting a site you can tell if it is a
professional website just by looking at the fonts that are used. Don't use Comic Sans and
other unusual fonts that may not be available on most computers (which will cause the
computer to load a default font - not attractive). Try to stay with common and
professional web fonts. The fonts that are most commonly recommended are Arial and
Verdana.
Use of white space:
Keep your website design simple. Try not to clutter the pages with too many flashing
graphics and colorful fonts. It is tiresome on the eye to try and read a page that has too
much going on. Use white space to convey a "clean" sense on your pages.
Check for broken links:
A dead giveaway for a non-professional website is broken links. Always check for broken
links anytime you make changes to your site. Clicking every link on your site and
navigating the structure just as your visitors would is recommended. If you have a large
site and the manual method would be too time-consuming, then some helpful tools for
checking broken are Net Mechanic or Dreamweaver.
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