You have spent a lot of time working on your website. You have planned, studied and worked hard to develop a site that would work for the site users as well as for those who have to maintain the site. But perhaps you’re not getting the results you had hoped for. Design could be the problem. If you’re looking to get better results from your website, consider the flowing web design ideas:
Simplicity is king! You remember the old saying K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid), well that saying is very true when it comes to web design. A good rule of thumb is if the visual element isn’t necessary, remove it from the site. And don’t be afraid of white space. Not every inch of your site needs to have color or an image. In essence, don’t overload the site users with images and animation, use only what you need to enhance your message.
Set Webpage titles. It is very common for web designers not to title the web pages they design. But a page title is an essential part of being found in web searches. Make sure all your pages are properly titled to reflect the page’s content.
Use the right fonts. It can be easy for a designer to fall in love with the look of a particular font, but the font choice has a huge impact on how the site user is able to extract information. You should use a font that is proven to be preferred by website users. Arial, Verdana and San-serif are perhaps the three best choices of fonts to use. Also font size is also very important. The font size should be no smaller than 10 points and no larger than 14 points.
Smaller pages load faster. It can be tempting to fill up a page with a lot of information and images, but the more images on the page the slower the page loads into the user’s browser. If the user has to wait too long, they usually exit the page and continue their research somewhere else. Use images to enhance your message but keep them to a minimum to keep load times running as efficiently as possible. Remember, the longer the user has to wait, the more likely they are to leave your site.
Good and effective web design is a science and an art, but it can be achieved by anyone. Take some time and look over your site with a critical eye, visit your site and look at it like a user looks at it. Design is just about big things, it’s also about small things, but small things add up and make the difference when it comes to good web design.
Today, internet has become a very important media in business world. According to a statistics, almost 70% of the the total business in the world is running over internet. A natural question arises that how does people running their millionaire business over internet? The answer lies with web site design and web site development, designing and search engine optimization. I’ll discuss Search engine Optimization in my next article. Lets discuss about Website Design and Development.
Web Site Development
Most of you must be familiar with web site design and web site development and must be thinking that is their any issue discussing about it. Yes. All of us who works on internet has now or later must have developed one site or at least seen one. There are many website development company who develops site for others. What do you notice when you look at a website. Its beauty, images, flashes etc. Most of us go well impressed by such sites when we look at it. But that is not enough for a site to be just marvelous. There are some thing we must keep in mind before we develop and design a web site.
Do not use too much images and flashes.
Images and Flashes are no doubt make your site more visible and attractive but those are not good for search engines. Hence avoid using images and flashes as much as you think its okay for your site unless you are going to have a strong outer promotion for your site, in absence of which your site traffic basically depends on search engines.
Good Content
Use good content in your site and relative to what you are selling. Users and spiders like those sites which provide useful contents for visitors. It will be an added advantage if you’ll keep updating your site’s content on some regular basis. But keep in mind that you don’t provide irrelevant content, i.e. something your are not dealing with. It can irritate your visitors.
Make a user friendly site
Users like a easy navigation on site. They don’t want to keep moving and moving all through the site and not getting for which they have visited your site. So, keep your site template simple and easy for novice users. Connect your pages through simple links. Don’t let user play hide and seek on your site.
Use ALT tags for images
Use alt tags for the images your are keeping on your site. It helps with the search engines. Since the spiders can’t see those image they read those ALT tags, so you may use your keywords in your ALT tags. But don’t over do it because some search engines may consider it as spam.
Title, and Meta Tags
Use descriptive titles but make it limited to 50-60 characters. Write a description of about two to three lines specifying details about the particular page. Do not stuff it with keywords. In keyword meta tag, write as much keywords as much you want. Generally most of the search engines do not read keyword meta tags including Google, but still some do go through them like Yahoo. Keep you keywords up to 250 characters. Make different title and meta tags for each page rather than copying the same for each page.
Halt then and there if you intend to do a blunder with your web design! You must be aware of the fact that a website is a mirror to your identity. It is the determining factor to the fact of your standing in the endless list of websites.
Get ready to attract more and more customers to your website by improving your web design. Don’t forget that your customer is one click away from ‘EXIT’.
Therefore, it becomes really important to keep in mind a few simple steps to make way for an improved web design, which are as follows:
1.Transparency: Provide enough transparent information so that your visitor is not confused about the purpose. It should not be obscure and difficult to understand, even if unintentionally.
2.Style: Just make sure that the typography that is, the font size, font style, spacing, and other such details match the theme of your website.
3.Subtle: Try and follow a subtle approach to your web design. If you tend to load your web design’s background with loads of colours, graphics and texture, it ultimately results in the diminished overall effect of the main purpose of the site. The visitor would loose the focus.
4.Keep it Light: Try to intact your heavy visual graphics, large images because they tend to slow down the loading tome. The more it takes to load a page, the more it increases the chances of a visitor to leave your site.
5.Graphics: You logo, which is a brand recognition; title bars, images, navigation menus are often anticipated by the visitors. They tend to enhance the value of your site. Unnecessary overuse of such graphics would tend to take away your potential customers.
6.Easy Navigation: It becomes very important in a web design to generate easy and simple navigation menus. Just keep in mind the familiarity people tend to follow.
7.Vertical is your call: Don’t think that visitors would like your so-called use of horizontal scroll bar. People just hate it and it becomes very annoying when they are not able to find the whole set of information on a single screen in front of their eyes.
Last but not the least, it is by far the most important aspect of the advice that try and think with the eyes of the visitor. Put yourself into their shoes and then, get started with your web designing. I hope, it would help a lot.