No matter if your website is a personal site with a few pages or a huge corporation website, having a good design is one of the most important things. It matters a lot to visitors and can make the difference between leaving a site or bookmarking it. Here are a few tips to help improve your design:
Tip #1 — Fast Loading Pages
Pages should load fast. Most people will leave your site if it’s not done loading in ten or 15 seconds. And even if you have a fast internet connection, not everyone does and 56k modems still exist.
Tip #2 — Easy to Read Text
Text should be easy to read. The text size should be big enough, and the background should not obscure your text. If you want to be safe, use black text on a white background. If you want more color, choose very carefully to make sure it’s still easy to read.
Tip #3 — Intuitive and Easy to Navigate
Your website should be easy to navigate. Each link should be clearly identified as such and graphic navigation elements like buttons and tabs should be easy to read and use. You do not want people leaving because they could not figure out how your Flash menu works.
Tip #4 — Consistent Layout
Your layout and design should be consistent. If you switch between styles too much, you will confuse your visitors. If the design is too different, people will believe that they are now on a different website since the layout changed.
Tip #5 — Less is More - Sometimes…
Avoid music and sounds. Very few people like to have music forced on them while they navigate, especially if they are already listening to music or surfing at their job! If you really cannot do without music, turn it off by default and ask visitors to start it themselves.
Tip #6 — Pay Attention to Browser Compatability
Design for browser compatibility. Many people do not use Internet Explorer on Windows. Make sure your site is at least viewable in Mozilla Firefox and Opera (if possible, you could even try testing on a Mac). Sites that target markets like technology should be more careful, since readers are more likely to use the newest browsers and gadgets like PDAs.
Tip #7 — Screen Resolution - Still Matters
Design for all screen resolutions. You may like to surf in 1240×1080 with your new screen, but some people still use 800×600, or even 640×768! A site that looks perfect in high resolution may turn out to be impossible to view correctly in 800×600.
This is just a begining to what I hope will be a growing list of web design tips (please submit tips through comments) and one that evolves into more advanced design tips. Please provide some feedback and tips of your own so I can get a better sense of the level of our readership.
PS - I am toying with the idea of adding Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced Categories to Designers Mind. Let me know what you think…
October 17th, 2007 at 12:17 am
Bill Turner left the following comment to “7 Tips to Improve Your Website Design” which I mistakenly deleted - he had an awesome point…
“These are some handy tips, but you might want to follow Rule #1 yourself. A 2.4Meg photo/graphic certainly won’t help the load time. :)”
First off - thanks Bill for keeping us in check - I forgot to compress the image at the top of the post and uploaded it as a 2.4 Meg file. What I typically do is use a cool little piece of software called “Advanced JPEG Compressor” which will take a JPEG image and automatically convert the file sze and other attributes to fit your needs.
If you want to check out their website it is at: http://www.winsoftmagic.com/
Here is a special “shout out” to one of Bill’s websites for submitting a comment and keeping me on my toes… http://brilliantcorners.org/
October 17th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Or you could simply set them when you “Save for Web” in Photoshop. =D
October 29th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
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October 30th, 2007 at 10:15 am
My initial thought about Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced category is that type of information is of secondary importance compared to the topic of the content itself. A quick glance at your archives I’d suggest something akin to:
-The Code Stuff (Usability, design concepts)
-The Business (Freelance, Promoting, etc)
-The Resources (Link lists, reviews, etc)
If the level were a custom tag then people could cross-search category / skill if you open up that field as a search criteria.