20 Tips In Designing A Website

There are millions of websites with different designs and of course, not all of them are perfect. Even if you are a beginner, still you can make a professionally designed website by just remembering these tips:

1. Flash designs:  Flash designs are very nice when it comes to animations and layout. But most users nowadays are viewing websites from their cell phones and some of these devices are not flash compatible. Google will also find it hard to index your pages because it can’t crawl texts inside flash files.

2. Compatibility:  Only the well-known browsers today are being frequently used like IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.  Well-designed website should fit and work with those browsers since these are the most used browsers all over the world.

3. Organized pages:  Try to organize your designs to fit with the content accurately and don’t just keep filling the pages with information.  Leave spaces or use separators between each side of your page.

4. Screen resolution:  Don’t use fixed-size design but instead, always use percentage when you’re trying to fit any type of screen resolution.  You won’t know if a visitor will access your website from a handheld device or a PC.

5. Avoid hot linking:  Don’t use a picture or a multimedia file hosted on another server; you’ll be stealing their bandwidth.  If they remove that content then you’ll lose your content as well.  It is better to upload your own files on your own server.

6. HTML Frames:  Frames make it easier to have the same navigation or body rather than the rest of the page but it will be hard for visitors to link to a specific page from the address bar.

7. Grammar and spell checker:  Avoid grammar and spelling mistakes because this will reduce the quality of the content of what you wrote for your audience.

8. New ideas:  Sometimes ideas just run out, but don’t give up and push a little harder to look for new ideas.  Get inspiration from anywhere.  Don’t stop and eventually you’ll get it.

9. Branding:  It is very important to have a brand that delivers what your business or website provides.  Avoid using “over used” images, like hand shaking for establishing business.

10. Update yourself:  Always keep learning about new designs and technologies in the industry.  It’s one of the rewarding careers that require studying at least every week.

11. Page size:  A webpage that loads faster is much better than a page with great design and pictures but takes ages to load.  As a web designer, keep your images’ size small, as well as flash files.  As for developers, take note that scripts also increase the loading time of the page.

12. Reachable content:  Make your content reachable.  Don’t force or trick your audience to click through a lot of links in your website to reach a piece of information.  Chances are, they’ll get bored and go away.

13. Navigation:  Navigation sets the duration of how long your visitors will stay on your website.  Provide a good navigation with only important links so users will keep navigating through it and will increase the online duration.

14. Link as you like:  Don’t ask other websites their permission to link to their page.  It’s a waste of time and they’ll be more than happy if they found a link coming to their page.  It’s the reason why they have a website online in the first place.

15. Add description for links:  When linking to a page, make sure to add a short description about it.  People don’t like to click on unknown links – with the threat of viruses, malwares, trojans, etc. – there’s just too much risk involved.  You need to provide some information and value to that link so visitors would click on it.

16. Quality content:  It’s the most important thing on any website on the internet.  It’s well known that Quality content on a website is what makes it special.  If you provide useless information, forget about getting any visitors.

17. Avoid long content:  Don’t put huge content in just one page, make it easier for your visitors to read and digest it.  Divide content on two or three pages and even ten; just avoid adding all your content in just one place.

18. Layout:  To attract visitors to read any content, use a readable font and add pictures because pictures are worth thousand words.

19. Manage colors:  Contrasted colors are always great for reading text, for example: don’t write with gray font on a black background.  Colors should match and look nice to make the user comfortable while reading.

20. Read about all these tips:  These tips are just titles with it’s definition.  There are hundreds even thousands of articles that talks about each point.

.........................................................................................................................................................

"If you do have a tip or want to add something, please share it with us in the comments section".