Website Design Tips

Website Design Tips

1. Avoid Complications: Animations and sounds on your webpage can divert attention of the visitor. Users who have slow dial up connection seldom like websites with these features, because animations and sound increase the loading time of webpage.

2. Use Small Size Pictures: Webpage with pictures is a good idea. But large size pictures increases the load time of webpage. There are numerous graphic software applications available in market which can compress graphics files so that webpage take less time to load on your visitor’s web browser. This will ensure that the visitor gets a fast website to look at and navigate through.


3. Contact information of your website: Your website visitors may want to ask some questions related to your website or goods/services offered on it. So don’t forget to include your contact information or link to it on each page of your website. Make yourself available to the visitors.

4. Check Website Links: Check your website periodically to ensure that it works correctly. If your website contains links to other websites, check it periodically because the target webpage may have been removed or some problem might have cropped up with the web link itself. Also, ensure all links to other web pages of your website are operational at all times.

5. Website Content: Use proper color, text size and fonts for your content. Never use too dark or too light colors. However you can increase the size of text to improve readability. Never underline the text to highlight it because underlined text and links look same and it is difficult for visitor to differentiate between them. Standard fonts used are “Verdana”, “Arial” and “Times New Roman”.

6. Include Navigation: Navigation links on webpage helps user to explore your site. If your webpage is too long never includes navigation links in the bottom because user have to scroll down to get to them.

7. Load Time: One important thing that you should keep in mind while designing your website is its load time. A webpage that loads quickly is always appreciated by the visitor. You can reduce load time by minimizing the use of images and animations. Also, follow HTML and CSS based coding. Avoid using too many scripts on a webpage. They slow it down. Remember – keeping website content (both text and graphics) short, crisp and simple would do wonders for your business website.

8. Browser Compatibility: Check your website performance with different web browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Opera. These are the main browsers used worldwide. Your corporate website needs to look and perform same on different browsers. If your website has JavaScript operational on it, there is a good chance that it may behave differently on different browsers. Ask your designer to test it on multiple browsers and weed out any browser compatibility issues.

9. Text link Information: Adjacent to the text link on your webpage, include a brief description about the link or about the webpage it links to. This will helpful to visitor to find what they looking for and will help them to make decision on whether to visit those sites.

e.g. – Best Design Services provides premium quality web banner ad (web banner ad samples) design services at highly affordable charges.

10. Manage Webpage Width: Maximum width of your webpage should be not more than 770 pixels. This allows visitors having 15” monitor to easily see your webpage without scrolling left to right. Manage the website content in such a way that it does not need to scroll left or right.

CSS Website Design

Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) have slowly but surely become a website design standard over the past few years. It was not that many years ago that people used Frames to position their content across their web pages and Tables gradually replaced this. Many low-end website developers are still very comfortable with Tables, as it ‘does what it says on the tin’. However, more and more people are now moving over to CSS, as virtually all the layout options can be achieved using the code.

One major problem with CSS is that not all Web browsers produce the same results and it has not been helped in the past by the various browsers employing their own way of interpreting certain CSS conventions. You can think your CSS design looks OK in the current version of your preferred browser and can then be crestfallen when you view your Web pages in another version that has destroyed the formatting. Therefore, when moving over to CSS, it is important that you use the capabilities that are consistently supported across the entire range of popular browsers. It is interesting that the new version 7 of Microsoft's Internet Explorer has fixed a number of earlier anomalies, but many people are now waking up to the reality that IE7 has in fact caused problems arising from their earlier workarounds!

So why not bother with CSS, if Tables work for you? The principal advantages are as follows:

1. Web page code is generally much easier to follow;

2. The amount of code used to achieve the same result is much less. The general view is that by switching to a CSS layout, the typical page size reduction is between 50 - 60 per cent;

3. Download speeds for CSS pages are generally faster than their Table-driven counterparts. This is because browsers have to read through the table code twice before they are able to display the contents. They do this firstly to figure out the structure and then again to understand the content. It should also be recognised that a Table's contents can only be presented to the screen in one go, whereas CSS content will drop in separately, thereby giving a better user experience. It is also possible to govern the order in which specific screen elements appear, so the user is not distracted by the more bulky and slower to load image files. Furthermore, because all the code involved with CSS page layout is held in one external CSS document and is cached, it is faster than Table layouts that need to be interpreted every time a new page is displayed;

4. It is much easier to edit existing pages and to add new pages, particularly in the area of subtle formatting amendments. For example, you can change the font or colour scheme across an entire website in literally minutes;

5. CSS delivers enhanced accessibility. In recent years the number of people using web browsers on hand-held devices has risen significantly and CSS plays an important function in delivering content to PDA's etc through additional CSS documents. This just isn't possible with Table-driven layouts;

6. CSS is considered to be more Search Engine friendly because they can spider CSS pages quicker. However, it remains to be seen if this has any tangible benefits such as an improvement on the your page ranking.

On the flipside, there are a few disadvantages to CSS web page design you should consider:

1. As compared with Tables, CSS involves a much bigger learning curve;

2. Because of cross browser support issues, the time spent implementing workarounds should not be underestimated;

3. New browser versions can catch website developers napping if you are not careful. You can find that earlier workarounds have been overcome and the look of your website has changed overnight.

Ultimately, your decision on whether or not to move over to see CSS will probably depend on your level of technical capability and the time you're able to devote to understanding CSS layout alternative