Web Design Guide

· Web design is the process of designing an effective and appealing website. There are many aspects involved with web design.

· Web design is extremely important, as if affects how users interact with your website and whether or not users stay on the site.

· Web design can be split into several main categories: Page Navigation, Appearance and Design, Linking and Website Readability.

· Page Navigation is basically how users move around your website, including search options and side bars. A few main things to keep in mind when developing navigation for your page:

· Use a sidebar on your website so users can navigate throughout your website easily. When naming subsections, use common terms such as Home, About Us, Products etc. Avoid using trendy names.

· Always have a link back to the homepage. Many websites link their homepage through their logo, but it is possible to place it on the menus on the top or the side. As a general rule, when users get lost, they are likely to start from the homepage again.

· When possible, minimize clicking. The more effort it takes to get to a particular page, the less chance there is of users getting there.

· If your website is more than 15 pages long, include a search function. A good search option for your page is Google Custom Search.

· Moving on to Appearance and Design now. My main tips for this are:

· Keep your website simple when designing it. Never include pop ups or animated pictures, nor auto loading sounds. All of these features simply annoy users and when a user is annoyed, they’ll leave your page. Animations and sounds are distracting, and keep users from reading what they want. Keeping with this point, all ways keep your visitor’s interest in mind. When designing a website, you want to please the people visiting your website, not yourself.

· When designing the background for your website, don’t place use an image for the entire background, and then have the text typed over it. If you must include images for your background, put your text on a white background, and then have the images lining the sidebars.

· Furthermore, an image background, takes a long time to load. As a general rule, keep your websites to a maximum of 10 second loading time, any longer and you’ve lost potential visitors.

· Limit your pages to a maximum of 2 pages long, unless you are doing an article, where the limit can go up to around 10 pages.

· Ensure your page resolution is 800x600. Any bigger and people may be forced to scroll sidewards, which is never good.

· Leave out features such as numeric page counters.

· Next section, linking. Linking is an extremely important part of any webpage, as it directs users to other useful sites that may be related to your own webpage.

· When linking things, ensure they are either underlined or are in blue. Even better, do both. 99% of users will expect links to be blue and underlined. Why? Because the majority of other websites are like that too. However, the worst thing that anyone can do when linking is to have neither. How is a user supposed to know that the word is linked to something else. When linking to an internal page, do not open the page in a new window. Provided that your website is easy to navigate, there is no need to open a separate browser. However, when linking to external pages, it is a good idea to open the page in a new tab, as it encourages users to stay on your website while they read another one.

<p style="text-indent: -18pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1">· Incorporate your links into your text, and explain what you are linking to. The worst thing you could do is just place a pile of links at the bottom, and the chances that someone will go click them is low.

<p style="text-indent: -18pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1">· Use descriptive link text. Instead of saying, for more information on html, click here, For more information of flash click here. Instead, say, check out these pages on html and flash.

<p style="text-indent: -18pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1">· Finally make sure your links work. There are many factors that could cause dead links, so make sure you check your links.

<p style="text-indent: -18pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1">· Last section, website readability. Website readability is extremely important. If users struggle to read it, they won’t read it.

<p style="text-indent: -18pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1">· Make sure your text is easy to read over the background. The best way to do it is to keep it simple, black text over a white background. However, if you must use colours, use contrasting colours to make the text easy to read. Furthermore, some colour combinations are just hard to read, such as orange and purple, or red and blue. Keep with simple colour schemes. Text that is done otherwise is annoying and hard to read.

<p style="text-indent: -18pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1">· Make your text large enough to read. Might sound simple, but go for at least 12 point Arial or 11 point Veranda.

<p style="text-indent: -18pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1">· Increase the line spacing to make it easier to read. The default setting is 100%, but it is a good idea to increase it up to 160%. Cramped lines make it a lot harder to read and a lot less attractive.

<p style="text-indent: -18pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1">· Finally, use a spell checker.