A good website is always simple, intuitive to use with easy navigation and one that attracts users to visit it again and again. It is a designer’s job to make a website look visually appealing along with simple navigation and easy to use functionality.
Whether you’re working for a design firm or as a freelance designer, here are some useful designing tips to help you build a professional website, friendly to human and search engines.
1. Clean Layout
Layout of a website includes right usage of images, colors and fonts, and effective use of white space as this makes the site look more appealing. “Keep It Simple”. White space gives an overall neatness to the website. It is important to use standard & readable fonts that do not require text size to be enlarged or reduced by the user. Try not to overstuff your page with too many images, backgrounds and colorful fonts.
2. Easy Navigation
Navigation links on the website are one of the key factors for increasing page views or stickiness of the site. All important links on a website should be placed appropriately that enable visitors to quickly find what they are looking for. Organize them according to their importance under varied categories. Important links usually come on the top of the page and other usage links on the right side of the page which are consistent and similar throughout the website.
To organize a large number of links you can use navigation menus. You can easily get copy & paste code for drop-down menu scripts available on the Internet as they are easy to install and use. You can also use drop-down menus or fly-outs to arrange too many links.
Keeping these basic principles in mind you can design an effective layout and navigation system for your site.
3. Quick download and response time
It has been noticed generally that the average time which a user spends on a website is very less. Hence, it is important for a web designer to make a website which has low loading time and get the user instantly to the page he is looking for. Each page must be optimized for the web to make sure that your website has an optimum loading time. To ensure your website loads faster, you must:
Optimize HTML tags Make sure that the website you are designing must not have any unwanted tags or broken links.
More text Area then Images – More content means more readability and less loading ti
me.
Optimize images – Take the images you need and optimize them for the web. They must be in the png, gif or jpeg format. Decrease file size so images load faster.
Use Text links- Try to make use of text links as much as possible as they are easier to maintain. Using CSS Styles you can make text links attractive.
Use Div tags – Using Div tags for your design means faster loading time and complete control over the layout. It also ensures scalability and helps you make changes in the future.
Less use of graphics, Flash and scripts- As they make your web page heavier, try to minimize them if possible, if required you can replace them with background colors and fills.
Keep it simple- Use simple and small icons that add a little color and are visually enticing. Also avoid using animated gifs as they take long time to load.
Use SSI files-When extracted from the web server, each Server Side Include gets lodged into its own cache, which on subsequent request enables faster loading of web pages.
Track W3C standard validity and Load time- Check your Load time and W3C code and CSS validity regularly. Maintain an error-free website!
4. All Resolution and browser compatible website
It is important to make a websit
e which is compatible to all screen sizes. There are more than 40 different screen resolutions used until now. 1024×768 is the most popular resolution used .Take a quick glance on some important considerations:
Select a screen resolution first- Before designing a website select a normal resolution size. Your pages must work at any resolution, from 800×600 to 1280×1024 and beyond.
Measure Tables in Percentages- While converting the design to HTML, measure it in terms of percentages rather than on pixels.
Measure cells in Pixels- Within the table, it is always better to measure cells in pixels. Provide a fixed measurement to all the cells, except the content cell.
Final check of Website in All the Resolutions- At the final stage of web designing, test your designed site in all the resolutions which are compatible to all the computers.
Make sure the website you are designing must be compatible to Internet Explorer 8+, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Opera 9.64 and Netscape Navigator 9.0.0.06 as they are widely accepted browsers.
5. SEO friendly design
Here are some SEO guidelines you all must abide to while designing a website.
SEO Friendly Code-Writing SEO friendly code can help search engine to index faster. Ensure your coding is error free. Always Check for W3C compliance.
Meta Tags & URL-Make sure to include Title, Meta tags on your web pages. Each page must have unique Title & Description. Your URL should be simple, easy to remember and contextual.
Alt Tags- Use alt tags for images as it helps search engines get information about them.
Internal linking -Internal linking must be done properly to ensure that your website gets properly crawled by the search engines, to establish relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase and to increase the PageRank of an internal page.
Sitemap is Must- Sitemap helps search engines to understand your website structure and increases indexing.
Hope these designing tips would help you design a professional and high-quality website. Please provide us with your feedback and suggestions on the same.
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The first 2 are definitely the most important. The rest are nice touches to a great web site.
Nice list.
Thanks for your input. Keep checking our blog section for more of such posts in the coming future.
these are good tips. these are good for search engine as well as end user.
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