3
Most Important Rules Of Web Site Design
| |
| You
need to remember that website design is not only about
having an attractive site, there are a number of other
considerations. |
| Here
are the three most important Rules of Website Design. |
| Let
us look at each of these in more detail. |
| The
CONTENT of your site must be interesting and worthwhile. |
| This
is probably the most important rule of web design. If
someone has found your website, you must give them a
reason to stay on it. You must make it "sticky"
- and can use one or more of the following. |
| 1) |
Make
your site different to the thousands of other sites out
there. |
| 2) |
Include
unique content - if someone has found your site, you
have what they are looking for - so present your information
or product in a unique way which will make a visitor
choose your site over another. |
| 3) |
Include
FREE products, or free information - or a FREE newsletter
! |
| 4) |
Include
a message board or a chatroom which keeps visitors coming
back to your site. |
| 5) |
You
can even offer a free web-based email service from your
site. |
| 6) |
UPDATE
YOUR SITE frequently to keep your visitors coming back.
You could run a weekly featured article for example. |
| The
site must be easy to navigate. |
| 1) |
Make
sure that when a visitor first visits your site, they
can get what they want with one or at most 3 clicks
of a mouse. A visitor looking for information is unlikely
to follow 4 clicks to get to the information they want. |
| 2) |
Make
sure that the buttons or links to your pages are obvious.
It
is a good idea to also have text links to your web pages
as well as buttons, for example at the bottom of each
page. This is because some people disable images so
that they can browse faster, AND more importantly, some
search engines do not follow hyperlinks from images,
so when they spider your site, they will not pick up
the linked pages. |
| 3) |
If
your site is very large and you cannot make navigation
easy with one or two clicks, consider using a Pop-up
menu and you don't need to know how to write Javascript
to use it - you can "cut and paste" the script
into your HTML. |
| Use
.jpeg (.jpg) and .gif graphics for your images. These
are the two file formats universally used on the web
- basically because they take up less space without
much loss of quality. |
| 1) |
Optimization
- This is where an image is reduced to its smallest
file size while retaining its best quality.
A
basic rule of thumb is save the images in .jpeg format
for photos and use the .gif format for your logos, and
other graphics. Understanding the difference in how
these file formats compress an image is important in
designing good web pages. |
| 2) |
The
second thing to remember is that the larger an image
is the more KB it will take up, so don't fill your page
with photos that are 600 x 480 pixels that take up the
whole screen - most visitors will not wait for such
large graphics to download - anything over 30 KB takes
too long. However remember also that you can make a
large GIF take up only a few KB by using one or two
colors - useful for backgrounds. |
| 3) |
Finally
remember there is no point in including unnecessary
graphics on your page - they only take up space. Don't
waste space with Java applets or animated GIFs just
because you want to show off some cool new effect unless
the graphics will really make your site sticky.
Once
again - look at it from your visitors point of view
- Will the graphics really make your site sell?
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