Basic Design Tips
As I said in "Before You Begin", your goal as the operator of a website is to keep your visitors on your website for as long as possible and to keep them coming back. A good website is a balance of design and content. A page without images (or some design) is boring. A page that looks great, but has no content at all is pretty to look at but won't keep people's attention for very long.
Do:_______________
- Keep your site navigation near the top of that first page. The less they have to scroll down, the better.
- Try to keep your index between 1 and 1 1/2 scroll lengths long. Also try to keep the total size of your index between 30 - 40KB total. (Images included!) Check your File Manager to see how big it is.
- Provide links to every section on your site on every page of your site. The last thing you want to do is get your visitors "lost." Lost visitors generally don't come back.
- Provide a "Back" or "Home" link to get back to where they started. It's up to you as to how far you want to send them back. A study was conducted several years ago that showed that the average website visitor doesn't like using their "Back" button.
- Follow the "three-clicks"- rule. No page of the site should require the user to click more than three links.
- Saint
- Fonts should be in a resonable size, color, and face (type of font). Studies have shown that rounded, thinner fonts like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, and Helectiva are easier to read online than more classic fonts like Times New Roman, Courier, etc. Also, note that exotic fonts that you had to download off a website are not going to be on many computers.
- Try to use pleasantly contrasting colors to make your font stand out against your background. When using a light background, you should try to use dark color for your font and visa versa. Generally, if visitors have to highlight to see what you wrote, they won't come back.
- Images, when used in moderation, can really make a page shine. Try to find the nicest looking version of the picture - one that isn't grainy, blurry, or otherwise crappy looking but isn't too large in terms of file size.
- As a rule, the longer your page takes to load, the higher the chances the people visiting your page will become bored. If they become bored, they'll leave. Pure and simple. Prevent this by keeping a close eye on the file size of everything you have on your website.
Don't:_______________
- Changing your Cursor
by any means generally annoys most people. Additionally, companies that offer to change your Cursor like
Comet Cursor will download Spyware / Adware onto your's and your visitors' computers! (See
Stealth Moose's Guide to Spyware)
- Don't use regular pictures or desktop wallpaper for your background. Generally, pictures make poor backgrounds. Most contain far too many colors and your text will "vanish" into them. Instead, try to use images
meant to be used as webpage backgrounds.
(
Example 1)
- Avoid annoying Javascript effects like Confirmation Boxes, Pop-Ups, or anything that causes your Visitor's browser or computer to behave in ways it wouldn't normally.
- Don't use background music. Ever. Most people listen to their own music when surfing, if not, they want it to be quiet.
- Saint
- Don't disable right-clicking. You can't protect anything, right-clicking just makes it take more time to do things. The only thing you'll do is annoy people who use the right-click menu frequently.
- Saint
- Avoid colors that are hard on the eyes. For more information continue to the
Choosing Colors Section.
- Don't overuse animated *.GIF images. Not only can they make your page take longer to load, too many of them can lag or completely crash some computers.
- Don't print "Under Construction". The web is constantly changing, any good webpage is, too.
- Saint
- Don't use "Cool Javascripts", "Cool separators", "Cool bullets" or whatever freeware stuff you find online. These things aren't meant to be seen as entities, but contribute to the page as a whole, if they don't conform well to the general style of the page, it just looks tacky. And seing as they're not tailored for your page, they never will conform. Some kind of uniformity is the key here, and we all know you achieve that by starting out simple. The same applies to counter, guestbooks, shoutboxes... Use only when needed.
- Saint
- For the love of god, don't have animated backgrounds (unless it's REALLY REALLY subtle)
- Nehle
Help on Choosing Colors_______________
Please see
NinaV's Post on Color Schemes.
ColorMatch (
http://www.colormatch.dk/ ) - IE Only! A hang little utility that allows you to find coordinating colors for your website.
More to Come...
