8 Tips for Effective Web Design

Here are some essential tips for designing a professional and high quality web site.

Navigation
Your site navigation is the biggest factor in getting your visitors to stay and explore your site. You navigation, or menu, should be in a prominent position on your pages, preferably at the top as that is where visitor will look first. You can also have your navigation on the right or the left of your content and you should try to link to as many pages of your site as possible. This is probably not always possible, but the idea is to make your information accessible from all parts of the site with just one click. Another option is to use the footer area to add more links to important pages.

Reduce Page Load Time
This is equally important and you should optimize your designs to not take longer than 15 seconds to load. What is the use of having a fantastic looking site but few people see it because it takes too long to load. You should:

Minimize the use of graphics, Flash and scripts.
When using CSS or JavaScript, do not place the code directly in the code of the page. Call your code and scripts from separate files (style.css or mycode.js)
Optimize your HTML, CSS & script code: Clean-up unwanted tags or unused scripts.
Server Side Include (SSI) files loads faster as they are called from the web server and resides in its cache for future requests.

Cross Browser Compatibility
Make sure your site is compatible with all browsers. 95% of all Internet users use Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Netscape’s Navigator. Do not think that when your site looks good in Internet Explorer, it is well designed; you need to be sure that it is compatible on all browsers. If it is not, then you need to fix your site so that users who browse sites via other browsers can also enjoy your site.

Scalability
These days’ people buy all kinds of monitors with various kinds of resolutions. They start from 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768 while some even go higher to 1280 x 1024 and up. As technology improves, so will the resolutions thus we have to keep on designing our sites for these higher resolutions. A Basic principle is to design your site by using fluid designs, in other words to use percentages and not pixels when setting widths in tables or you CSS styling. If you would rather like to stay with fixed widths, then at least design your site for a minimum resolution of 1024 x 768.

Readability
Make your content stand out by using basic font types, sizes and colors. Make it easy for users to read your site content and don’t use fonts like Comic Sans or other fancy fonts as they may not be available on most computers. If you use a font that is not available on your site visitor’s computer, then the browser will display the default fonts installed on the computer. The best is to keep to common fonts like Arial and Verdana.

Clean Page Design
The use of white space is handy to make certain elements of a page stand out. To keep the focus on your content, it is better to not use too many images, backgrounds and colorful fonts. White space does give a sense of space (you can breathe) and neatness to a site.

Check for Broken Links
Always check for broken links before uploading it to your web server. There is nothing worse when a click takes you to a nonexistent page. Check your spelling and test the site offline before you make it live.

Minimize Image Use
Simple designs are probably the most effective as it reduces clutter, makes pages load faster and makes it easy to read. Use images creatively to draw attention but do not overdo it.

Popularity: 26% [?]