Listed below are essential techniques for designing professional and good quality websites.
Useful tips for effective web design:
- Tidy and Simple Navigation - Ease of Navigation through links on your site play a big part in determining how long visitors to your site stay and explore your web content. To achieve neat navigation you should ask yourself, what do I want visitors to do when they first come to my site? You would like them to read the content of the present page, become interested in what you are promoting and then look around to find any other link to a web page that interests them. What needs to be done here is make it as easy as possible for them to access links to other pages on your site. For example, on 9 out of 10 websites, there are top navigation and left navigation menus containing the main articles of a website (Services, Portfolio, Contact Details etc..). It is also very important when designing a website to have links within the main content to be visible as a link (e.g. Here is an example of a visible link to our Small Business Web Design service).
- Clean Layout Design - A clean layout is very important for a websites look to browsers. Sports team websites are a perfect example of poor layout design. You cant choose your teams colours but you can choose your website colours. A website that uses a lot of white space enhances a site's looks. So if your club team are pink and purple, this does not necessarily mean your website background needs to be pink. Try to keep the focus on your content which not only keeps the attention of visitors but also helps with SEO. One important point to take when designing your site is the font you choose. Remember some computers have different fonts then others, meaning if you use an unusual font, it may look very well on your computer but will be messed up on visitors computers, so it may be an idea to use universal fonts (e.g. Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana etc..)
- Site Load Time - Browsers of the web do not like waiting around for web pages to load. It is important you make sure your website load time is low. Again this not only enhances the chances of visitors staying with your website, it also helps google keep persist with your site when indexing it for SEO. Your website load time can be kept low by minimizing graphics, flash and scripts, optimize your HTML & script code.
- Website for all Screen Resolutions - like the layout design above, it is important to note that your PC or laptop may be a different size to that of visitors to your site. It is therefore very important when designing your websites, to use stretch layouts that fit any screen resolutions ensuring all visitors can browse through your site easily no matter what the screen size.
- Cross Browser Compatible - Cross-browser means something works with all versions of all browsers to have existed since the web began. Make sure you check your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Opera 7.0 and Netscape Navigator 6+, Safari as they constitute 95% of the worlds browsers. It is virtually impossible to compatible with all web browsers as there a lot out there now, but if you design your sites with the browsers above in mind, your websites will generally be cross browser compatible.