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Web Design Tips - Basic Web Design
Principles
Basic Web Design Principles
by: Zoran Makrevski
Home Page
Home page should clearly indicate what the site is about. Provide
top level navigation on the first page, your logo, and tell
to the visitor what he can found on your web site. Your home
page should be informative, and should call your visitor on
action. Home page is the place where the visitor decides what
he will do, click on some of your links, or leave the site.
If you have a discount, or if you offer some free service in
attempt to make a contact with potential customers, make sure
to provide link to that service on your home page.
If you decide to implement flash intro on your first page, make
sure to give the user possibility to skip the flash intro. The
link “skip intro” should be outside of the flash,
because you will force the visitor to wait until the Flash movie
is loaded.
Navigation structure
Place the navigation on the place where the people are used
too look for it. Don’t experiment with the navigation!
I can’t stress enough this. Keep the navigation system
same on ALL pages. Visitors are not ready to learn your site
navigation system. Consistency is the most important thing here.
You should focus your effort on building consistent rhythm across
all pages of your site.
Font size
Your font size should be enough big so your text can be read
without effort. There are many people who will not bother to
read very small letters. Don’t loose your visitors because
of font size. Optimal size seems to be 12-13 points. Visitors
should be able to read your text easy, without any effort. Broke
big chunks of texts in paragraphs and make them easy to follow.
Line Length
The length of a line of type should be comfortable to read.
The optimal line length for printed materials seems to be about
10 to 12 words, or 60 to 70 characters. Somewhat shorter lines
of about 40 to 50 characters may be more appropriate for larger
displays. If the line is too long the reader must search for
the beginning of it; if it is too short it will break up words
or phrases awkwardly.
Creating emphasis
Creating emphasis is an important and integral part of designing
and typesetting. Handled with taste and good judgment it can
help direct and inform the reader. When these qualities are
lacking, or someone feels that every word is important and must
be emphasized in some way then your web page starts to look
like a battlefield and becomes difficult to read!
Graphics
It’s well known that one picture worth more than million
words. This rule applies on Internet too. Do your best to show
clear, attractive photo of your product. If you offer a service,
find a photo which will best describe him. However, be careful
about file size. Don’t compress your photo to that level
to not be clear, but also don’t leave the photo on full
quality. That will make file size too big, and will increase
download time.
Gif vs. JPEG
Less experienced web designers many times use wrong format to
store their picture. Here are few guidelines which will help
mistakes to be avoided. If your photo has small number of colors
(less then 64) GIF will be better choice. Make sure however
to reduce the palette size too. That is, if your image have10-15
colors only, reduce your palette on 16 or 32 colors.
Also, if your image contains text, GIF format should be your
choice. JPEG use loosy compression method and will cause text
and edges to become blurry.
If you are saving a photograph – save it as JPEG
JPEG images can contain over 32 million different colours. That
is much more than the human eye can see.
If you want to incorporate large text into a photographic image,
JPEG may be a good format to use. While the edges may still
get blurred, danger of it becoming unreadable is slim. If you
think your image is more important than the text, go ahead and
use the JPEG format.
Speed
Do your best to reduce the download time. We live in a busy
world and people are not will to wait long time. Try to reduce
size of your graphics as much as possible without to destroy
the image. Image must look good, but size (in KB) should be
as small as possible.
Test before publishing
Do your homework, and do it well. Your visitors will not bother
to send you an E-Mail that some of your links does not work
or that some of your images does not appear. Even if someone
do so, it is quite embarrassing. Perform spell and grammar checking.
Remember that in many cases visitor will build his opinion about
you or your company on base on your web site. When published,
site should not contain any “under construction” or
“coming soon” messages.
About The Author
Zoran Makrevski is founder and CEO of SEO.Goto.gr.
Since 1998 has focused on E-Commerce and attempts to bring more
traffic to the customer sites bring him in the SEO industry,
and he is running his own company today.
Search Engine Positioning Firm
SEO.Goto.gr |
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