The Basics of Web Design

In my months of engaging in web design and development industry, the following are the basic web design principles (I don’t simply mean the graphical design but the overall website design) which we often forgot most especially by beginners.

1. Neat and Easy Navigation: Navigation links plays a vital role in the accessibility and usability of your website. They serve as the pathway for your visitors in navigating the website.  Make it easy to use so that users won’t go elsewhere in search of information. Users often see themselves in front of web sites without knowing what to do next because they don’t know where the navigation is.
2. User must know what your site is about in seconds: Make your website simple and direct to the point. If an intuitive user cannot understand what your site is about in couple of seconds, he might get out of  the site, you lost a visitor, you lost a prospective customer.
3. Make your contents readable: Don’t punish your visitors by making them frown because they can’t read the contents of your site. Avoid using those fancy and tiny fonts which are unreadable. If you want your visitors to keep reading your stuff then make it comfortable for them.
4. Do not overuse flash: Aside from the annoying load time, search engines cannot index images and graphics, and so with flash. Today’s preferred search engine, Google.com, cannot properly index the text embedded in the movie . The text that you so conscientiously animated is useless to the search engine.
5. Do not auto play music: I listen to music, therefore I am an avid fan of music. But does all of us have the same taste in music? If you want to embed some audio file to your website, let the user start it, let them “push the button”.
6. Throw that blinking texts and backgrounds away: Try to see this websites:  (aiseikai.or.jp and dokimos.org/ajff). Do you love them? Hmmmnnnn…
7. Make your website cross browser compatible: Unlike people, browsers are not created equal. Browsers do not interpret CSS and other languages on the same way. This is one of the most challenging part for us since whether we like it or not, we need to make our website compatible to the most preferred browsers in the market today, else you will lose a prospective client. Make sure you check your site for Internet Explorer 6 and 7,  Mozilla Firefox 2 and 3, Safari and Chrome  as they constitute 95% of the worlds browsers.
8. Your links must be visible: Make your visitors recognize easily on which is  clickable and which is not.  Give it a different color (preferred is blue or red) and if possible put an underline on it.
9. Don’t forget to use “alt” and “title” attributes for your images: Search engines and blind users reads images through the ALT and TITLE attributes.
10. Make sure to have no Spelling and Grammatical error: It could affect the quality of your website and you must know it.

There are still various basics  of web design which we must consider in order to have a successful website but I listed on the 10 most basic above.

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