Good Design Practices and Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every
minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose.
Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your
website performs well.



1) Do not use splash pages




Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website.
They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or
"click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with
no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the
"back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the
splash page.




2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements



Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore
banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real
estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant
affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they
want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.



3) Have a simple and clear navigation




You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu
so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from
complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your
visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.



4) Have a clear indication of where the user is




When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want
to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that
moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or
navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors
because confusion means "abandon ship"!




5) Avoid using audio on your site



If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading
your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some
audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio,
make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls
would work fine.



Your website is where your business resides it's like the headquarter
of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design
principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of
visitors and sells to as many people as possible.



Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website.
The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors
know how to navigate around your website without confusion.



Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load
very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you
think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them
using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.



Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too
long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text
blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text
that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.



Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make
sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in
Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will
lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.



Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely
necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to
create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the
loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts
are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss
important information because of that.



Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

About The Author

Kanicen Nichathavan is the owner of Shoppers
Journey, At Shoppers Journey, we provide quality Web Marketing &
Web Design solutions for your needs. Be it dazzling websites and
portals or customized software solutions, our team is trained and ready
to fulfill your every need. Visit my site at http://www.shoppersjourney.com


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Distributed by Hasan Shrek, independence blogger. Also run online business , matrix, internet marketing solution , online store script .
Beside he is writing some others blogs for notebook computer , computer training , computer software and personal computer
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