Principles of Good Web Designing
By Jason Olson - Ultimate Web Designing
Whether you are designing a site for yourself (and it's your
first attempt at web design) or you are designing one for
your 100th client, remember to always apply these principles
of good web designing.
1. Good, useful, and informative content. Provide the
information your visitor wants to see. Don't make them go
to your competitor's site to find the rest of the information.
You need to let them know that everything they're looking for
can be found right here in your site. If they like your site,
they'll return. If they really like it, they'll tell their
friends.
2. Appealing, quick-loading pages. Make sure your site is
attractive to the visitor and that the pages download in just
a few seconds. Your visitor/potential client doesn't want to
wait 30 seconds just to see if your site's content is something
they MIGHT be interested in. Keep the size, and number, of
your graphics to a minimum. If you have too much content on
your page, then you need to help your visitor by breaking it
into categories (which leads us to #3).
3. Easy to follow navigational structure. Select a method of
navigation to help your visitors find what they're looking for.
Make sure your links are easily identifiable and easy to use.
Make it obvious to your visitors that if they click on a link,
it will take them where they want to go.
4. Consistency. Make your visitors know that they haven't
left your site. Place links at the same spot on every page.
Place your logo at the same spot on every page. Use the same
color scheme throughout your entire site and use the same font
pattern throughout your entire site. If you change any of
these from one page to the next on your site, not only will
your visitor not be sure if they're still on your site but it
might cause them to become frustrated because now they'll need
to re-focus on a new page before they get to the information
on that page.
5. Links to other sites with similar content. Place external
links on your site to give your visitor the opportunity to view
more information related to what is on your site. This will
save your visitor time because they won't have to search for
other sites, you make it easy on them. This will also increase
your number of visitors because if the site returns the favor
by placing a link to your site, you'll get some of their visitors
and search engines rank sites higher with quality sites linking
to them.
6. Search engine strategies. Don't waste your time following
steps 1-5 if you don't want people to find your site. In order
for your site to be found by the search engines, each of your
pages must have the following meta tags: title, description,
and keywords. Work the keywords into the body of the web page.
Follow these simple steps when designing a web site and your
visitors will enjoy their stay. Visit other sites and see which
ones you like and which ones you don't. See how well they
followed these steps.
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Jason Olson (mailto:jason@ultimatewebdesigning.com) is the owner
of Ultimate Web Designing (http://www.ultimatewebdesigning.com)
which offers web designing, web hosting, search engine strategies,
and search engine submission. To make searching for the search
engines easier, visit our 100 Search Engines page (http://www.ultimatewebdesigning.com/100searchengines.html).