Good Website Design Practices to Remember

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarters of an offline company. Therefore, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells your product or service to as many people as possible.

For starters, make sure you have clear and easy 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 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. Most internet users scan pages and text quickly looking for interesting or desired information, and will quickly move on to another site if they don’t find what they want or if it’s hard to read. Make it easy for them.

Make sure your website complies with all web standards at www.w3.org and make sure your site is 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 and buyers. Always test your site for compatiblility.

Avoid using scripts or scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary for a specific need or function. Use scripts only to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy and visual scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. You need to remember that some 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 it saves a lot of work by styling all elements on your website rather than having styling code on every page. This makes it extremely easy to edit your site if you want to make changes to colors, fonts or layout.

Always test your site and links to make sure all is well. Keep it “fresh” and update often.