Web Design Tips and Tricks .

Aspects of Good Web Site Design.
How to Increase Web Site Traffic

Aspects of Good Web Site Design

1. Keep text concise especially at the top levels of the site. Surfers have trained themselves to speed read a page to see if they have landed where they want to be. If they cannot ascertain the information they are seeking within seconds they will move on. Longer explanations can be made available via links to pages deeper in the site for those who want the full story. Bullets often work well to crystallize  major points.
2. Professional looking graphics can create a "user experience", provide contrast to text and create visual relief.. The quality of the graphics more than anything else will instantly portray the level of sophistication of the site and entice the visitor to linger.  Use meaningful "ALT" text on images.
3. Page format is important for aesthetic composition, readability and logical organization. The most important content to the user should dominate the web page "above the fold".  Minimize navigational graphics for destination pages to less than 20% of the page space.  Create effective "white space" or blank areas around graphics and text for visual relief and aesthetics but at the same time, it is important to provide as much information as possible with minimum scrolling.  Web page length should rarely exceed 3 screen lengths. Some web pages can be very sparse depending on the mood or feeling being portrayed.  Be careful with the overused and usually boring "centered and stacked" approach.
4. Use of Tables is required by good web page designers for exactly controlling the composition of the page reliably across the major browsers.  Take advantage of the all important background colors and background images available within tables and their cells.  This is a great way to add color and graphics to your design with very little cost in download time.
5. Graphics versus download speed. Download speed is one of the most important aspect of web design.  Strive for less than 10 second download time which means a page design under 34 Kbytes. The "bailout" rate of visitors increases after 10 seconds.  A thorough understanding of GIF versus JPEG images and GIF animations versus Javascript animations is necessary to create the smallest file size (and best quality) for a given image or effect. The proper balance of text versus image size is also important so that a visitor can begin to read the information while images are downloaded. To accomplish this, always insert width and height parameters inside image tags so that the browser knows the image dimensions before it is downloaded.  Reuse images as much as possible as they are cached and only need to be downloaded once.
6. Create straightforward navigation with links that are clear as to what they are about. If the link is for a large image or file include the file size with the link so that those with slower connections will understand that they will be waiting.   Realize that a good percentage of visitors will not enter your site from the homepage therefore always include at least a "home" link on every page.
7. Point Links inward especially at the higher levels of your site. You will work hard at attracting visitors to you so don’t invite them to leave as soon as they’ve come in. Give your visitors the opportunity to visit important external links after you’ve had a chance to tell them about your message.
8. I've been Framed!  Frames have their pros and cons.  Frames are especially useful if you wish to keep your navigational links continuously available to the visitor.  Having all the links on one page in a frame also makes it easier to make updates to the links since only one page needs editing as opposed to all your pages. Frames are also useful for allowing a user to "design the page", by giving the user the opportunity to combine various combinations of pages on the same screen.   The problems with frames are that not all browsers support them.  This is particularly important to busy commercial sites where the few percent using these browsers can mean a large number of visitors left out.  In these cases alternate non-framed sites are created to support those visitors.  Some search engines have trouble reading frames and may not be able to read the links to your internal pages.  Therefore redundant links should be inserted in the frameset page to satisfy the search engines.  Another frame related problem occurs when search engines direct visitors to a single page and not to the frameset.  In other words, the main page is presented without the top logo frame or left navigational frame leaving visitors confused and stranded.   Additional Javascript code should be added to every page to assure that a page cannot be accessed without the frameset.
9. Target your design to the correct monitor resolutions and self-optimize for larger display dimensions when possible.   A low resolution monitor of 640 x 480 pixels will have a viewable area on all platforms and browsers of 557 x 270.  If you expect the user to print the page on standard A4 letter size paper stick to dimensions of 535 x 670 pixels.  As a general rule graphic images should not exceed a width of 535 pixels.  Screen resolutions are getting larger with about 80% of visitors using 800 x 600 or larger.  This resolution translates to a browser safe area of 717 x 390.  Only 11% of current visitors use the minimum 256 colors.  Most pages today with fixed dimensions are ignoring the few 640 x 480 users and optimizing for the 800 x 600 users.
10. Design to accommodate all users especially the none graphic user. This will continue to be important as more and more people excess the web from mobile equipment like Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).  Use the ALT tag to describe the image they would be missing.  Did you know that visually disabled people can acquire special software that makes ALT tags audible!
    
     

"We continue to get enthusiastic response to the creative, friendly, easily navigated site." Sheila Kelly,  Charlotte Martin Foundation