This article is not about the practical designing of your site. It will, on the other hand, help you keep away from many of the common mistakes that novice (and expert) designers make. Whether you are going to design the site yourself, or contract out to a design consultant, there are several key elements to good site design that you (or your designer) need to work to.

The most important part of your site is the home page - that is what your potential customers will see when they first visit the site. If that is not right, it doesn't matter what the remainder of the site is like - no-one will ever get to see it!

The following pointers will help you to design a site that your customers will find attractive and will stay at for at least a few minutes! I would recommend that you list these points and ensure that they are followed - especially if you are paying someone else to design the site for you - make sure you get the site that will work for you - not one that shows what clever designers they are!

Downloads Quickly
Most accepted research has shown that a visitor will only wait six to eight seconds for a site to download - after that he will skip on somewhere else - so don't have lots of graphics on your home page!

Easy to Read
Don't have a heavily patterned background or lots of color - it might look pretty but people wont strain their eyes trying to read a light blue text on a purple background. (If you think I’m exaggerating, believe me, I’m not - I have seen that on a site of a company trying to sell a web design service - I could hardly read it so naturally I left and have never been back!). Black or dark blue on white is usually best for the main body text.

Make it Clear
Show your visitors exactly what they have to do to navigate your site/obtain information/buy goods etc. Don't leave them thinking what to do next.

Build Confidence
They probably don't know you, so build confidence in your site. Do this by having an "About Us" page, contact information, site security information (if you are taking credit card details), testimonials, a FAQ page if appropriate (Frequently Asked Questions).

Keep Banners to a Minimum
Particularly on your home page - people either don't like them, ignore them, or worse still, click on them and leave your site!

Ensure Visitors can Navigate Easily
At a minimum, have a "top of page" link at the bottom of every page that is longer than the visitor can see at normal browser settings, and have a "home page" link on every page. Don't send visitors down a cul-de-sac with no obvious way out. Yes, I know they can use the back button on their browsers, but it is surprising how many people do not and will simply exit your site if it is unclear where to go next.

How Do I Buy?
If you are selling products directly from your site, make it crystal clear to visitors how to buy.

Build up a Database of Customers
Collect their e-mail addresses (getting permission to contact them in the future). This can be accomplished by the use of surveys, questionnaires, a quiz, or asking them to sign up to a newsletter.

I trust that the above tips will help you in designing a web site that will not only look good but, more importantly, make visitors want to look at the remainder of your site.

The Myth of "Good Web Design is in the Graphics"

On the other end of the scale are the people who believe a good website must have much color, graphics, animation and sound. You might meet them, for example, in the form of newcomers or pundits who either do not have much real world web experience or who only surf on T1 connections.

My first encounter with such people came in the form of an old friend who exhibited his personal website proudly to me. At the centre of his home page was a large animated graphic that was a few hundred kilobytes in size. That graphic had little function on that page - it did not provide any informative value: it was neither a logo, nor was it a photo of himself, or an image map, or anything at all. It was purely decorative. At that time (many years ago), I was using a 14.4K modem and that page took ages to load.

Now don't get me wrong. Decorative graphics on a page are fine. They make a page more pleasant to look at, and hence more likely to be read. But you should at least make them as small as possible. While I'm hesitant to give a hard and fast rule about how big such graphics should be, a decorative graphic that is a few hundred kilobytes in size is definitely too big to be tolerated.

If your concern is that your page should look good without being too slow to load, here are a few commonly used tricks that you may want to consider:

Do not put too much text in one big block. Separate them out into paragraph and put white space between paragraphs. This makes your text look more readable.

Like colored pages? That's okay, but in general, if the readability of your text is important to you, a white background with black text works best.

If you must have a colored background, make sure you try out your page by viewing it in resolutions like 256 colors to see whether the page looks alright. A colored page that looks fine on your 32 bit color resolution system may have dithering that makes your text difficult to read on lesser settings.

If you check the websites of big companies (Microsoft, Yahoo, etc), you will find that they still prefer a white background with black text for their main text. These companies probably have more resources for testing the usability of their website than you have, so it may not be wise to scoff at their design too quickly.

Reduce the size of the individual graphics files on your pages by using the following methods:

• Reduce the number of colors in the graphic.
• Reduce the size of the image, if possible.
• In animations, reduce the number of frames.
• In animations, don't duplicate the background in every frame; make the first frame a background without any objects that will move, and put all your moving objects in separate frames with transparent backgrounds.
  

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