UNDERSTANDING BASIC DESIGN
Principles Every Web Site Should Follow.

A good site design pays off directly in increased new visitors you can keep coming back. Good web design also supports the efforts you make to market your site. It is not worth your time to register your site with search engines and publicize it if the site is not attractive and easy to use. You may attract visitors, but they will visit once, have a quick look around and become frustrated with slow loading time and lack of navigation aids and probably never return. To maximize the return on your marketing efforts, you must provide a site worth visiting that's easy to navigate and provides visitors with the content they want.

Purpose of Website and Target Audience

At the foundation of a good web site is a clear sense of purpose. A good site shows evidence that the design is appropriate for its intended audience and meets its needs by providing the desired content. Write down the purpose of your site if you haven't done so. The purpose may be to provide information about an obscure disease, to show family photos, or to sell company products. This stated purpose will become the key direction for your site. In the future, if you are unsure whether to include something on your site - such as a notice about selling your house - check the site's purpose. If your intended content isn't in accordance with the site's purpose, don't include it.

Once you know the purpose, consider your audience. Is the core audience family members, customers, young people, or retired people? Are they wealthy? What level of education do they have? Are they liberal or conservative? What is the level of their computer skills? What browser add-ons will they have? The more you know about your audience, the more you can tailor your site to their needs. For example, don't include content on your site that requires a user to download a browser add-on if your audience is not highly computer literate. If your audience is technically literate and your site showcases cutting edge information, you can include this kind of content.

Strong, consistent design

To distinguish your site from the rest of the web, create visual walls around your site by making every page look like the others. To do this, use repeated elements, like colors, logos, navigational buttons, and columnar layout on each page. This helps define your site and gives visitors good visual clues about where they are. It also has a side effect of making your site easier to create, because when every page has the same structure and layout, you don't waste time and effort designing each page individually and differently.

Organized content

Organize your content into logical and independent categories, topics and sub-topics. You should be able to limit the categories to five to six topics, which will give you a reasonable number of separate areas on your sie to link to from your home page.

Good navigation

Each page on your site should contain a full set of navigation links in a prominent position, including links to each main area of your site and the home page. Ensure the links are in the same place on every page and they are labeled the same so your visitors can learn your site's navigational structure and move around your site quickly. If your visitors can't find what they are looking for with minimum effort, they will go elsewhere and never return.

Fresh Material

Keep your site fresh by periodically checking for outdated material. If the content is aged, remove or update it. Another approach to keep your site fresh is changing a main image on the home page regularly or adding a tip or quote of the day feature.

Clean appearance

Free animations and scripts that do things like add scrolling text or mouse rollovers are readily available on the Internet. Do not be tempted to overuse every available feature on the Internet on your website. If you are using an abundance of "javascript" overkill on your website just because they are "cool" and you want to "impress" someone, try adding valuable and relevant content to your website instead, something that can add real value to your visitors lives. You will really impress them, they will thank you for it and maybe even return to your site to purchase something. In short, remove anything irrelevant from your website, regardless of how cool it looks.

Readable text

Reading text on a monitor is different than reading it on paper. For most people, it is more difficult, because the text is harder to focus. Make text-heavy pages easier to read by using blank lines between paragraphs, keeping sentences short and limiting paragraphs to a few lines. Using sub headings can also help break text up. You can also make text easier to read by using a plain typeface such as Times New Roman, Arial or Verdana which will appear clearer on most screen resolutions. Avoid using dark colored text on dark colored backgrounds.

Contact Information

If a visitor needs to contact you, make it clear how to do so. The method could be as simple as including an email address or phone number at the foot of every page. A "contact us" page as part of the navigational system is a must.

Meta Tags

Your site stands a better chance of being properly indexed by search engines if each page has a title and includes Meta tag text with the site's title, keywords and description. Not all search engines use this data, but enough do to make it an essential part of your design. For better search engine results, write separate meta tags for each page and include words that correctly describe your site and the page. Most search engines will use the keywords you choose to index your site, to it is important to pick the words carefully to ensure your site is indexed correctly.

Limited links to external websites

It is recommended not to place MORE THAN ONE hyperlink to other sites on your home page. After all, you don't want to create a site, attract visitors and then on your home page actually redirect them to another site. This would be like walking into a Wal-Mart, only to be directed by an employee to the mall across the street. Your site won't keep visitors if you do something similar. Keep links to external sites off your main page and you'll keep visitors around longer.

Short page loads

A good site loads quickly. A good way to accomplish this is to avoid large graphics and to reuse images throughout the site.