Principles for Good Web Design

Your website is where your business is – it is like the location of an offline company. Therefore, it is crucial to make use of good design principles in order to ensure that your site reaches out to the maximum amount of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Try to make sure that you have clear directions on your website’s navigation. The navigation menu should be neat, tidy and concise so that visitors know how to navigate through your website without any confusion.

Try to reduce the amount of images which are present on your website, as they will make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are quite unnecessary. If you think any image on your site is essential, try to make sure that you optimize them by using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Try to maintain your text paragraphs to a length which is reasonable. If a paragraph is too long, you should divide it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks won’t be too big. This is crucial due to the fact that a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading any of your content.

Try to make sure that your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure that they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose many potential visitors.

Try to avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is most necessary. Make use of scripting languages in order to handle or manipulate data, but not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and might even crash some browsers. Also, scripts aren’t supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss on some important information due to this.

Try to use CSS in order to style your page content as they can save you a lot of work through the styling of all elements on your website in one go.

Article Source: http://www.webdesignarticles.net.

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