Here you will find 10 points you should try and follow when starting out in website design. As promised!
1. Don’t go mad! Keep your idea’s down to earth as trying to reinvent the wheel on your first website will leave you furstrated and exhausted. Have a browse around and get a feel for what you want, look at how they’ve done it (source codes).
2. Design your site template first. Don’t do your content first. This way you’ll get a consistent style throughout the entire site. This will also save time if you decide to make any changes to your design as you won’t need to go through and update every single webpage.
3. When doing your deign start by selecting a pallet of complementing colours, keep these the same throughout the whole site. I Wouldn’t even recommend a small change as it may confuse your visitors, by leading them to believe they’re now on a different site .
4. Aim to keep file sizes small large graphics and long pages will take much longer to load and could encourage a dial-up user to exit your site. To reduce load times try to compress images as much as possible and spread text over more than one page if there is a lot.
5. When designing your site, stick to a consistent screen resolution, ideally the smaller the better (800 x 600) then everyone higher can see your page, and people on the lowest can also! A high resolution website might render your site somewhat unreadable on low specification machines.
6. Research has taught us that users don’t like to scroll down more than one and a halve pages, so as stated above spread your content over multiple pages.
7. Minimum amount of images, too many can loose the visitor and take a long time to download. People are usually after your content, not your design. Look at Amazon, Ebay or Google do they have tons of graphics?
8. Keep Navigation Consistent, try and keep the navigation the same throughout the site. No one likes looking to find a button. They’re more likely to just leave your site if they can’t find what they’re looking for easily.
9. Respect the Net, links are suppose to stand out, so make sure yours do. Don’t hide them in with text, its annoying. Your visitor doesn’t need confusing.
10. TEST YOUR SITE using different browsers and operating systems. Try Internet Explorer, Firefox and a texted base browser.
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