Website Design Guide

Click on the links above for all website topics 

Wheather you plan on creating a website designed to offer a service, consumer products, information or your insights into world events, or if you create your website yourself or have someone else do it, here are suggestions on how to produce a website that will achieve your goals. The important elements that go into a successful website each deserve thier own page. Click the links above to explore them all.

 

 Professional Look
Your web site cannot look cheap! A web site has the difficult job of building trust and credibility with its visitors. If it has a cheap look to it, then ultimately it will harm your web site’s results. A consistant look to your pages maintains a professional look and allows your visitors continuity from one page to the next. Develop a pleasing color scheme for your website. Avoid bright colors, softer muted tones are best. It is much easier trying out your page designs in a graphics program as it takes seconds to move things around the screen, as opposed to an HTML page where it can take hours rearranging the layout of a page.

 

 Web Page Sizes
It is much easier viewing a web page that is designed for a smaller screen than one that is designed for a larger screen where you may have to do a lot of scrolling left and right to read what is on the page. By designing the web page for a live space of 783 x 398 pixels you a guaranteed that the web page is going too easily viewed by the majority of web users The length of your web pages is also important. It is best to try to keep pages under 3 page lengths long and if necessary split the page into 2 or more pages.

 

 Content
When planning and building a website it is essential that you remember that textual content is King!  In their own way, both human users and search engines read and understand textual content on web pages better than you think so make sure that all your pages are rich in well written, textual content that is pertinent to the subject you are writing about on that page. Make sure your pages are spell-checked and re-read them several times to check for grammatical errors. Try to make your descriptions as simple as possible and make sure the page tells a story that is logical, complete and will make sense to anyone reading it. Try to seperate content into seperate pages if a single page grows too long.

 

 Usibility
Visitors to your web site need to be able to navigate quickly to where they want to go. If you confuse your visitors and they get stuck and cannot figure out how to get to your ‘order’ page, ‘enquiry’ page or your checkout page, then you will most likely lose them. Clear and consistent navigation is strongly supported by placing important navigation elements in ‘standard navigational’ areas on the web page design. You can do this by making sure your web site is template-based. Cluttered web sites are hard to read and navigate. It is important not to present too many different ideas on the same page. This comes down the objectives of the web site. Focus on the objectives of your web site. If you have two main objectives then focus the main “content” on the most important objective and have a smaller highlight for the other.

 

 Navigation Links
Whenever possible try to use text-page links instead of graphic links. Search engines struggle to navigate to pages that are linked-to using a graphic. Graphical links can also be detrimental to the web site’s loading speed. Duplicate links by adding secondary links to the bottom of the page.

 

 Meta Data
Metadata is the information about a data source. For example, a document contains information, but there is also information about that document such as the title, author and publisher - this is the metadata, in other words, data about data. If we compare this to the web, every webpage has a number of metadata elements that can be set for the page. Standard metadata that should be displayed for every webpage is: the page title, the description and the keywords or phrases that summarize the content of that page and which appear within it. Metadata is not visible on the site itself but is used by some search engines and directories to gain information about the website in order to index (catalogue) it correctly. Different search engines use metadata differently and some don’t use it at all.

 

 Keywords
Make sure that each of your pages concentrate on one subject only. Select the keywords you want to attract search engines referrals for and concentrate on writing around that subject. Always remember that it is Web pages that attract search engine traffic, not Websites.Selecting appropriale keywords is central to the success of a web page. Promote the right keywords and traffic will be driven to the page. Failing to understand the importance of using keywords or promoting inappropriate keywords will mean that your page will attract little traffic.

Focus on using two or three primary keywords on each page. Use these keywords in the page TITLE Tag, the META Description Tag, the META Keywords Tag, the H1 Header Tag at the beginning of the BODY section, in the first two or three paragraphs of the textual content of the page, in the Title Attribute of outbound links on your page and in the Alt Attribute of your page images. Also, provide two to four outbound links to external pages that have a similar content to your page. Finally, when posting links to to the page from other Websites you should try and ensure that the link description and Title attribute reflect your chosen keywords.