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How to design a high quality performing website? A serious question! It's sad that site design is a factor that is often overlooked, yet a cause for many a websites’ failure.It can bring a site’s ranking sliding down, and even worse, it can blanket the site from the search engines’ visibility. And to top it all, consider the huge loss and trouble to the site owner. According to an internet report, 75% of online businesses fail due to poor website designs, though conceptually brilliant.
This brings us to the question, how to build a robust, design proof website? Here, in this article, I attempt to provide you few tips on how to go about designing a successful website. Remember, good-looking website needn’t’ be a performing website, many websites are simple, yet robust.
You should have a clear idea on what the site is expected to do. An information site should provide information; a news site should give news and none other. Yes, you can have other features along with the purposeful content of the site. It doesn’t mean that the news site shouldn’t sell products, hold Ads etc, however news should be the majority of the content on the site.
· What would the users expect to see on the site?
· What would make it special?
Keep this in mind when you make choices between 2 column or 3 column web pages and planning the positioning of the web elements on the web page.
Keep the page layouts on your website simple and clean. An attractive website is a crowd puller. Check out http://acne.about.com/ to know how a simple page layout makes a difference.
Design simple navigation and avoid opening new windows for every single click, thus not cluttering the user’s taskbar. Opening multiple new windows annoys users and destroys the sites intentions.
Don’t have too many scrolling texts and images flashing right at the users’ face. It could instigate users to leave the website.
A user is on your site looking out for something and wants it fast. Slow images and flash elements on the website could make an impatient user to search for the same information elsewhere. Plan to have lighter images and use flash elements only if it’s absolutely necessary. Optimize the images before putting them up on the site, but at the same moment don’t compromise on their quality else, the site will look yuck and that is even worse.
Use CSS –Cascading Style Sheet to build you website. The CSS makes your website load faster. It’s even better if you can have an external CSS, loading it from another server. This way the site would load faster and be search engine friendly.
Avoid popping up annoying Ads. The users don’t like it. Don’t clutter the website with lots of Ads, this is going to chase the user out. Users don’t like staying on sites that throw garbage at them. Have priority for the content and if at all there is a dire necessity, have Ads that are positively apt to website’s content and is helpful to the users. People don’t come back to a dumb website.
Links should take the user directly to the page he/she was destined to go. Don’t take the user on a joy ride in a maze of links. Clicking on so many links to access the information will force the user to leave midway, looking for the information somewhere else.
Another cause for a website failure is the content. Poorly written articles providing nonsense will plug returning users and copying content from other websites will anger the Search Engine Bot. Remember, copied content is not appreciated by the Search Engine Bots. Have fresh, original, and useful content on your website. Avoid using slang in the content, it’s not considered professional. Keep the spelling and grammar at it’s best.
Avoid having lot of blank spaces in the web page. Your design should make use of the available area completely. Having white spaces will seem as if something is missing on the site.
Frames are not Search Engine friendly. Avoid frames, by all means, in your design. What is the use of having best-looking site that doesn’t come up on search?
Avoid flashy backgrounds that make reading the text difficult. Keep the color warm, yet not on the dark side.
Take care that the website looks good on 800x600 and 1024 x 768 resolutions, the two of the common ones.
Make sure that the design remains intact in different browsers, especially IE, Mozilla, and Opera, the most used browsers around the world.
Build a Sitemap of all the links in the website and put it on the home page. It’s good for the Search Engine Bot, that it can crawl all the pages in the website.
Use mild, yet exciting colors that would make the user comfortable with your website. Take a look at http://yoga.about.com to see how simple colors be mixed and played to make the site exciting. Take a look at the link to know how you can choose best colors for your website, http://www.developertutorials.com/blog/design/choosing-the-best-colors-for-your-website-45/
Make a right choice on the font type and the size. Having fonts like Verdana, Times New Roman, Arial will do good to your site. Font is your preference; however, the size is users’ preference. So, be cautious when choosing the size, don’t make it too small or too big either.
Keep the pages short. Don’t make the user scroll down a lot across the Ads to locate the required information. If you can’t avoid long pages then keep anchors to different parts of the content on at the top of the page.
This brings us to the question, how to build a robust, design proof website? Here, in this article, I attempt to provide you few tips on how to go about designing a successful website. Remember, good-looking website needn’t’ be a performing website, many websites are simple, yet robust.
1. Have clarity on purpose of your website.
You should have a clear idea on what the site is expected to do. An information site should provide information; a news site should give news and none other. Yes, you can have other features along with the purposeful content of the site. It doesn’t mean that the news site shouldn’t sell products, hold Ads etc, however news should be the majority of the content on the site.
· What would the users expect to see on the site?
· What would make it special?
Keep this in mind when you make choices between 2 column or 3 column web pages and planning the positioning of the web elements on the web page.
2. Concentrate on Having a Simple, User Friendly Layout.
Keep the page layouts on your website simple and clean. An attractive website is a crowd puller. Check out http://acne.about.com/ to know how a simple page layout makes a difference.
Design simple navigation and avoid opening new windows for every single click, thus not cluttering the user’s taskbar. Opening multiple new windows annoys users and destroys the sites intentions.
Don’t have too many scrolling texts and images flashing right at the users’ face. It could instigate users to leave the website.
3. Avoid Flash and Heavy Images.
A user is on your site looking out for something and wants it fast. Slow images and flash elements on the website could make an impatient user to search for the same information elsewhere. Plan to have lighter images and use flash elements only if it’s absolutely necessary. Optimize the images before putting them up on the site, but at the same moment don’t compromise on their quality else, the site will look yuck and that is even worse.
4. Use CSS.
Use CSS –Cascading Style Sheet to build you website. The CSS makes your website load faster. It’s even better if you can have an external CSS, loading it from another server. This way the site would load faster and be search engine friendly.
5. Avoid Pop Ups and Unwanted Ads.
Avoid popping up annoying Ads. The users don’t like it. Don’t clutter the website with lots of Ads, this is going to chase the user out. Users don’t like staying on sites that throw garbage at them. Have priority for the content and if at all there is a dire necessity, have Ads that are positively apt to website’s content and is helpful to the users. People don’t come back to a dumb website.
6. Design Straight Links.
Links should take the user directly to the page he/she was destined to go. Don’t take the user on a joy ride in a maze of links. Clicking on so many links to access the information will force the user to leave midway, looking for the information somewhere else.
7. Write Right Content
Another cause for a website failure is the content. Poorly written articles providing nonsense will plug returning users and copying content from other websites will anger the Search Engine Bot. Remember, copied content is not appreciated by the Search Engine Bots. Have fresh, original, and useful content on your website. Avoid using slang in the content, it’s not considered professional. Keep the spelling and grammar at it’s best.
8. Avoid Blank Spaces.
Avoid having lot of blank spaces in the web page. Your design should make use of the available area completely. Having white spaces will seem as if something is missing on the site.
9. Avoid Frames.
Frames are not Search Engine friendly. Avoid frames, by all means, in your design. What is the use of having best-looking site that doesn’t come up on search?
10. Simple Background.
Avoid flashy backgrounds that make reading the text difficult. Keep the color warm, yet not on the dark side.
11. Check Resolution.
Take care that the website looks good on 800x600 and 1024 x 768 resolutions, the two of the common ones.
12. Browser Compatibility.
Make sure that the design remains intact in different browsers, especially IE, Mozilla, and Opera, the most used browsers around the world.
13. Map the Sitemap.
Build a Sitemap of all the links in the website and put it on the home page. It’s good for the Search Engine Bot, that it can crawl all the pages in the website.
14. Color it Right.
Use mild, yet exciting colors that would make the user comfortable with your website. Take a look at http://yoga.about.com to see how simple colors be mixed and played to make the site exciting. Take a look at the link to know how you can choose best colors for your website, http://www.developertutorials.com/blog/design/choosing-the-best-colors-for-your-website-45/
15. Fonts & Fonts.
Make a right choice on the font type and the size. Having fonts like Verdana, Times New Roman, Arial will do good to your site. Font is your preference; however, the size is users’ preference. So, be cautious when choosing the size, don’t make it too small or too big either.
16. No Long Pages.
Keep the pages short. Don’t make the user scroll down a lot across the Ads to locate the required information. If you can’t avoid long pages then keep anchors to different parts of the content on at the top of the page.
These are few basic tip that you can keep in mind when designing a website.
Reach me at vik_grt@yahoo.com. If you liked the article, comment and certainly do subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed at Thoughtfully Vikram
In case you liked this article, you could be interested in the other one at Ways to Improve Stickiness of Your Website.Do take a look!
2 comments:
It is important to check the forms and mail links atleast weekly once to be double sure that the enquiries are being forwarded from the website perfectly.
Hi, I'm Isaac Yassar and I help people reach success in self development, business, and blogging for free. Thanks a lot for sharing VikramKir, you got some good points there. Good job!
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