7 Do and Don't in Website Design

1. Scope

Before website designing begins, it is important to determine the scope of your website. Determine the target visitors that you wish to attract to your site; be it for a personal site, a small business site, or an e-business site. Research has shown that building the site, whilst looking at it from the perspective of the target visitors would enhance web design.

A clean, uncluttered and easy on the eye site would be the way to go. How you present your content is almost as important as the content itself. The human eye is naturally drawn to things that are pleasing to the visual senses, and a good layout makes it easier to read. It also offers ample space around images, matches the background of your images to the background of the corporate/brand colours of your company. Use a table structure to insure alignments and spacing.

Always try and match the colour scheme of your website to that of your brand and/or company corporate logo colour. Not only does this create a visual link between them, but it also helps your reader associate those colours with your brand, and therefore, your products/services.

Fonts should be kept simple and readable. Always stress the visibility level of the text on your website. Studies suggest dark coloured text on a white background offers the best visibility of your content, on any screen, and in any resolution.

A website containing a large amount of flash and huge images may be attractive, but the fact that this imposes a heavy burden on the site, should be taken into consideration. The time taken to load would increase, and your visitors who may be running on a tight schedule would leave, halfway, before the page completely loads.

Another way to combat these large image files, without compromising site design would be to reduce the number of colours and repeated pixels used.

It is important to ensure that your site is compatible with major browsers that are used on the World Wide Web, such as; the Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape. Be aware of the type of graphics and animations that these browsers support.

Try to keep content as simple, precise, direct and straight to-the-point as possible.

Instead of simply copying and pasting your HTML version of your text, make an effort to present the text version of your web pages in a clear and readable way. Add dividing lines and extra spaces between paragraphs to help break up the content into digestible chunks.

7. Security

Security is imperative in an e-business site. This is because your customer must feel secure enough to do an online transaction on your site. Thus, it is necessary that the latest security protocols are implemented with the design.