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)1. Overall Aesthetics - A website is like the cover of a book… people say “don’t judge by the cover” but it happens nonetheless. If your site leaves a poor first impression, you’ll lose credibility with your visitor and they may never return. How can you make a good impression? Your site should employ an attractive color scheme, use a consistent layout, and above all be simple to use. Resist the urge to flood your home page with links or graphics. Websites full of promos, misplaced navigation, or irrelevent images will only frustrate and/or overwhelm your visitors.
2. A Clear Message - There is a recurring question that visitors ask when arriving at a site… “What can I get/learn/do here?” Deny them the answer, and they won’t stay long. Your site’s purpose should be obvious. Don’t hide it “beneath the fold” or amidst a ton of banner ads. Your visitors want to know how your site can benefit them, so don’t make them search too hard or guess.
3. Appealing Graphics - Photos, clipart, maps, charts and other images are very important in solidifying the message you’re trying to convey. However, they should be used sparingly and only when relevent to your content. Directional aspect also should be considered when placing images. In most cases, a photo should face the center of your page. Avoid using blurry, dark, faded, or trendy/overused images.
4. Legibility - Use fonts and font sizes that are easy on the eyes. There’s no sense in making your viewer strain to read about the fabulous new widget you’re trying to sell. San-serif fonts such as Arial or Verdana work best. Keep paragraphs short - usually 5-7 lines, and don’t be timid about white space. Splitting up large blocks of text helps the reader transition from one point to another, and offers necessary “pauses” when moving through text-heavy pages. Use a text color in high contrast to your background color.
5. Spelling & Grammar - Correct spelling, punctuation and use of grammar is important, so don’t be careless. It all comes back to credibility. Mistakes in this area suggest that the site owner is lazy or unprofessional. You don’t want visitors to be wary of doing business with you. An exception to this is a blog. Many bloggers don’t pay attention to spelling, much less grammar. However, if you’re doing business and not just blogging, keep your writing concise and interesting, and remember to spell check.
6. Speed - Your site should load as quickly as possible. Surfers don’t like to wait. They scan text more so than read it. If your pages load too slow, users will become impatient and hit the back button without a second thought. To keep load times reasonable, avoid using large graphics or flash animations, use Cascading Style Sheets when possible to style your pages, and stay away from excessive use of tables for layout. Each and every tag on your page must be parsed by the browser, so of course clean code loads fastest.
7. Consistency - Site-wide elements such as navigation, color scheme, and main content areas should be consistent throughout. Categorize your navigation into easily identifiable sections. It’s also a good idea to put a small, text version of your navigation at the bottom of each page so users can quickly jump to another section without having to scroll back up (particularly for long pages). Using a consistent layout will improve usability, and enable your visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for.
Now that you’ve plowed you way through these little tidbits, you can call up your designer (uh, me?) or your buddy at work, and brag about how knowlegeable you are on web design. Way to go Joe! If you decide to build your own site, however, please do me a favor… actually use what you’ve learned. Don’t pollute the web! There’s enough ugly and useless websites out there consuming perfectly good bandwidth! Stop the madness.
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