Effective web design
THE KEY TO EFFECTIVE WEB SITE DESIGN
by Breal Web Design
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The key to effective web site design is good planning.
Without planning and organisation, you will end up with
chaos. Once you have a design plan, content is the
next consideration. This applies equally to new and
existing web sites.
To create your plan for a new or existing site, sit down and
consider what your site will achieve. Get out a piece of
paper and a pen, draw a circle in the middle and mark it
'home'. Draw boxes connected by lines radiating out from the
centre circle and mark them with each of the main areas your
site will cover. Don't forget a site map if your site has
more than 8 or 9 pages. Repeat this process for each
secondary circle until you've planned your site. If you've
already got a site, do this exercise and include every page
on the web site.
Good navigation is vital and poor navigation leads to
visitor frustration. Once you've created your plan, you can
create logical navigational links. Make up to 8 main
navigational links to use on all pages of your site. You
don't want to confuse your site visitors with too many
options. You can offer more choices later, as your customers
drill down into your site.
If you have lots of links, then consider creating pages that
list each group of links instead. For example, Click Art
Gallery, (www.clickart-gallery.com) has hundreds of pages
within the site, but only 8 main links. Two of the main
links are to sub navigation pages. The first is an 'arts'
page. This lists all the pages on the site only relating to
the displayed artworks. The second is a 'services' page that
lists all the extra services on the site.
Once your navigation is taken care of, it's time to focus on
content. Common questions we hear are, how much information
should I put on a page and how big is a web page?
The size of a web page, and therefore the content are
dependent on the type of information being provided.
However, many site visitors don't want to read a condensed
version of 'War and Peace' on a single page. See if you can
logically break the content down into easy to read chunks.
Unless your site is an art gallery, keep images to a
minimum. Try using simple 16 colour GIF images as they're
small and fast loading.
The following list gives you a few good design tips to
consider when preparing your web site content.
-> Do make your text easy to read.
-> Do use short sentences.
-> Do break up your text into paragraphs.
-> Do use bullets and lists to make your point.
-> Create textual variation with heading size and colour but
don't make your text too small to read easily.
-> Be consistent - consistency creates a professional image.
-> Don't use fancy fonts except as 16 colour GIFs as your
masterpiece may not display correctly on every browser.
-> Don't use weird text colour/background colour
combinations.
-> Stick to one colour for each font type (eg Headings -
blue, sub headings - teal, main text - black)
-> Don't be too adventurous with changing hyperlink colours.
Many people, especially newbies, expect blue, underlined
links.
-> Leave white space to create a 'clean' looking design.
-> Ask two or three friends (who's opinions you value) how
they find your site navigation and layout.
You can also experiment with cascading style sheets (CSS)
and bold, italics or even highlighted words and phrases. For
example, this code inserted into your document will create a
yellow highlight over the word 'Highlight'.
Highlight
All the preparation may seem like a whole lot of hard work,
but it will pay off. Over the lifetime of your web site,
good layout design and navigation allow your site to grow
without creating you massive headaches.
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copyright Breal 2003
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