Good Website Design Practices

Your website is one of your most active marketing tools. Even when you have closed your company's doors for the day, and there is no one to answer the telephones, your website is still up and running. It is a permanent office and source of information to thousands of people across the world. It is extremely important that your site reaches the maximum amount of people possible, and will keep their interest once they are on the home page.

The first thing is to ensure that you have clear navigation directions on your site. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and user-friendly, even to people who are not particularly computer literate.

Reduce the number of images on your website. Too many images can make your site load slowly, which could lead to impatience from the browser who may then turn to an alternative site for their browsing needs. When choosing images to put on your site, ensure that they are relevant to your company and also eye-catching. Use only the essential and best pictures and utilize image editing programs to ensure the pictures have a minimum file size and will therefore load quickly.

Keep your text paragraphs to a specific, concise length. Include only the most necessary information, and if you need to have quite a bit of text, make sure that you break it up into short paragraphs. Having a substantial amount of text in one big condensed block will appear overwhelming to the visitor. They will then be deterred from reading your information because it looks too long.

It is important to do your research on www.w3.org to ensure that your website complies with web standards. Using this site will also help you determine whether your site is cross browser compatible. Your website may look great in Internet Explorer, but could possibly look awful in Firefox or Opera. You need to ensure that this will not happen, and your site will look the same across all browsers, so as to ascertain that you do not lose any visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Scripting languages should be used purely to manipulate or handle data, and not to create visual effects on your website. The reason for this is that heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and may even crash some browsers. This is sure to upset and deter visitors! Another problem is that scripts are not supported across all browsers, and thus you will also run the risk of losing potential visitors.

CSS can be used to style your page content. A lot of time and effort can be saved in designing your website by using CSS because they style all the elements of your website in one go.

There are many aspects to website design that need to be taken into consideration. Undoubtedly the most important of these is having an eye-catching website, but one that also does not appear to be too 'busy.' You want it to have all the information you need in an attractive way, portrayed in a way that can be used by anyone, anywhere.

Christine Anderssen is the owner of Tailormade4you, a web design and web hosting company that specialises in building cost-effective websites and hosting for small business owners in South Africa.