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Guide
Line Tips on Web Design
Tips to brand your website
Include your logo in all pages.
Position it at the top left or each page.
Complement your logo with a tagline or
catchy sentence that summarizes your business purpose. For example
"Always low prices" is the tagline for Wal-Mart.
Create a favicon. A favicon is that
small graphic that appears next to the URL in the address bar.
Have a consistent look and feel in all
your pages. Use a color scheme and layout that are clearly recognized
across your site.
Have an About Us section, that
includes all relevant information about you and your business.
Include a copyright statement at the
bottom of each page.
Tips on website navigation
Design your pages to load in less than
10 seconds (50Kb maximum size, including pictures).
Group your navigational options in
relevant categories.
Use common names for your menu
options: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Help, Products. Avoid "clever" or
"trendy" alternatives.
If your site uses Flash, provide also
an HTML version for users who prefer a less fancy, faster site.
Provide simple text navigation links
at the bottom of long pages, so users don't need to scroll back up.
Link your logo to your homepage,
except in the homepage itself. Put a link to your homepage on all your
internal pages.
Display a "breadcrumb trail"; it is
basically the path from the homepage to the page where you are. A
breadcrumb trail looks like this: Home > Section > Sub-Section > Page,
and it greatly facilitates navigation.
If your site is too big, provide
Search capabilities. Include a search box in the upper right corner of
your homepage, and a link to a Search page from your interior pages.
Freefind offers you a free and powerful search engine for your site.
Set your search box to search your
site, not to search the web.
Create a custom error page that
displays a simple site map with links to the main sections of your site.
That way, you will not lose visitors that have followed a bad link to
your site or who have misspelled your URL.
Tips on Layout and Content Presentation
Save the top of your page for your
most important content. Remember: good content must flow to the top.
Lay out your page with tables, and set
the width in percentage terms instead of a fixed number of pixels. That
way, your page will always fit the screen, without the need to scroll
horizontally.
Optimize your page to be viewed best
at 800x600 (the most popular resolution at the time of this writing).
Use high contrast for the body of your
page: black text on white background, or white text on black background
work best.
Don't use too many different fonts in
one page. Also, avoid using small serif fonts (like Times Roman): they
are difficult to read from a computer screen. Verdana is the most
web-friendly font, since it is wide, clean and easy to read.
Avoid long blocks of text. Use tools
that facilitate scanability, like bullets, subtitles, highlighted
keywords, hyperlinks, etc.
Avoid amateurish features like:
numeric page counters, wholesale use of exclamation points, all caps,
center justified blocks of text, excessive animated gifs, busy
backgrounds, etc.
Don't use pop-up windows. They
distract your visitors and are immediately dismissed as ads.
Test your site so that it looks good
in different browsers and resolutions.
Tips on Writing for the Web
Write in layman's terms so that
everybody can understand your content, unless you're running a technical
site for technical people.
Reading from a screen is painful: use
50% less words than you would use on print.
If a page is too long, break it into
several pages and link to them.
Don't use font sizes smaller than
10pt. for the body of your page. Specify your fonts in percentage terms
instead of pixels, to let users set their own size preferences using
their browser's text view options.
Use a spell checker. Spelling mistakes
are embarrassing and hurt credibility.
Tips to Know Your Customers
Ask for feedback: include a feedback
form in your Contact Us page.
Publish an ezine and include a
subscription form in your homepage. Give your customers valuable
information and encourage them to contact you.
Include polls and other tools to
gather market intelligence.
Tips on Linking
Make your links descriptive. They
should indicate what the user will be linking to, as opposed to just
saying "click here".
Don't underline anything that is not a
link.
Underline your links and use a
consistent color for them across your site (preferably blue).
Use a different color for visited
links, so that your visitors know where they've been (preferably purple
or a more subdued tone of the unvisited links color).
When linking to a non-HTML file, such
as Excel, Word or Acrobat, make it evident, by including a small icon
next to the link.
Don't link to "under construction"
pages.
Make sure that your links work and
that you don't have broken links. There are free online tools that can
help you with this.
If you use graphic links, don't forget
to use the ALT attribute. The ALT attribute should describe what are you
linking to.
Tips on how to use graphics
Optimize your graphics. Use only .gif
and .jpg formats. Make your image files as small as possible while
maintaining acceptable quality. Use a free online graphics optimization
tool.
Use thumbnails (miniature versions of
a picture) and make them clickable to the actual size picture.
Avoid graphics that look like ads.
People ignore them.
Use the ALT attribute on pictures,
even the image is not a link. It helps users with disabilities and
people who have turned off graphics.
Tips to optimize your site for the search
engines
Create short, descriptive page titles,
to entice search engine users to click on your links.
Create a site map containing all your
pages, and link to it directly from your homepage. Search engine robots
will follow the link to your site map and will most likely add all your
pages to the index.
Decide what the two or three main
keywords are for each page (the words you believe search engine users
will type to find your page) and repeat them often in your page title,
description meta tag and page body.
Create a Links page and call it
Resources. In it, place links to those sites that have agreed to place a
reciprocal link to your page. The more inbound links you have from
quality sites with a topic related to your site, the better your site
will rank with the search engines.
Use more text than graphics, and
minimize the use of Flash and JavaScript. Search engines heavily favor
text and will crawl and index your site faster.
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