Good Design Practices

Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

Improve Usability of Your Website

No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn't load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.


Got questions - or need help with your web design, seo, or site maintenance?  Contact me at MarketingNeeds.net

I'm Back

Wow.. I can't believe my last post was back in 2008.  A lot has happened since then.

First and most importantly is I went back to school and received my degree in web design and interactive media.  I am so proud of this accomplishment.  It took some time but now I can focus on the end results.

So now that I have a little education and some experience under my belt I am ready to start my career as a freelance web designer and internet marketer from home.  My new site is MarketingNeeds.net and I am offering services in web design, and web maintenance as well as marketing your site and helping you drive traffic to your site.  After all; what good is a web site if no one sees it.  So I can help with search engine optimization if you need it.

So what will I bee doing with this blog?  I think this will be a good place for future clients to get to know MarketingNeeds.net and see what we can do, as well as learn a little about getting more traffic to their website.

I am very excited about moving forward and helping people with their online needs no matter if it is just a small banner for their site:

or, web a brand new site.

Please check out my site, and my small portfolio, and feel free to contact me about any MarketingNeeds  you may have.... Have a great day :-)