Web Design and Content Tips

Your website is an online ambassador for your company and poor web design damage your company image and brand name as well as enhance it. Broken sites, delayed deliveries, impersonal responses, non-responses, slow download times, difficult to navigate sites and out of date information all tend to annoy customers and cause them to leave the site and more than likely never return.

It is therefore very important that your web design and content captures the essence of your company and is appropriate for the target audience. It is recommended that you develop personas for the type of people that you envisage will visit your site and consider these users when deciding on web design and content.

There are also basic guidelines which should be followed when designing a website which are detailed below and are inspired by Jacob Nielsens's work on effective web design and content.

• Fast download time is vital and so graphics should be used sparingly to facilitate this. Web sites should not take more than 8 seconds at 56k to download.
• Differences in screen resolutions, font sizes, browser versions and colour display should be taken into account to ensure that all visitors can view the web site. Good web design caters for the user with the lowest capability in order to increase the audience size.
• Underlined or bold words should never be used in the body text because it makes the work look like a hyper link.
• Vanilla font styles such as Arial or Verdana are more suited to web pages as they are easy to read and can be read by all web browsers.
• The company name and logo should be displayed on every page with the logo as a link back to the homepage.
• A search facility should be provided if there are more than 100 web pages.
• Use clear headlines and page titles which will make sense in a search engine report.
• Use headings and sub headings to allow users to quickly scan pages.
• Limit the page lengths and put different topics on different pages.
• Only use thumbnail product pictures on product pages with a link to a larger version of the picture. This increases download times and avoids confusing web pages.
• Pictures that are being resized should zoom in on the important part of the picture rather than reducing the picture to a thumbnail that is difficult to view.
• Use words which describe each link so users can tell where it will bring them before they click on it.
• Every important page should be available to disabled users.
• Standard page layouts should be used in accordance with big web sites, as users are familiar with this format.
• Page layouts should be consistent within the site. Shallow web sites are generally better because users can find the information they are searching for faster however deeper structures offer the user less choices so perhaps the solution is to have a mixture between the two styles.
• The web design should be easy to navigate and users should know where they are at a given time, where they have been and where they can go.