Web Design Tips – Part 1

  • If you have a site in all Flash, consider creating an HTML version of the site as well. This will not only make your site search engine friendly, but also help users who do not have flash plug-ins in their web browsers.
  • The most important thing you should do while designing a banner is to feature a call to action. Placing a “Click here” or “Submit” graphic image on your banner can significantly improve your Click Through Rate. Also, note that bright colored banners like blue, yellow, and green have a higher CTR than black-and-white colored banners.
  • While it is important to make the home page of the site easily accessible to the users from all the site pages, one shouldn’t force them to navigate to the home page each time for browsing other pages on the website. Placing a navigation/menu-bar on all pages of the website helps navigation and site usability. It also helps search engines locate your inner content easily.
  • Pop-ups are mostly used to present additional information, ads and other ‘non-core’ material to visitors. However, unless used properly, automatic JavaScript pop-up windows are the biggest turn-offs for any website. Pop-ups increase the bounce rate of your website.
  • Use a Crystal Clear Source Code (HTML/CSS). There are many web-designers who give too much importance to the look and the graphics of the website while ignoring the clarity and usability of the source code. Clean and well-written source code is the first step to a successful website design. If a spider cannot crawl through all the pages of the site smoothly, chances are, that all website pages would not be noticed by Search Engines.
  • Alignment of design objects is one important thing you can’t afford to ignore as it plays an important role in deciding the look and feel of your website and it is as important in web design as it is in print design. Good alignment doesn’t necessarily mean that everything should be in a straight line, perhaps you should align your design to look more ordered, digestible & polished.
  • Most of the people specify size of fonts in pixels (because it relates with Photoshop). But using pixels as font unit has one major problem, pixels can’t be resized in Internet Explorer. As monitor resolutions increase, visually challenged might struggle to adjust the font size . So it’s better to use ’em’ as font unit. According to wikipedia – an “em” is a unit of measurement in the field of typography, equal to the pt size of the current font. An em is roughly equivalent to 16 pixels. To use ’ems’, your designer must set the font size attribute in the body tag to 62.5 per cent like this: body { font-size: 62.5% }.
  • Keep your website design consistent. It means that you must have a clear theme in your mind before starting the design so that you can select colors, font, buttons, spacing, illustration, pictures etc. accordingly and each element compliments the overall theme of your website. Inconsistent design looks unprofessional and low in quality. So make early decision and stick to them. Using smart CSS will help you achieve this consistency. Remember, even if your website design is bad, a consistent bad design will still look better then an inconsistent website design.
  • Keep an up-to-date backup of your existing files before any alterations to the original design so that if you find that your altered design has undesirable changes, you can conveniently revert back to your old design by re-uploading your backup files.
  • Center aligning the text, titles, taglines, and parts of copy is one of the most amateurish thing you can do to your design. Instead left-aligning is a much safer and usually better looking option on most websites.