Regardless if your website is a couple pages for your family or 1000s of pages for a band, online business or corporation there are some basic design concepts that apply to everyone. I always tell clients to remember the website is for use by your fans or customers, design for them. Don’t design for your personal tastes or desires. I don’t care if you visit your own website every day, you don’t matter. It is more important that your fans and customers visit every day and that they can use your website. Their demands and requirements can often be much different than your own.
My thoughts on the list below…
Pages should load fast – I can’t stress just how important this is! You have one chance to convert that first time visit. If the site does not load or forces them to wait, they will leave. They can find another website to provide what they need. Listen to me… slow pages and poor servers WILL KILL YOU!
Text should be easy to read – Black text on white background, please! Don’t put purple text on black background… nobody can read it. I don’t care if it is the color of your logo, nobody can read it.
Your website should be easy to navigate – try and strive for this, might be difficult, but think about it… users should be able to get anywhere in your website within three clicks.
Avoid music and sounds – I will also add avoid videos that start playing automatically. Let your users turn on the music or video if they want it, don’t force them to hear it every time they visit your site. I have closed many sites because music started playing and I couldn’t find the controls to stop it, or they didn’t even bother to provide play controls. This also applies to bands.
Design for browser compatibility – I will add you must look at mobile browsers now. At least make sure your site is fine on the iPhone, iPad and Android devices. You might be surprised how much traffic to your website is coming from those devices. It is enough to matter.
1. Pages should load fast. Most people will leave your site if it’s not done loading in ten or 15 seconds. And even if you have a fast internet connection, not everyone does and 56k modems still exist.
2. Text should be easy to read. The text size should be big enough, and the background should not obscure your text. If you want to be safe, use black text on a white background. If you want more color, choose very carefully to make sure it’s still easy to read.
3. Your website should be easy to navigate. Each link should be clearly identified as such and graphic navigation elements like buttons and tabs should be easy to read and use. You do not want people leaving because they could not figure out how your Flash menu works.
4. Your layout and design should be consistent. If you switch between styles too much, you will confuse your visitors. If the design is too different, people will believe that they are now on a different website since the layout changed.
5. Avoid music and sounds. Very few people like to have music forced on them while they navigate, especially if they are already listening to music or surfing at their job! If you really cannot do without music, turn it off by default and ask visitors to start it themselves.
6. Design for browser compatibility. Many people do not use Internet Explorer on Windows. Make sure your site is at least viewable in Mozilla Firefox and Opera (if possible, you could even try testing on a Mac). Sites that target markets like technology should be more careful, since readers are more likely to use the newest browsers and gadgets like PDAs.
7. Design for all screen resolutions. You may like to surf in 1240×1080 with your new screen, but some people still use 800×600, or even 640×768! A site that looks perfect in high resolution may turn out to be impossible to view correctly in 800×600.
via 7 Tips to Improve Your Website Design | One Source Graphics.
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