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Design with
the goal in mind. What do you want your website
to achieve? Your design must translate
your Internet strategy into action. |
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Use intuitive
navigation. Your visitor must be able to get
to what he wants quickly and effortlessly. |
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Pay attention
to your color scheme. Certain colors are a
no no. For example, using the color red on a
financial website. |
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Choose a
unique identity and personality for your
website and stick to it consistently across
all pages. |
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Design for
faster downloads. Over 80 percent of home
users and 20 percent of corporate users
still use a dial up connection to access the
Internet. Make sure your website downloads
completely in less than 20 seconds using a
56 K modem. |
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Use standard
fonts that are loaded by default on most
computers. Using a unusual or fancy font can
cause your page to look quite different on
your visitors computer. |
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Don't get
carried away by aesthetic fluff and
ornamental irrelevance and don't get tempted
to display your technical prowess by
embellishing your site with "bell and
whistles". |
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Present
information in small chunks. Adding a whole
lot of text on a single page can create
information overload and your scare your
visitor away. |
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Using small
flash animations that download quickly can
help present your information in new and
interesting ways but avoid creating a website
completely in flash. Most search
engines cannot read the information and
follow links embedded in a flash file. Also,
remember not all visitors choose to download
the latest flash plug-in required to view
your site or to wait patiently while your
flash animation downloads. |
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Check for
cross browser compatibility. Most people use
Internet Explorer but a few also use
Netscape and other browsers. A website sometimes also might look different on a Mac
if designed on a PC and vice versa. Check
your site using different browsers and
operating systems. |
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Optimize for
search engines at the design stage.
Intelligently embed your key words and
phrases in the web copy. Remember to use
keywords in your page title and to use meta
tags including keywords and description.
Google ignores Meta-tags but Inktomi (which
is now owned by Yahoo) still takes Meta-tags into
consideration. Make good use of the 'Alt' tag
to add additional keywords to your page. |
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Design with
room for expansion. Sometime you may need to
add extra content or links on a web page.
Ensure that you have provided for this
option at the initial design stage itself. |
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Use the
services of a trained professional if
required. Tacky, amateur websites for
professional products and services are not
likely to inspire confidence amongst your
customers. |
