Website Design Dos and Don’ts

Website design decisions will depend on the type of site you’re publishing. Personal sites, entertainment sites, and corporate e-commerce sites all have different priorities and abide by different guidelines, both in terms of content and how that content is presented.

General Page Design Advice

The following dos and don’ts apply to the formatting and structure of the whole page.

DO

• Keep all file sizes as small as possible for quick downloads. Because Quick downloads are crucial for a successful user experience. If your pages take forever to download, your visitors may grow impatient and go surf elsewhere. At the very least, they’ll get cranky

• Design for a screen size of 800 × 600 pixels, unless you are certain that your audience will be viewing your pages with a different configuration because When you design larger page sizes, you risk parts not being visible for users with older, smaller monitors.

• Put your most important messages in the first first screen (the top 350 pixels of the page). Because Most users make judgments about a site based on that first impression, without taking the time to scroll down for more information.

• Limit the length of your pages to two or three “first screen.” Because Longer pages that require a lot of scrolling are unmanageable for online reading and make it more difficult for readers to find their place. For some reason, users do not like to scroll; they’d rather keep moving forward. It is better to break long flows of text into a few separate pages and link them together.

DON’T…

• Don’t Use too many animations and flash, especially on pages with content you want people to read. Because while animations are effective in drawing attention, users find them annoying and distracting when they are trying to read the text on the page. Even one looping animation can be an annoyance to some people. A whole page of spinning and flashing is a disaster

• Don’t Use “Under Construction” signs. In particular, don’t make “under construction” pages that appear after a user clicks on the link. If your site or section isn’t ready, simply don’t post it.

  Although you may intend to show that you have information that will be available soon, “Under Construction” signs and other placeholders just make it look like you don’t have your act together. Providing links that go nowhere is a waste of your visitors’ time and patience. An alternative is to include a Coming Soon section on the home page that explains what you are planning for the site without the dead-end links.