Web Design Tips - What Will Make Your Visitors Stay on Your Website (Part 2)

Time:2010-09-08 19:08:33 Source:Ezinearticles Author:Sasha L Alova

Web design plays a major part in the success of your business. A bad web design can damage your company's reputation regardless of the quality of your products or services. In the previous article, we've discussed the first 3 web design tips. Let's proceed to the next essential web design tips.

1. Speedy Loading
Overloading your website with graphics and flashy multimedia is the best way to bog your website down. Can you imagine yourself waiting for a 300k graphic to load when you know it should be only 30k instead? Nothing is more annoying than this. There are graphic softwares available which will help you compress your files so they take up less room and hence, less time to load into your user's browser.

Flashy graphics and multimedia control do look good but when they obstruct effective functionality of the website, then it would be hard for your users to avail of the information that they need. Users don't want to be bothered by these cumbersome Java scrollers just to view all the texts on the page, much more wait for all these graphics to load. Add auto-playing sound files to things that you should avoid when you're planning your web design.

2. Website Readability
Line of text must not be more than 600 pixels wide to prevent it from looking messy. To make the line length manageable, you must place the text in a fixed-width table in the center of the webpage. Texts with no limits on length will produce a lot of problems. First, the content will be too wide or lengthy making it difficult for visitors to follow especially if they have large screens. Content is generally fluid and automatically expands when the window is big.

However, placing contents in a fixed width gives birth to another problem. Generally, WebPages are designed to work on computer screens as small as 800x600. This simply means that anything that's more than 770 pixels wide to account for scroll bars and the likes must be avoided.

Avoid making your webpage too wide. Since majority of the users have 1024x768 monitors, WebPages must be absolutely visible at 1000 pixels wide sans horizontal scrolling. To check, if your webpage do not work at 100 pixels, it means that it's too wide.

Utilize contrasting colors or simple backgrounds to emphasize your text and thus make it easy to read. It's difficult to read light texts on an equally light background, much more a dark text on an equally dark background. Many web designers are guilty of this blunder. A dark red text on a dark blue background can give your users migraine. Do you know what I mean?

If you're using background images, just make sure that they do not have a wide mixture of light and dark colors or better yet, make use of simple and mostly dark or white background. This way, readability is increased. Another effective method of increasing readability of text placed on a background image is through increasing text size and/or making it bold.

Another important thing that you MUST never forget is to make the text large enough to read. This is commonsensical but unfortunately, many still fail to follow this rule. If you want to punish your visitors, then I guess you can break this fundamental rule in web design over and over again. CSS rules in text use are 12 or 13px Arial and 11 or 12px Verdana.

Here are other important tips to improve website readability:

Make use of line spacing
Avoid typing more than a few words in ALL CAPS
Make use of a spelling checker
Avoid using more than one exclamation mark.

If you're in need of a good web designer, you can check out the best web designer in Ireland, Irish Web Solutions. Visit their website to get a free Web Design Quote.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sasha_L_Alova

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