Good Web Design Practices
Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.
Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
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Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.
Books on Good Web Design Practices
The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Websites
by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, Jason I. Hong - Computers - 2007 . Tedeschi, B. (1999, August 30) Good Web site design can lead to healthy sales. New York Times E-Commerce Report (www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/.
What is Web Design?
by Nico Macdonald - Art - 2003 . Clients ln the early days of Web design clients understandably knew little about design in the medium and good designers were in demand..
Dreamweaver 8: Design and Construction
by Marc Campbell - Computers - 2006 . “Best design practices using Dreamweaver. Fast prototyping using Dreamweaver. Fast web development.” “Cool idea,” I replied. That’s when he informed me,.
Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web
by Jennifer Niederst Robbins - Computers - 2007 . This edition has been completely rewritten to be in compliance with the standards and modern web design practices. The markup chapters emphasize using HTML.
Designing With Web Standards
by Jeffrey Zeldman - Computers - 2007 . Bad Browsers Lead to Bad Practices Then came the 4.0 browsers. to support Netscape 4—and mistake “support for Netscape 4,” which is a good thing,.
DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model
by Jeremy Keith - Computers - 2005 . In this chapter, I’m going to apply those practices to the image gallery. Whether it’s CSS, JavaScript, or visual design, a good web designer will.
Handbook Of Human Factors In Web Design
by Robert W. Proctor, Kim-Phuong L. Vu - Computers - 2005 . If you start off with a bad design, small changes just make it not quite so bad. It is the deep and detailed analysis that leads to good initial designs..
Technical Communication and the World Wide Web
by Carol Lipson, Michael Day - Education - 2005 . A good web designer listens and understands immediately why a user is having A great designer becomes the user during the act of design..
Innovation Networks: Theory and Practice
by Andreas Pyka, Günter Küppers - Technology & Engineering - 2002 . The case studies highlight that, while web design is constrained by and notions regarding what qualifies as ‘good design’ or ‘good design practice’..
The Architects’ Journal
Architecture Periodicals - 1919 Do not be put off if the design company has not done an architectural web site before. After all, most practices have yet to establish sites..
