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[19/01/2010] Points to keep in mind when designing a website
Outlining the purpose and characteristics of your website should be your beginning step in web designing. Stress on what you want your website to attain. Refer a reputed website to have an idea on the layout and design to understand what works and what doesn’t.
In order to make your website content easy for your visitors to navigate, make sure the links and tabs to the main web pages of your website are easily viewable. You can make your website traffic busy by creating easy links to the web pages of your website.
A good way to help you bring to mind the structure of your website is to prepare a flow chart of the whole website on paper. Think like a user visiting your website and searching for required content on your website. When designing a website, displaying a general outline of the content on main page will not frustrate visitors searching for their needs. A direct link to a particular section will attract more visitors on your website.
Most web pages in web designing have a usual layout containing of a header and footer or a horizontal navigation bar at the top and a vertical navigation bar down the left of the page and a link for the main content. If there is a lot of content, the idea is to split it into various categories and links so that the visitor doesn’t get confused and easily navigates to his required category.
Keep text clear and to the point and make sure there are no grammatical mistakes by checking again and again to avoid looking inadequate. Content in text is difficult to read when there are images in the back ground of your website.
Learn the basics of html, even when you are using WYSIWYG software, Front Page or Dreamweaver. Hypertext markup language will help you gain and understanding of how a web page is built, and compromise with problems you face while using the software in web development. Try to avoid tables and always create pages using layers and cascading style sheets(CSS).Table based web pages are easily accessible to users specially when they are using mobile phones, PDA's to access the web. Good thing about the table based web page is that you can change or edit the layout just by changing the cascading style sheet.
In Web designing, photos and images you use should be clear and well arranged to reduce file size and increase the speed for loading the page. An amateurish website is an example of page with large images that takes much time to load. A GIF is a good format used to for clear images with few colors which makes reading text easy. JPEGs images format is good for images with numerous colors, like photographs, drawings with many shades. These are some of the basic points to remember in website design.
