Basic a Web Design Principles

Basic Web Design Principles

The Home Page

The home page should clearly indicate what the site is about. Provide top level navigation on the first page, your logo, and tell to the visitor what he can find on your web site.

Your home page should be informative, and should call your visitor to action. The home page is the place where visitors decide what they will do, click on some of your links, or leave the site. If you have a discount, or if you offer some free service in attempt to make a contact with potential customers, make sure to provide links to that service on your home page.

If you decide to implement a flash intro on your first page, make sure to give the user the opportunity to skip the flash intro. The link “skip intro” should be outside of the flash, because you will force the visitor to wait until the Flash movie is loaded.

Navigation structure

Place the navigation in the place where users are used to looking for it. Don’t experiment with the navigation! I can’t stress this enough. Keep the navigation system exactly the same on ALL pages. Visitors are not ready to learn your site navigation system. Consistency is the most important thing here. You should focus your effort on building a consistent rhythm across all pages of your site.

Font size

Your font size should be large enough so your text can be read without effort. There are many people who will not bother to read very small letters. Don’t lose your visitors because of font size. Optimal size seems to be 12-13 points. Visitors should be able to read your text easily, without any effort. Break big chunks of text into paragraphs and make them easy to follow.

Line Length

The length of a line of type should be comfortable to read. The optimal line length for printed materials seems to be about 10 to 12 words, or 60 to 70 characters. Somewhat shorter lines of about 40 to 50 characters may be more appropriate for larger displays. If the line is too long the reader must search for the beginning of it; if it is too short it will break up words or phrases awkwardly.

Creating emphasis

Creating emphasis is an important and integral part of designing and typesetting. Handled with taste and good judgment it can help direct and inform the reader. When these qualities are lacking, or someone feels that every word is important and must be emphasized in some way, then your web page starts to look like a battlefield and becomes difficult to read!

Graphics

It’s well known that a picture is worth a thousand words. This rule applies on the Internet too. Do your best to show clear, attractive photos of your product. If you offer a service, find a photo which will best describe it. However, be careful about file size. Don’t compress your photo to that level where it is not clear, but also don’t leave the photo on full quality. That will make the file size too large, and will increase download time.

Gif vs. JPEG

Less experienced web designers many times use the wrong format to store their pictures. Here are few guidelines which will help avoid mistakes:
If your photo has a small number of colors (less then 64) GIF will be a better choice. Make sure, however, to reduce the palette size as well. That is, if your image has 10-15 colors only, reduce your palette to 16 or 32 colors. Also, if your image contains text, GIF format should be your choice. JPEG uses a lousy compression method and will cause text and edges to become blurry.

If you are saving a photograph – save it as JPEG. JPEG images can contain over 32 million different colors. That is much more than the human eye can see. If you want to incorporate large text into a photographic image, JPEG may be a good format to use. While the edges may still get blurred, the danger of it becoming unreadable is slim. If you think your image is more important than the text, go ahead and use the JPEG format.

Speed

Do your best to reduce the download time. We live in a busy world and people are not willing to wait a long time. Try to reduce the size of your graphics as much as possible without destroying the image. Images must look good, but size (in KB) should be as small as possible.

Test before publishing

Do your homework, and do it well. Your visitors will not bother to send you an E-Mail that some of your links do not work or that some of your images do not appear. Even if someone does so, it is quite embarrassing. Perform spell and grammar checking. Remember that in many cases a visitor will build his opinion about you or your company on the impression from your web site. When published, your site should not contain any “under construction” or “coming soon” messages.