Best Design Practices

Your website is where your online business resides – it's similar to an offline company's headquarters. It is therefore important to practice good website design principles to make sure your site connects with the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many of them as possible.

There are a number of ways to make this happen.

·          Ensure that the navigation of your site is clear and easy to follow. Your navigation or menu bar should be uncluttered and clear so that visitors know how to navigate around your site without getting confused.

 

·          Reduce the number of images or graphics files on your website. Image/Graphics files are usually very large and they make your site load slowly. If you determine that an image is essential for your site, make sure you utilize a file type that uses the least amount of storage space. Most graphics files on the internet are of the .jpg or .gif format as opposed to using the .bmp or .png formats, because the latter can be up to 5 times the size as the former when showing the same graphic. Larger files mean a longer load time and translate into a slower loading web site. So remember to only use graphics files that are absolutely necessary.

 

·          Keep the text in your paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. Studies have shown that smaller paragraphs are easier to read than longer run-on paragraphs. In order to keep your visitor's interest and increase the probability of their reading your content remember to keep your paragraphs small.
 

·          Verify that your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure that it is multi-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but displays horribly in Firefox and Netscape, you may lose a lot of prospective visitors and customers.

 

·          Avoid using multiple scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. When possible, use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy script usage will slow down the loading time of your site and may even cause some browsers to crash. Also, some scripts are not supported by all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

 

·          Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) to create your page content because it can save a lot of maintenance work by updating all elements on your website when making just one change in your CSS file.

Keep the points above in mind when creating your web site and you'll be certain that everyone who visits your site will get all of the information you want them to have in as little time as possible.

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