Useful Tips

Here are some essential web design tips that every web site should follow.

1. Plan Your Website – start right.
2. Good Website Design – what to stay away from.
3. Screen Resolutions – can your pages be seen?
4. Content – what is your site full of?
5. Flash Designs – To Flash or not to Flash?

Plan Your Website

Website planning is probably the most important part of building a website. It can also be the most frustrating if you don’t start with a good understanding of how the Internet works and or have unreasonable expectations about how your site should be designed.

Without a basic, clear plan about how your website will be organized and function it will take you longer to complete it, make it harder for you to accomplish your goals, and will make it difficult for your visitors to find what they are looking for.

When you start to build your site and add information and products to it do it one page at a time, completing each page as much as possible as you go. If your site will have more than 5 pages don’t create those pages in your site’s directory until you are ready to work on them. The more pages your site has the longer it will take you to complete them all and the longer it will take you to “go live”. Start with just a few pages and a handful of products or articles and that way you can start to put your site to work for you a lot sooner as you build it up.

Websites are never totally finished. There is always updating that needs to be done and fine tuning to get the best search engine listings. If your site is a mess, disorganized, and full of empty pages more than likely it will be a failure. Start small and get it actively working for you as soon as possible in a professional and effective manner. Web site planning is only the first step.

Good Website Design

The design and layout of your site is the second most important part of building a site. If you don’t have a good design it won’t matter how great your content is or how much advertising you do. If your design looks bad no one might visit your page and those that do might not stay long or buy anything.

Choose your colors carefully and keep in mind that your tastes may not be appealing to your target audience.

The website name, domain name, or business name should be prominently placed somewhere near the top of your web pages either within your logo or near it. And it should fit within the typical boundaries of the webpage.

The navigation buttons or links of a site are usually placed in one of three different areas of the web page. Where your menu buttons or links appear on your pages should be decided by the number of main or primary web pages you will have in your site.
Primary webpages links are the pages organized just below your home page in the structure or diagram of your site.

Screen Resolutions

One of the most frequent mistakes we see people make is they build their site in such a way that it looks great on their own computer, but terrible on just about any other. How can this happen you ask? It happens because of the various screen resolution or display settings available on every computer.
A few short years ago, monitors were so small that the best screen resolution setting on them was 640×480. Then as average monitor sizes increased the best resolution moved up to 800×600 and eventually the standard will move up again to 1024×768 or higher. The problem that occurs because of these different display settings is that a page created on a computer set to 1024×768 or higher will only be seen the same way on other computers set to the same resolution. Because we are at a time in the evolution of computers where the standard is currently moving between two widely used settings this issue occurs a lot.

The good news is that as long as you create your website with your computer set to the 800 x 600 resolution it will appear fine on any computer set to that same resolution or higher, which is 95% of all the computers connected to the Internet.

You should check your site in various screen resolutions after each time you add new pages or content to make sure nothing is overriding the percentage option you set.

Content

Your content is the information or products that you want visitors to come and see or buy and any images that you use to assist that objective.
Written information works best and is easier to read when it is broken up into short, concise paragraphs. Ask yourself this question, would you have read all of this if we had bunched it all up into big, book-like paragraphs?

Do your best to use good grammar and spelling. Run your information through the spellchecker in your word processor before you enter it into your site.

Anytime you use images or graphics in or around your information or product descriptions try to use the smallest images possible.

Flash Design

Flash is a design element developed by Macromedia Inc. as an alternative method of bringing motion to static websites. Prior to the development of Flash, the only way to do that was using animated GIF files which were the equivalent of how old-time cartoons were made. Flash changed all that and made it possible to create larger animations that incorporated more detail and more style while still maintaining a relatively low file size for downloading over regular dial up connections. That was many years ago.

To view Flash animation, your computer must have a special plugin or program installed on it called the Flash Player.

Flash is the future of the Internet and how websites will be built. No doubt about it. But at the present time, the use of Flash comes with a number problems every website owner needs to consider before they add it to their site.

First of all, Flash is still very much in development. As of this writing, the Flash Player that comes installed on almost every new computer sold today is version 6.0. A special program is also needed to create Flash animations. Macromedia’s own current Flash Player can’t even recognize animations that were created using the original version of its creation software. So it is possible that a visitor to your site could have a 2 year old computer with Flash Player 3.0 installed that can’t display your animation because it was made with a newer creator or vice versa !

Another problem is that the more dynamic your animation is, the larger the file size will be and therefore the longer it will take to download. For a visitor with a broadband connection that isn’t a problem. But 60% – 70% of the Internet using public are still on slow 56K dial up connections. Using even a little bit of Flash will cause them to have to wait longer for your site to load. That’s never a good thing.

Search engines don’t like Flash either. Their spiders can’t read anything contained in the animation. When they come to index your website they are looking for text, not graphics. If the first thing they run into is a Flash intro screen then the spiders will almost always immediately leave your site and go elsewhere looking for what they do like.

Finally, it is a well known fact that constant movement of something on a webpage will draw the visitor’s eyes to it. That can be a good thing if whatever is moving is the primary reason for the visitor to be there, but if you want the visitor to see something else then the movement becomes a distraction. That’s also never a good thing.

Go to any of the high-traffic, well known websites that actually sell products or services. Sites like Amazon.com, Buy.com, Yahoo, MSN.com etc. Do you see any Flash animation? The answer will be no. Even Macromedia.com uses it in a limited way on their own website and they are the creators of the technology.

UPDATE – The recently released Windows XP Service Pack 2 from Microsoft increases the security settings on any computer it is installed on. In most cases, Windows update will download and install it automatically. That security setting increase classifies any Flash animation on any site as an ActiveX program and blocks it because ActiveX is a potential vulnerability for hackers to exploit to gain access to the visitor’s computer. Obviously, the Flash on your site isn’t any kind of security threat, but a visitor’s computer can’t dtermine that on its own. If it is set to block any ActiveX programming from running then that’s what it will do. Until either Macromedia or Microsoft figure out how to exclude Flash from being classified as ActiveX programming any Flash on your site will be blocked from showing to any visitor who has the Windows XP Service Pack 2 installed on their computer and has not manually lowered the security settings afterward.

Update 2 – Spring ‘06Microsoft recently lost a patent infringement lawsuit regarding how Internet Explorer recognizes and displays flash content. The lawsuit loss effectively prohibited Microsoft from displaying flash content the same way that it has always been done. Microsoft claimed to have a different way to do it that would not infringe on the patent and implemented the new method right away with an update to the IE browser. However, now any flash on a webpage that was coded into the page the old way has to be clicked on for any navigation links embedded in the flash to be functional. Yet another reason to not use flash for any significant parts of your site….