Web design should involve achieving a design that is both usable and pleasing, delivers information and builds brand, is technically sound and visually coherent. Wondering how to create good website check below some useful tips for web design to find answer.

How to Make Good Website

Know your audience
The target audience determines what content you present and how to create good website accordingly.

Know your competitionhow to make good website design-tips
Knowing your market can help you in building your website that serve your purpose.

Plan a clear structure
This step is vital. The site should be easy to navigate. Produce a sitemap of your proposed web content. Visitors should ideally find in formation in 2-3 clicks maximum.

Use of Text
Make sure-
  • Background does not interrupt the text
  • Text is big enough to read, but not too big
  • The hierarchy of information is perfectly clear
  • Columns of text are narrower than in a book to make reading easier on the screen
Also make correct choice of
Text Font
Font sizes
Spacing
Color
Paragraphing

Clarity
Keeping your design crisp and sharp is super important in Web design. And when it comes to clarity, it's all about the pixels.

In your CSS, everything will be pixel perfect so there's nothing to worry about, but in Photoshop it is not so. To achieve a sharp design you have to:
* Keep shape edges snapped to pixels. This might involve manually cleaning up shapes, lines, and boxes if you're creating them in Photoshop.
* Make sure any text is created using the appropriate anti-aliasing setting.
* Ensuring that contrast is high so that borders are clearly defined.

Use Quality Graphics and Brand Site Effectively
Ensure strong brand presence and quality graphics on your site to leave a lasting impression.

Limit the use of animation and graphic
Animated images can be quite effective when used in a subtle manner, however overuse is considered a web design no'no. Why? you may ask, well because animated images contain many different frames just like in a cartoon, these frames are effectively a separate image and therefore the more animations on your website the higher the load time will be. Multimedia can make your content more attractive, but don't overdo it. Use graphics only if they support your message - white space has proven to be important in communications. Too large images also slow page loading for people with poor connections.

Check web page Load time
The recommended size that a web page should be is between 40-60 K the reason for this is because we web surfers are an impatient lot and if a site takes more than a minute we loose interest and move on to the next website, some people will not even give you a minute - 20 seconds and they are off. To keep load times as low as possible try to use the least number of graphics as possible, only use graphics that enhance your site. Remember that Jpg's are generally large files so try and keep the size low without effecting to much quality. Also some people save normal images as jpg's, dont do this as mostly photographs need to be jpgs. Try to keep your site as quick to load as can be.

Think about your content
Remember “content is king”. Most of your visitors won't know the subject as well as you do, and have little time to spend reading! So keep it simple and short. Avoid jargon, be concise, focus on the successes and attract your audience by announcing exploitable developments or technologies and their potential benefits.

Navigation
One of the most frustrating experiences you can have on a Web site is being unable to figure out where to go or where you are. There are two aspects of navigation to keep in mind:

Navigation — Where can you go?
There are a few commonsense rules to remember here. Buttons to travel around a site should be easy to find - towards the top of the page and easy to identify. They should look like navigation buttons and be well described. The text of a button should be pretty clear as to where it's taking you. If you have a rollover sub-menu, ensuring a person can get to the sub-menu items without losing the rollover is important. Similarly changing the color or image on rollover is excellent feedback for a user.

Orientation — Where are you now?
There are lots of ways you can orient a user so there is no excuse not to. In small sites, it might be just a matter of a big heading or a 'down' version of the appropriate button in your menu. In a larger site, you might make use of bread crumb trails, sub-headings and a site map for the truly lost.

Offer easily searchable content
Have a 'search engine' box on the front page. A number of tools can be found on the web to help you do this, including Google.

Try not to use frames
Frames are considered to be an evil of the web, although unless it is absolutely necessary that your site needs to use frames, then dont! Frames can be very unpredictable, search engines, browsers and web surfers in general just dont like them. If your site uses frames the likely chance that you are loosing visitors will be high.

Ensure Ease of Access to your Contact Information
Make sure your contact details, phone, address, address map, email etc is well placed on the site for users to contact you conveniently.

Consistency
Consistency means making everything match. Heading sizes, font choices, coloring, button styles, spacing, design elements, illustration styles, photo choices, etc. Everything should be themed to make your design coherent between pages and on the same page. Keeping your design consistent is about being professional.

Make your website look professional
Customers, for the most part expect a company's web site to be as neat and professional looking as their printed sales literature and marketing materials. Anything less than a professional façade for your online shop, will make your business look small and unreliable.

Make it interactive
Allow visitors to interact. Host a discussion forum or start a blog – it may encourage visitors to drop inmore often.

Usability
Web design ain't just about pretty pictures. With so much information and interaction to be effected on a Web site, it's important that you, the designer, provide for it all. That means make Website design usable.

In short, make sure your website is consistent in look, feel, and design. Nothing is more disturbing to a website's visitors than feeling as if they have just clicked away to another website. Keep the navigation, colors, and themes consistent throughout the entire website.

Recommended Reading:
About web hosting
White hat seo

3 comments:

  1. Joe -Freelance web designer8/25/2009

    -A Good Website is Compelling: It Provides Value to Your Audience that draws them to your site again and again.

    -A Good Website Meets Clearly Identified Goals

    I must say that:
    although visual attractiveness is an important element, compelling content, clearly defined goals and easy navigation are equally important for a good website.

    Joe

    ReplyDelete
  2. Robert8/27/2009

    To have best website:

    Your site needs to be clean, simple, and well-structured. People use the Net to find information. The best Web site design includes informative content, simple layout, easy navigation and fast loading graphics. It allows users to search for and locate the information they desire in the quickest and most convenient manner possible.

    On the other hand, your Web site design is a reflection of your business, the quality of your product. Web surfers looking for some information not only want the right info, they want it from the right source. So make sure that your site doesn't look like it was designed by a novice.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mark freelance web designer10/05/2009

    Some more Helpful Tips:
    Keep pages short and simple - remember that other countries (if that is a consideration) may not
    have sufficient bandwidth to allow fast loading of complex graphics or pictures.

    Ensure pictures use the lowest resolution, without compromising them, for fast loading.

    Make sure the text is clear and understandable.

    If you have a lot of information to show - it is better to split that information into a number of linked pages rather than one big one.

    One must always keep in mind to choose best color combination while designing website.

    Thanks for the useful information.

    ReplyDelete