We all know one can design a website but the question remains how to design eye catching website. I have read many books, articles and tutorials about web design and have realized that every web designer has his own way of designing websites.
Of course, I wrote about something which you might already know about but I believe there is always someone out there who needs such information and tips and benefits from them.
In the article I have gathered and explained some good tips (Do's and Don't's) which will give you an astonishing results if you follow them well.
Below are the tips for designing an eye catching website: 1. Consistency . . . It is always better to keep
your design from page to page consistent so that the visitor knows
that he is still in the same site and didn't jump to another site.
The page or site color scheme and navigation should be the same throughout the site.
2. Navigation . . . Always keep your navigation
simple. Tell the visitor which page he is on. This can be done in
many ways and the way which I think is the best way is to remove the
link from the page which he is on. For example, Let's suppose that
you have the following navigation text on your home page ... Home -- About Us -- Contact Us -- Services -- Order
Then suppose that the visitor clicked on the
services page. When the services page is loaded then the link which
says services will not be a link instead it will be a normal text
with different color. That helps the visitor know which page he is
on. If you are using graphic buttons then You can provide a different version of the button and make it without a link.
3. Use Browser Safe Colors .
. . What are browser safe colors anyway? Browser safe colors
are 216 colors which remain the same when displayed on any computer
or browser. Colors which are not browser safe may dither when displayed some computers ,meaning if a computer can't display a color 100% it will then display the nearest color to it instead.
So make sure that you use browser safe colors throughout your site.
4. Minimize the use of Graphics . . . A site with a lot of graphics will take forever to load. Even though graphics make sites better but it is always better to minimize the use of them for many reasons including but not limited to the following :
A lot of Graphics make your site or pages take forever to load which will make the visitor of your website close the page or hit the back button.
Search Engine Spiders have problems with graphics because they will not be able to index any page that has a lot of graphics.
Of course you can use small, yet fast loading
graphics instead of the big ones. Also You can use them as a table
or cell background but make sure that the text is readable before
the background image is loaded. And don't forget to use the ALT tag for all of your images. 5. Flash . . . Flash is is much like the graphics
. Even though Flash brings your site to life but avoid using a lot
of it on your site because that will make it load forever.
You can use small Flash animations and also You should give the url
of the Flash Plug-in for the visitors who haven't got the Flash
Player on their computer. After all You want people to be able to
see your Flash animations. So don't over use it because they say Flash is evil.
6. Frames . . . Frames are not good for many things including but not limited to the following: Search engines have problems with
them. The links can be opened into the wrong frame.
Distracting scroll bars are displayed when the
content doesn't fit it. and many other things but There are many reasons which make us sometimes use Frames on our websites which some are the following: Frames enable us to manage sites easily.
Suppose you want to update the header of your website ,if you
designed it with just an html then You will have to update all of
the pages on the site but Frames made that easy by just updating one
page and You will not have to update the rest. There are many
alternatives to the frames. You can use PHP Includes to include the
desired file to the desired location. You can use this code to
do so. Where the filename.php will be the file name
which you want to include. But The page which you are going to
insert the code must be saved as yourpage.php and have .php file
extension. Also You can use Extended Server Side Includes
which is like the PHP by using the following code. But The page
which you are going to insert the code must be saved as
yourpage.shtml and have .shtml file extension. So avoid using Frames on any part of your site.
7. Organize Your site files well : It is good to
organize your site files well and divide them into categories for
easy file management. For example suppose you have a lot of products
and then you can organize them as follows - products/product1/ or
products/nameofproduct/ - So the url of the product will be like
http://yourcompanyname.com/products/product1 or http://yourcompanyname.com/products/nameofproduct/
- In that way You can organize your web files easily.
8. Use Limited Colors only . . . Avoid using many colors on your site. Limit your colors to four or six.
9. Links . . . Your links
should be descriptive. And should be readable. Also Use one color
for all of your major links. These were some tips which is necessary to use for designing an eye catching website.
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