Web Design Tips: What Will Keep Your Visitors On Your Website (Part 2)

Web design plays an important role in the success of your business. Bad web design can damage your company’s reputation regardless of the quality of your products or services. In the previous article, we discussed the first 3 web design tips. Let’s move on to the following essential web design tips.

1. Fast Charge

Overloading your website with flashy graphics and multimedia is the best way to clutter up your website. Can you imagine waiting for a 300k graphic to load when you know it should only be 30k? Nothing is more annoying than this. There are graphics programs available that will help you compress your files so they take up less space and therefore less time to load in your user’s browser.

Flashy graphics and multimedia control look nice, but when they obstruct the effective functionality of the website, it would be difficult for your users to take advantage of the information they need. Users don’t want to be bothered by these cumbersome Java scrollers just to see all the text on the page, much less wait for all these graphics to load. Add autoplay sound files to things to avoid when planning your web design.

2. Readability of the website

The line of text should be no more than 600px wide to prevent it from looking cluttered. To make the line length manageable, you should place the text in a fixed-width table in the center of the web page. Texts with no length limits will cause many problems. First, the content will be too broad or long, making it difficult for visitors to follow, especially if they have large screens. The content is generally fluid and automatically expands when the window is large.

However, placing content at a fixed width creates another problem. Web pages are generally designed to work on computer screens as small as 800×600. This simply means that anything larger than 770px wide should be avoided to account for scrollbars and the like.

Avoid making your web page too wide. Since most users have 1024×768 monitors, web pages should be absolutely viewable at 1000 pixels wide with no horizontal scrolling. To check, if your web page doesn’t work at 100 pixels, it means it’s too wide.

Use contrasting colors or simple backgrounds to emphasize your text for easier reading. It’s hard to read light text on an equally light background, let alone dark text on an equally dark background. Many web designers are guilty of this error. Dark red text on a dark blue background can give your users a migraine. You know what I mean?

If you’re using background images, just make sure they don’t have a wide mix of light and dark colors, or better yet, use a simple, mostly dark or white background. In this way, readability is increased. Another effective method of increasing the readability of text placed on a background image is to increase the size of the text and/or make it bold.

Another important thing that you MUST never forget is to make the text big enough to read. This is common sense, but unfortunately, many still don’t follow this rule. If you want to punish your visitors, I guess you can break this cardinal rule of web design over and over again. The CSS rules for using text are 12 or 13 px Arial and 11 or 12 px Verdana.

Here are other important tips to improve website readability:

• Make use of line spacing
• Avoid typing more than a few words in ALL CAPS
• Make use of a spell checker
• Avoid using more than one exclamation point.