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Website Design Tips

Designing a website is a complicated process, that when finished should look simple. Multiple factors have to be taken into account to produce a professional, easy to use and effective website. Usability, compatability and accessibility are some of the key areas to consider when creating your site.

Appearance

When most people think about the appearance of a website they will want lots of moving graphics with interactivity, fancy buttons, lots of colours etc... However although appearance is very important it is just one aspect of many that need to be considered when designing a good web page. Flash graphics look great and in certain circumstances can be very affective but the down side is that they can slow down your page load time and draw the attention of the user away from the important part of your site, the information on it. Different background images on each page and interactive navigation bars all look great but can make the site confusing and difficult to navigate.

Take a look at some of the most successful sites, google, bbc news. These are very simple in design, easy to use and very good at drawing your attention and because of this they make you come back. This is what you are looking for from a well designed website.

A consistent theme using a small pallett of complementry colours and fonts where each page is laid out the same and focuses on the information is a good place to start, make sure the pages are not too large but have enough relevant information to keep the user interested and if required are updated on a regular basis.

Usability

The main purpose of your website might be to promote your business / organisation, sell products or provide information for users to reference.

Make sure that the information on your website is good enough to allow the user to make an informed decision. It must be up to date and easy to understand. having all this well presented information will be no good if the user can not find it on your website so you need to make sure that it is all easily accessible. If a user can not find what they want quickly on your site they are likely to leave and look somewhere else.

In Summary

To produce a professional website you are looking at the following :