Good Web Design

"There are two types of web sites. There are those web sites you date, like 'The Data Was Lost Collective...' ...and then...there are those web sites you marry, like Yahoo! The trick is not to confuse the two."

Too many web designers get confused about what type of site they're creating -- witness the site that was up for a long time . If you're creating a site that's for a media company (movie, music, etc.), fashion company, art school sites where there's no accountability for the bottom line, then it's ok to use "wild and crazy" design techniques. But remember, "It's a temporary thing." This type of design is not supposed to be serious and last forever. Have fun.

But if you want your website to look reasonable and is functional, devote your energies to keyword rich content, site maps, privacy policies and the other standards that seem to be missing from a lot of websites. The things that the Search Engines like to see and will reward with higher rankings. A ‘crawler’ can’t see fancy flash gizmos or premium quality images over 100 kb each.

If you're creating a real web site for a real company, you have to choose a design that's not quite as exciting. Something more responsible and restrained. Something dependable. Something you'd marry

It would have to be to keep it clean and simple. There is nothing worse than a cluttered looking website and there is nothing that will repel visitors more quickly than a slow loading website. Take a look at a few of the ‘TOP’ Internet based company’s websites like Adobe.com. The largest image on their Home page is 6 Kb. There is no Flash, no music. Even Microsoft.com has one small, unobtrusive ‘flash’ component in the bottom left corner and their largest image is 18 Kb.

Many private Internet users are using ‘56kbps dial up modem’ connections (according to research firm Instat-MDR). So, by building a website that is only accessible in a reasonable amount of time to DSL users, you are effectively disqualifying yourself from visits by 80 percent of the people likely to be interested in your product or service. They will not wait.

The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load.

Minimize the use of images - Images do enhance a page but don't make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Very often simple designs are the best.

Optimize images for the web - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image.

Use Tables creatively - You can get some great looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like.

Cut down the use of animated gifs - Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor's attention to a particular section of your site.Or design simple icons icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor.

Use background images instead of big images whenever possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small.

Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.

Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don't make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.

Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful.

Vaidehi Ghag
For web design source files visit my site http://www.davbindu.com/

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