When
designing a web site, you want eye-catching graphics, user-friendly navigation,
easy to read textual content and a web page that loads quickly. Web designers
are faced with many challenges and often times need to make compromises to
ensure the best overall design.
Some of
the prominent factors good designers take into consideration are discussed
below.
It
is important to ensure that the most important topics are presented at the top
of the page above the fold line so that the important information is presented
when the page is first displayed in the visitor’s browser. Research has shown
that visitors typically decide in the first five to seven seconds whether the
site offers the information they are looking for.
Short
sentences and short paragraphs with no more than four to five lines per
paragraph are preferred over longer more technical dialog since the reader is
able to scan the page for what they are looking for quickly. Recent changes in
style are also favoring graphics and images over long, technical textual
content.
Load Time:
Load
time is the time it takes for your web site to display in your visitor’s
browser depending upon the connection speed. Downloading smaller image files
and consolidating images into one image file which is read and processed by the
client-side program to position and display individual images on the computer
screen are two techniques used to reduce load time.
Cross
Browser Compatibility means ensuring that the colors and web page layout
display the same on different browsers. Different vendors process HTML
directives differently or don’t process some commands at all. A good HTML
manual reference can be of assistance but testing on different browsers is the
best way to determine compatibility.
Color
compatibility is the other issue. There are 216-browser safe colors and 256-web
safe colors. If the designer wants to ensure color compatibility, they should
use one of the 216 browser-safe colors. If the designer needs to use a color
scheme outside of the browser-safe color palette, then using an embedded Flash
color management profile can help ensure color compatibility. Adobe has an
add-on that is now installed on most newer computer systems.
User-friendly
navigation is another design consideration. If it is not intuitive, the visitor
will soon become frustrated and leave the site. If the navigation has been
coded in JavaScript, it will not be visible to visitors who have JavaScript disabled
in their browser, so it is best to use HTML to ensure the navigation is
accessible to all visitors.
Conclusion:
If
you’re contemplating designing your own site and have a technical background,
you may wish to purchase some good technical documents to assist you. If you’re
not technical, you may wish to consider buying a pre-built template and
incorporating your personalized content or hiring a professional web designer.
Tampa Custom Design Studio offers affordable custom web design and search
engine optimization services, if you decide to go the professional web designer
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