Good Web Design Practices

June 17, 2007 | 1 Comment

Your business resides on your web site — it’s like the headquarters of an off-line company. Therefore, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load more slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize it using an image editing program so that it has a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too large. If a block of text that is too large, your visitors will skim over the content &mdasah; or worse, skip over your content.

Make sure your web site complies to HTML and CSS web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Don’t use browser-level scripting languages, like Javascript, to handle or manipulate data or to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Don’t create your web site with Adobe Flash, or at least not entirely with Adobe Flash, if you want the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN to be able to index your pages. The search engines can not read Adobe Flash.

Use CSS to style your page content. You can save yourself a lot work by styling all elements on your website in one step.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Design Decisions, Graphics, HTML, PHP Scripting, Scripts, Server Side Includes 

Powweb’s $5.77/month October 25% off Special

October 13, 2006 | Leave a Comment

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This blog, like all my other sites, is hosted at Powweb.
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Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Apache Web Server, Blogs, CSS, HTML, PHP Scripting, Server Side Includes, Web Hosting 

Drawing on the Web

September 15, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Welcome to my new web design blog. I’ve decided to post web design topics here, rather than interleaving them into my regular computer tips blog at Terry’s Computer Tips blog

The topics here will all be web design focused, and I expect them to include at least the following subjects:

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Apache Web Server
  • Server Side Includes
  • PHP Scripting
  • JavaScript
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Getting Traffic
  • Inbound Links from other sites
  • Outbound Links to other sites
  • Text Editors
  • WYSIWYG Editors
  • Web Hosting
  • Monetizing Your Site
  • Google Adsense
  • Yahoo Publisher Network
  • Chitika eMiniMalls
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Internet Marketing

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Apache Web Server, CSS, HTML, Internet Marketing, JavaScript, Monetizing Your Site, PHP Scripting, SEO, Server Side Includes, Text Editors, Traffic & Linking, WYSIWYG Editors, Web Hosting