Thursday, February 14, 2008

User-Friendly Web Design

It is very important when you are designing a website that you reign in your own creative impulses and work from the point of view of what the person looking at the site needs, rather than what you think looks good and attractive. A simple starting point is to ask yourself if the average person would have any problems in their navigation through the site.

A common complaint in web usability is the difficulty in navigating from page to page. This is where good web design comes into play. The most common position for navigation links on most websites is either at the left hand side, at the top, or at the bottom.

There is no reason to have links dotted all over the place, out of sight, and indistinguishable from the rest of the site. This is to ensure that the site rates highly for usability in the public’s eye. If you can make their journey easier, then they will be more inclined to return to your site again and again. Good web design should also be very professional looking. A nice color scheme, simple layout, and readable text is the very minimum that is required to make your website as accessible as it can be to the general public.

You should also pay attention to site construction when designing a website. That means that all links work, that all images upload, and that the time it takes for a page to present itself on the reader’s web browser is kept to a minimum. Nobody wants to wait two minutes to read a page.

On top of that, when the page does load, the layout has to also be visually appealing and simple, as opposed to flashy and artistic. When most people visit a website, they usually know what they want to look for, and don’t appreciate barriers being put in place for them to get to the information they need.

Some Web Design Options For a Home Business Web Site holder With a negligible Budget

For a home business holder or probable webmaster with a very minimum financial plan, what are the options?

To start with there are many sites that help with templates. This makes designing very easy because all you require to do is change and adjust an existing template to come up with a quite original looking brand new site. However it is not too hard for anybody to figure out rapidly that a web site is just an alteration of some common-looking template.

Yet one more choice is to visit one of the many sites that sponsor competitive bidding online that have registered web designers one of whom you can appoint through them. Because you have gotten your designer through a viable bidding process, probabilities are that you will end up with a very little price for the service.

Best Fonts for Website Design

A font is a comprehensive set of characters of particular size, style and type. Popularity and acceptability of font is depend upon style are readability of that font. Most popular fonts are Frutiger, Futura, Helvetica, Optima, Agfa Rotis, Arial, Lucida, Gills Sans, Univers and Palatino. These fonts are popular because of their readability at low screen resolution. Since the rich content websites use content to get the point across, it is careful to use fonts that are easy to read. If fonts used by you make the content’s readability poor then visitors will more likely leave than put forth the effort. Keep following points in mind while developing your fonts for your website.

Big Fonts

Use Big Fonts for the heading of the web page, paragraphs or for points. Bold them, make them stick out and attract the reader. Many of your visitors will appreciate this step because they will not have to put stress to read the text. Sometimes bigger is better.

Sans Serif

If you don’t have knowledge about the magic of the professional fonts, or how they will affect your visitors, sales, then you should go for san serif font. The reason to choose these fonts is that these fonts provide the awesome readability for visitors in a low resolution atmosphere.

Simple is Safe

Don’t forget that simplicity is always appreciated. Don’t confuse your self in complex fonts. Keep one thing mind that simple is safe. Keep the things simple and easy to read and you will definitely get benefit of this.

1. Format your text using CSS.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go - use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler.

2. Make the font size big enough to read.

Consider your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it's never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn't have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana.

3. Make the text contrast with its background.

The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colors if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there's not enough contrast.

4. Give the lines room to breathe.

Don't stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I'll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line.

5. Break text up into chunks.

No matter how good a writer you are, people don't want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that really interest them, or use bulleted lists to change the pace of the writing and slow down the scanning.

And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. Nothing irritates me more on a web page than spelling errors - it simply makes you look like you don't care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spell-check tool.

Making your website's content more legible is easy. It doesn't take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that's more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors.

5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website's Legibility

Websites that make their customers work to read them are not the best way to get business. Miniscule fonts, text in colors that make it hard to see against the background color, and lines that are piled on top of each other are problems, but they're easy to correct. Let's jump right in and look at five easy fixes: