As a web master it is always a good thing to practice good web design principles. By enforcing such principles on all your web pages, your website will reach out to the maximum number of visitors (consumers) as possible. Below you will find important web design tips you should always follow. It’s always a good strategy to lead the way. In doing so, you will guide your visitors through your web pages using your site navigation. Your site navigation menu should always stay clean and clear from broken links. Make sure to place links to the most important pages towards the top of the navigation so your visitors will see it.
Limit the number of images or graphics displayed on your website. Having a lot of graphics or images on your site will cause your web page to load slowly, and a slow loading web page will cause your visitors to move away from your website. If it is necessary to have images or graphics on your site, use image editing applications to reduce the files size. Also, make sure to optimize your photos by using the proper image and alt tags.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. A good length is about four to six lines of text per paragraph and about four to eight paragraphs per web page. If your paragraph is too long, split it into multiple separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not appear too big. A block of text that is too long will deter your visitors from reading your content. So the golden rule here is SHORT & TO THE POINT.
Make sure your site layout complies to web standards at www.w3.org and it is cross-browser compatible. Your website design layout may look great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Safari, Netscape, Firefox and Opera. There are some applications you can use online to check if your site is compatible with other browsers. As for me, I have all the browsers downloaded on my computer, and I always check my layouts manually. If your site is not compatible with other browsers you will lose out on a lot of potential visitors.
Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not 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.
Finally, use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to style your web page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one page.
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