19 replies to this topic

[delivi]

Getting a great looking website is really a difficult task. We need to take care to make the site more acceaaible and get more visitors pouring in. Here are a few dont's that you need to keep in in while designing a site.

1. Clutter - Too much text and too many links is information overload. Simplicity is the most efficient way of getting a point across.

If you must have a dozen of links in your site, classify them in sections for easy navigation.

2. Different font sizes- Keep consistency in font sizes for text content of similar nature like headers, footers and body text.

3. Too many GIFs - GIFs take a longer time to load and just put people off.

4. Flash - Flash is a brilliant way to desgin content for your website, but do not overuse it. Using too much flash where simple HTML would have done the work is simply annoying. Always have a Skip intro button if you add an flash intro to your site. Provide an Sound ON/Off button if you add background music.

5. No Popups - The thought of using pop-ups should never cross your mind. And these days browsers block pop-ups efficiently, so it becomes useless. Opening clicked links in new windows must be avoided and used only when required.

6. No Horizontal Scrolling - Internet users are accustomed to scrolling webpages from top-to-bottom. The horizontal scroll must be used rarely for anything unless it is a large image.

7. Design for Standard Window Size - design your fixed layouts for web pages considering the standard window sizes, used by most users. 800 x 600 was the standard size a few years before, now 1024 x 768 is the standard window size.

8. No long URLs - Keep your URLs short and related to the subject matter of the web pages they link to. There is no point having URLs larger than 30 to 35 characters long.

9. The first four second - As a rule of thumb, if one cannot figure out what the site is about within four secondsof looking at the loaded web page, the site will most probabily fail to make an impression on the user. Make your contnet crisp and up to the point you want to convey.

Edited by delivi, 01 June 2007 - 03:30 PM.

[SamiFX]

Thanks a lot for that delivi.. It'll be really important for me but I have to recommend members to use CSS too..

[heavensounds]

Yep, I have to agree with you on all of the things you've pointed out! Great guide and I will sure put it in a safe place and read it everytime before I'll start working on a project...

Eventhough these things are well known to experienced web developers, it is wise to read them from time to time so one does not forget about the most simple but most important rules of webdesigning...

Best whises

[masugidsk8r]

An additional note: Separate content from Design, meaning use stylesheets to layout web pages and have pure content in HTML. There should be no attributes in any of the HTML tags that would affect how the page looks--leave it all to stylesheets. These attributes should be used mostly: "class" and "id"

Attributes such as "width" "height" "margin" "bgcolor" are a MUST-NOT Apply these styles using CSS

One more thing: Do not use tables to lay out webpages! Use "div" tags as an alternative. The reason behind it is to increase page load. HOWEVER... styling in CSS can be a pain in the *bottom*. Most of the times you won't get the result you wanted, but once you get into it you can produce more precise results.

[FolkRockFan]

Also: check your colors. I hate seeing Web sites with, say, lime-green backgrounds and yellow text. Yes, it's cool to do some background other than white, but make sure that it's not hard on the eyes.

[Smack]

How about auto playing music, or music you can't turn off within 2 seconds. I hate that! I want to listen to the music coming from my media player, users should be able to choose if they wish to listen to the music, not have it forced on them.

Unless it's a music artist's page, then it makes sense.

...One reason I don't mess with MySpace pages.

[sylenzednuke]

I pretty much agree to all of your points and including the ones others have mentioned here.

This will quite much be a good guide for beginners to start making web-pages having certain criteria in mind.

This will definitely stop people creating fairly ugly web-sites using things like Freewebs and Piczo and this might as well reduce the number of ugly web-sites. Check BooZKers topic for reference.

[Tetraca]

I use percentages for my just about everything so I don't have to worry about designing for a particular size. This list is also incomplete.

http://catb.org/~esr/html-hell.html

That link has just about everything you shouldn't do on your webpage.

[Saint_Michael]

funny that no one really caught on with the gifs or they did but didn't say anything so I will; It should all image formats and not just gifs so to many images make the web page take a bit longer to download. Now with number 7 people still code to 800x600 because some people especially that guy in Antarctica, still use that resolution. So basically if are building a design you can't flip flop between liquid and fix because that will just look messy in any resolution outside the one your programmed it in.

Also to add on to flash section, search engines do not recognize full flash sites, so if you plan for your site to be index and be used by everyone, have enough html code within your structure for it to be spidered.

[Matt2]

Those points are all very true that have been bought up. Some of the things that annoy me most, are auto-playing music, music you can't turn off, videos autoplaying and colours. Some people just don't know how to use colours properly....