Website Tips

Ten Simple Important Things To Make your Site Better

1. Navigation: Keep it simple. Too many drop-downs from the menu could overwhelm and  confuse the visitors. Navigation doesn't have to be fancy nor does it need to boring but it should be kept simple so that visitor do not have to figure out how to get from one place to another.

2. Typography: Use fonts that are supported by all major operating systems. If you use a font called Berylium, the chances are that a good number of visitors will not have it and so therefore their browsers will render the page using the browser's default font. Also, use a font that fits your theme but be sure that it's support and easy to read.

3. Color: Having too many colors can certainly turn off visitors especially if the colors are not used wisely. The ideal number of colors to use is 2 with up to 3 additional related colors for each. It's possible to have 3 colors with additional related colors but those colors should flow with the theme of the site. For instance, a baby site may used red, yellow, blue and green but it would like pretty kind of ugly as is. However, using pastel colors of the same group would flow nicely with the theme of the site.

4. Content: What's a website if you don't have good content that visitors need? Providing relative good content is vital to many users looking for specific things on the internet. Don't write about candles if your site is about auto repair.

5. Graphics: People like pictures. Sometimes they often speak volumes. When you use images, be sure that it related to your site's theme whether as a background or as a picture to emphasize something that is related to the current page. Unless you are displaying several products, try to not to use too many images per page. Try to avoid blinking images. It make look cool to you but can be very annoying to the visitors.

6. Advertisements: Most people like to make money and there is nothing wrong in having advertisements so long it's done tastefully and doesn't give the users a bad experience of being swamped by multiples of ads all over the site. Most people are there for services or information you are providing. Don't make the mistake of turning your visitors off.

7. Flash intros, pop-ups, banner marquee, page counters and blinking text: Don't use them. Most people find them annoying. Some flash intros are pretty cool but do they really need to see the same intro page every time they type in your web URL? Banner marquee is hard to read and follow. Besides, web standards no longer supports the marquee tag. Page counters...who uses them? Businesses? Most host providers' offer web stats to help monitor your site's pages to see who's viewing what. Blinking text is annoying and distracting. If you need to grab visitors' attention, use a color text that stands out from the rest of the content.

8. Consistency: People like consistency especially when it comes to surfing the internet. Although not all websites are the same, the majority of them are relatively consistent such as the menus are located at the top or left of the page and not on the right. This applies to the use of fonts as well as the color theme and layout of the site.

9. A never-ending page: Have you seen web page that you have to scroll down so much that you wonder where it will end? A good design should have no more than two full scroll views per page. Visitors like to have content broken up into parts, sections and/or categories just like a book does which has sections and chapters.

10. Text links: Underline them! Not to be confused with navigational links but what I am talking about are the text links within the content. Link colors should also be consistent throughout. Most visitors that see underline text think that they are links. Never use underline for text alone unless it is a link. If you must make your text links non-underlined then make sure that the links are links by give it an obvious color that is consistent throughout. If you need to emphasize a word or a phrase, bold it or italicize it.