Simple Web Design Steps to Improve Your Website's Readability

by: Mark Webster

Websites that make their customers work to read them are not the best way to get business. Miniscule fonts, text in colours that make it hard to see against the background colour, 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:

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

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.

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 colours if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there's not enough contrast.

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.

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.

About The Author

Copyright 2007, Mark Webster

Mark Webster is an experienced web designer, working for a leading advertising agency / web design agency in Manchester, ADZ Media http://www.adzmedia.co.uk. In addition to this, he also owns a web design company offering affordable web design at http://www.fullwebdesign.co.uk and aims to get people to conform to compliant web design standards.

Website Design Concerns – The Basics

by: Mark Gerrard

Just when you thought that you had all the aspects of your website covered, a few more concerns crop up. One of the biggest reasons why customers will leave your website is the time it takes to load or the speed of the website.

Intense graphics, too much flashy special effects and your logo design all eat into your website’s load time. As business owner first and a webmaster second, you need to ask yourself these questions:

* What do I want my website to accomplish?
* My website in its current state, does it accomplish what I want?
* Can I limit the amount of graphics used and still broadcast my message?
* How I maintain the viewer friendly design of my website?

1) What Do I Want My Website To Accomplish?

When answering this question go beyond the obvious answer of ‘I want to make money.’ More importantly, ‘How can I give the customers what they want while still achieving my business goals?’

Remember these 4 key points: what are my customers’ problems; what solutions have they sought (or ones that didn’t work); what I will offer to provide this solution and finally; why they should buy from me. When you have successfully answered these questions, get an objective opinion. Why? What you may think are reasons may not be what others see (i.e. your customers).

2) My Website In Its Current State, Does It Accomplish What I Want?

If you are creating a new website, you have the advantage of starting with a clean slate and progressing towards your goal. If you are an existing website owner, you may need to re-evaluate if your website is accomplishing what you originally set as its goals.

The ultimate review is this: Am I attracting enough customers to my website and are they buying my service or product? If you are attracting customers, yet they aren’t buying, you need to review your prices and checkout process. If they proceed to checkout and then balk (click away) again you need to determine why. If the reverse is occurring and you have frequent customers and they are buying, it may be time to see if you can add more products they may be interested in – (either through a newsletter or alerting them on the website). This will allow you to ‘up-sell’ to your customer and provide them will more solutions to their problems.

3) Can I Limit The Amount Of Graphics Used And Still Broadcast My Message?

Limiting the amount of graphics used will help your website load faster and will help deliver your message to the customer quicker. However, just because your website may have a lot of graphics doesn’t mean that it has to load fewer graphics; it may mean that the size of the file may have to be reduced in order to have the products listed show properly. For example, if you are showing ladders on your website, you may group them according to height and to no more than 3 per page.

4) How Can I Maintain The Viewer Friendly Design Of My Website?

When mapping your website allow for the fact that you will expand your website to include more information, products or services. Do not build your website with a limited capacity. You will automatically restrict yourself from expanding and possibly create more headaches down the road when you expand.

Some points to remember:

* Have clear titles
* Include a site map
* Include an ‘About Us’, ‘Contact’ and ‘Privacy’ page where people can see a real address and phone number

When you create your website, keep these questions in mind. Get some objective feedback from someone who gives you their true opinion and doesn’t say things to make you feel good. The reason: your customers don’t know you and will at any opportunity click away from your website if given the chance. You minimise the direct chance of clicking away and maximise the opportunity to provide the customer with what they want and you fulfill your business goals

About The Author

Mark Gerrard is the Development Manager of the Freestart Website Builder Platform. See our website builder in action at http://www.freestart.com

Choosing An Effective Web Design Company

by: Phill Bernier

Here's the scenario...

..You're a business person, you know all there is to know about your industry and your products. You felt the time was right to expand your business by harnessing the power of the internet. You know that with the tools available today, just about anyone can throw together a website, however, you also know that there are many issues and pitfalls that can turn a good idea into a complete disaster... time to call in the professionals.

Good plan!

But here's the problem...

There are hundreds of them!!! Prices range from £50 to £5000 for seemingly the same product, there are big companies, small companies and freelancers all selling web design services. Your friends grandson who just left kindergarten can do you a good deal if you're prepared to pay in cash.

In my opinion, if you are going to buy something...anything...you need to have a basic understanding of the issues surrounding it: The good points, the bad points. Acceptable and unacceptable concessions. Consequences and benefits. In this article, we are going to attempt to show you how to avoid getting ripped off by providing you with the necessary understanding required when choosing a web designer. Once you have read and inwardly digested the contents of this article, you should be confident that the web design company you choose will build you a web site that will fulfil the vision that you have for it.

Step 1: Choose a Few Reputable Web Design Firms

The first step when choosing a web design company is to shortlist a number of prospects. The best method possible is to choose a selection of companies based on personal recommendation. Many business people know other business people who can supply referrals. Given the benefit a well developed web site can have on your business, it is well worth taking the time to tap into your network of contacts to get the name of 3 or 4 satisfactory web design companies to choose from.

In the event that this doesn't work for you, use a local directory, the internet or a newspaper to make a list of potential web designers. (Remember that anyone can pay an internet marketing firm to get them at the top of a search engine such as Google so a company's ranking does not mean that they are capable of delivering a good solution.)

Step 2: Check Out the Web Design Companies Own Web Site

It stands to reason that if a company is capable of creating workable web sites or solutions then its own site should be beyond reproach, so take a look at their own web site as well as a couple of sites from their portfolio, if portfolio items are not available, simply e-mail them and ask.

The Design of the Web Site

The following are a number of things to look for when choosing a web design company from your shortlist:-

Are there apparent errors (spelling errors, missing pictures, broken links etc.)?

Attention to detail is vital in web design. What you see on a web page is the result of a great deal of complex interaction beneath the surface. If that which is visible is full of errors, it stands to reason that the same level of care has been taken over the code which makes the site function. Spelling and grammatical errors will harm your credibility and a dysfunctional web site will frustrate your audience.

Can You Easily Find the Information You Are Looking For?

This is critical. If you find yourself on a web site, the chances are you were looking for something in particular. Ensure that the elements of the designer's web site are easy to find. Check that you are able to quickly and easily spot the contents of the pages and move freely between pages.

Other design considerations are as follows:-

- Is the text clear and easy to read?

- Are the pages uncluttered and easy on the eye?

- Are there elements such as excessive animation distracting the user from the main text?

- Does the site appear quickly?

- Does the colour scheme and design fit in with the brand of the company (take the logo as a benchmark)?

The Technical Bits

Now this is important! Why?

First, because there is legislation in both the UK, the US and a variety of European countries that requires your site be accessible to disabled users. Failure to adhere to this will result in your having to hire a third party company to re-code and possibly redesign your entire web site.

Secondly, if your web site is not coded using standards (set by the www council) it may not function correctly when viewed by different people using different equipment.

Finally, it is a well known time-proven fact that if your visitor is kept waiting more than 10 seconds for a web page to appear, they will move on.

SO HOW DO I TELL ?!

I hear you cry in desperation! Well, you don't need to be a geek or even know the first thing about web design, html or programming. All you need are the addresses of a couple of useful websites and an explanation of how to use the tools found there. A web page has been created for your convenience that contains links to these sites and detailed instructions on how to use the tools provided and evaluate the results. The link appears at the foot of this page.

It should be noted that evaluating these elements will give you some idea of the technical ability of your chosen web site design companies. There are many many more issues that a web site designer should be aware of, and in fact should take care of without you even knowing about it. The points listed here are, in our opinion, those that will have the greatest impact on your business and are so often ignored by less scrupulous web design companies.

Step 3: Contact the Web Design Firms

Now you should have pretty much narrowed down the possibilities you can go ahead and get in touch. Most companies will jump at the chance to talk to you and convince you of their product offerings. However, what you are interested in are the facts, not the sales pitch.

You have already established their design and technical capabilities, now you are interested in their ability to fulfil your needs and provide you with efficient service. Ask for some references from their most recent projects. Ask for the web addresses, contact names, details and completion dates. In approaching them in this way you ensure that you're not getting the one or two satisfied clients that they have serviced in the past, you are getting up to date clients and up to date projects.

Once you have their details, call the referees. The following are some idea's of the kind of information you might want to extract from these people:-

Verify the details you have been given in respect to project completion dates.

Find out about the quality of service the client received

Ask how able the web design company was in establishing and anticipating the needs of their client.

Discuss deadlines and timely delivery

Try to establish how effective the site has been in achieving the original goals of the client

Ask if the client has any complaints

Don't be afraid to speak frankly, whether satisfied with the service or not, most people are happy to be given the opportunity to sing praises or vent frustrations.

Step 4: The End

Well, having done all of this you should have a pretty good idea which company is going to provide a solution that's going to work for you. It may seem like a lot of work, but not only are you about to part with a substantial sum of money, but if the web site you receive doesn't do its job properly, you could well be missing out on new business or worse still convincing potential clients to go elsewhere.

About The Author

Phill Bernier is the owner of Adira Limited, (http://www.adira.co.uk) a web design company based in Winchester, Hampshire, UK. Phill has a degree in Business IT and 5 years experience of running his own company. Phill has given talks at a number of events and has published a number of related articles.

Good Design Practices and Important Rules in Website Design

by: Kanicen Nichathavan

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

Your website is where your business resides it's like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise 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 very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to 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.

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.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

About The Author

Kanicen Nichathavan is the owner of Shoppers Journey, At Shoppers Journey, we provide quality Web Marketing & Web Design solutions for your needs. Be it dazzling websites and portals or customized software solutions, our team is trained and ready to fulfill your every need. Visit my site at http://www.shoppersjourney.com