Principles of Good Web Designing August 26, 2002 Whether you are designing a site for yourself (and it’s your first attempt at web design) or you are designing one for your 100th client, remember to always apply these principles of good web designing. 1. Good, useful, and informative content. Provide the information your visitor wants to see. Don’t make them go to your competitor’s site to find the rest of the information. You need to let them know that everything they’re looking for can be found right here in your site. If they like your site, they'll return. If they really like it, they'll tell their friends. 2. Appealing, quick-loading pages. Make sure your site is attractive to the visitor and that the pages download in just a few seconds. Your visitor/potential client doesn't want to wait 30 seconds just to see if your site's content is something they MIGHT be interested in. Keep the size, and number, of your graphics to a minimum. If you have too much content on your page, then you need to help your visitor by breaking it into categories (which leads us to #3). 3. Easy to follow navigational structure. Select a method of navigation to help your visitors find what they’re looking for. Make sure your links are easily identifiable and easy to use. Make it obvious to your visitors that if they click on a link, it will take them where they want to go. 4. Consistency. Make your visitors know that they haven't left your site. Place links at the same spot on every page. Place your logo at the same spot on every page. Use the same color scheme throughout your entire site and use the same font pattern throughout your entire site. If you change any of these from one page to the next on your site, not only will your visitor not be sure if they’re still on your site but it might cause them to become frustrated because now they’ll need to re-focus on a new page before they get to the information on that page. 5. Links to other sites with similar content. Place external links on your site to give your visitor the opportunity to view more information related to what is on your site. This will save your visitor time because they won't have to search for other sites, you make it easy on them. This will also increase your number of visitors because if the site returns the favor by placing a link to your site, you’ll get some of their visitors and search engines rank sites higher with quality sites linking to them. 6. Search engine strategies. Don't waste your time following steps 1-5 if you don't want people to find your site. In order for your site to be found by the search engines, each of your pages must have the following meta tags: title, description, and keywords. Work the keywords into the body of the web page. Follow these simple steps when designing a web site and your visitors will enjoy their stay. Visit other sites and see which ones you like and which ones you don’t. See how well they followed these steps.