Good website design

Good website design ideas

Your website is often the first impression a potential customer gets of your organisation or business. You have very little time to make that good impression. How many times have you landed on a website and left either before the page fully loaded or within 5 seconds of seeing it?

Aim to make your website as flexible and accessible to as many visitors as possible; don't make it difficult for those with slow internet connections, poor eyesight or who are in a hurry.

Visitors have arrived at your "front door" looking for information - give it to them!

And what is good for your visitors is good for search engines!

• Make sure pages load quickly
• Keep your design simple - "less is more"
• Keep your content up-to-date - this will encourage visitors to return
• Give your page a meaningful page title or title tag - make sure it reflects what the page is about. Titles show at the top of browsers and in search engine results
• Put important information near the top of your page - you can add details and explanation further down the page » more about writing for the web
• Structure each page to allow readers to skim down and pick out the main content. Use headings, sub-headings, bullet points, bold text etc » more about page headings
• Break up the text into small chunks - it's hard to read larger chunks of text on a monitor
• Add contact details on each page - you want your visitors to contact you - make it easy for them
• Make sure all links work. Check links regularly, particularly links to other sites
• Provide a search function on sites that reach 100 pages
• Provide a site map for your visitors - a contents page
• Use standard looking links - don't try and blend them in too much with the surrounding text
• Avoid distracting background images - it makes it difficult to read the text, which is what you visitor came for
• Ensure that pages are accessible for users with disabilities, especially blind users. Follow the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines"
• Don't try and be too different from other websites in your field. Visitors expect things to work the same way in similar types of sites. Don't confuse them
• Label your links. This provides visitors with a preview of where each link will take them. "Click here", isn't very helpful
• Add a link to your home page on every page of your website - visitors want to know they can get back to the beginning if they want to
• Add a meta description tag. This provides a short summary of the page for use by readers and search engines
• Label your photographs with "alt" tags which provide a written description of photographs to those who don't or can't see the image
• Use a consistent style throughout your website, with the same look on each page and the navigation in the same place on each page
• Make the text easy to read. Avoid colour combinations that don't have a good contrast and avoid small text
• Avoid flashing and moving text - your visitor came for information - give it to them
• Test web pages in different browsers - it needs to look good in all modern browsers - IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome etc
• Do make sure that the purpose of your website is clear
• Place your name and logo on every page. You can make the logo a link to your home page
• Avoid music playing automatically - your choice may not be to everyone's liking!
• Indicate the size of files to be downloaded
• Check your spelling and grammar
• Validate your code - HTML, XHTML and CSS
• Avoid all the bad website design mistakes!

back to the top

If you have more questions or you need more help or advice, please contact us and we will endeavour to help you ~ without any obligation.