A Few Design Tips

• Keep the look of your site uniform. It gives the viewer continuity. It makes browsing and navigating easier. And your primary goal should be to make your information quickly and easily accessible to your customer, otherwise they may go somewhere else.


• Don't put important information in banners or in boxes on the right side of the screen. Don't make it a radically different color or put borders around it. People ignore these things, even when flashing and ringing bells. It doesn't matter that its not an ad and doesn't look like an ad. There is a name for this phenomenon. Its called banner blindness. You can do a search on it, or you can just trust me. Information put in these areas will be completely ignored.

• Check your layout in several browsers. Your page may look great on your screen, but do you know how it looks to other people? Some browsers are standards compliant, some aren't. Your beautiful creation may not even render in another browser, so check.


• Check your design at several resolutions. You may also be surprised how much screen resolution can affect the appearance of your page. The world at large is no longer stuck with 600x800. Change your monitor resolution or look at your design on a friend's computer. It can save you some embarrassment.


• Don't jump into new design features too quickly. You may have the latest and greatest version of your favorite browser, but most people don't update their browsers until they buy a new computer. The design feature you think is so cool may not be supported by the browsers that most people will be using to view your site. It doesn't matter how many browsers and updates I install on my Dad's computer, he uses the one that pops up when he dials up. He's used to it. He knows where everything is, and he's not going to change.


• Think carefully about colors. You need a color scheme that is esthetically pleasing and doesn't impair readability. Because of this, most web sites have a white, gray, beige, or black background. Bright colors can be hard on the eyes. Don't forget people who are color blind. You may be able to read the green text on a beige background, but not everyone can.


• Go through your site and check all links regularly. Broken links are annoying. They also make you look lazy and uninformed.


• Unless your audience is very young, stay away from animations and things that blink. Its visually annoying, takes up lots of bandwidth (not everyone has broadband), and makes people impatient.


• Be VERY judicious in your use of sounds. They are often fun and cute the first time, but the twentieth time someone's mouse rolls over a link producing a chirp, bong, siren, or whatever sound you choose, it becomes grating. Background music is straight out. If you feel it necessary to have music, make it user controlled. Let them click on a link to hear it. I was recently on a band's site. A different song began to play when each new page loaded. I didn't stay on any page very long, so the effect was disjointed and disorienting. I left the site quickly.


• Keep your audience firmly in mind when designing your site. I was watching my grandparents browse the internet the other day. Small text is impossible for them to read. Sites that require them to enter information in an exact way frustrated them; their hands tremble slightly, causing them to hit wrong keys. If input has to be exact it often takes several tries, and sometimes they give up. As a business owner, that's the last thing you want. Small buttons also gave them problems. They don't have the fine motor control to manipulate the mouse. Eventually, they shoved the keyboard toward me in frustration and said, "You do it!"


• Don't open new windows. It really clutters up the system tray, which is irritating, especially to people who prefer tabbed browsing. If someone wants to open a link in a new window, they will right click on it and choose to do so.


• Don't make it impossible to back out of your site. Don't disable the back button. In fact , don't hijack control of someone's computer in any form or fashion. It's rude and it really makes people angry. It's like having an unruly dog in the house that keeps running off with your slippers. If you do this, you can bet I will never come back to your site.


• Don't suddenly give someone a Word or Adobe document, especially if you don't warn them first. It interrupts browsing. Plus Adobe takes forever to open. Making people wait is a mistake. It doesn't take that long to code something for HTML. Have some pride.