Bread & Butter Pixels

The goal of most web designers is to create an attractive, easily accessible and functional website that will convince the visitor to do something. Creating such a website requires good graphic design, easy and intuitive site navigation, logical site layout and relevant content. The following suggestions are general web design guidelines:

• You want the visitor to see you as a knowledgeable information source and/or a reputable business. Poor grammar and spelling will immediately reduce your credibility. Remember that people use the internet to find information. Whether you are selling your own product or recommending someone else’s products, you must first provide valuable information to the visitor or they will click away and find a website that gives them what they what they want.
• There are at least a hundred different browsers in use. Good web design requires your web pages to work in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera and Safari at a minimum. To do that you may not be able to use all of the really great special effects that are available because they may not be supported in most browsers.
• Web surfers are impatient and studies show that most people will click away if a webpage takes longer than 10 seconds to load. Optimizing your photos and other graphic files to have as small a size as possible, along with proper HTML coding to allow the rest of the page to load while graphic files are downloading, may be necessary to accomplish this.
• Multimedia is composed of flash movies, video clips, audio clips and background music. Make sure the visitor can stop and start multimedia files or in the case of flash introductions, skip them if they want. That way people with slow connections or devices that don’t support multimedia can ignore them.
• Site navigation should be simple and intuitive. Studies have shown if a visitor cannot access the information they want within three clicks, they will leave the site. This is called the 3-click rule. Every area of your website should be reachable within three clicks from anywhere else on the site. If you use anything other than simple text links, make sure to test your navigation in all the major browsers.

Good Web design is a combination of common sense and good planning. Your site should be attractive and easy to use and most importantly provide the user with the information or services they want.