A website is a platform for the information about your company you want to highlight to your customers. In today’s e-marketing age, a website is perhaps the first point of contact (and in many cases, the first point of purchase as well) for a company. Hence, an effective design should form a major part of your overall marketing strategy.

Things to Keep in Mind While Designing

• A standardized design for the entire site so that the users know where to go to find a particular content.
• A clean layout to make the content easy to read / grasp.

What is Web Design?

Web design is basically organizing and presenting information in a way that the user finds both easy to comprehend and attractive.

What is the primary aim of a Good Design?

The aim of a good design is that the information should be easy to comprehend and the presentation should be attractive. People use the Web as they search for information, and then they read it. That’s as true for sites selling products as it is for news sites. Many Web sites ignore this and make their content unnecessarily hard to read. You don’t have to try too hard to find sites with overly elaborate color schemes, small fonts, and poor layout. If you think of your Web site visitors as readers, the importance and function of your Web site’s design becomes far clearer.

How to Go About It?

• Cater to Your Readers’ Needs, Not Your Ego- Design the site according to the needs of your intended users and their level of expertise in using web applications. For this, it is necessary to first define who the intended users of your site will be.

• Spend considerable time on the content- Keep it brief. Most information blocks should be between 500 and 700 words, with paragraphs of between 40 and 60 words. Sentences should be short. There should be no more than 9 to 12 words per line of text. UPDATE REGULARLY. Nothing upsets a user more than outdated content.

• Define the structure of the site before the design. This will help you in organizing the content on the pages in a better way.

• Engage the user. The time a visitor spends on a website depends majorly on how well the website is able to engage the customer. The design, the content and the flow of the website largely decide this.

• Test with Real People. The only way to test the effectiveness of a design is to take the feedback from the intended users of the site.

Do’s and Don’ts s of an Effective Design

• All Web pages should have a consistent set of navigation links that is visible when the first screen loads, pointing to key areas within your Web site. This essential navigation (sometimes known as global navigation) should always begin with a link back to the home page of the Web site. Essential navigation should contain links such as Home, About, Products, and Contact

• The masthead is the top of the page area, and should be slim, like the masthead of a newspaper, maximizing the space on offer for the content your visitor came to get. Your organization’s logo should also appear in this area, and you could place essential links and a search box here too.

• Make sure a footer appears on every page, featuring a copy of the essential links, contact information (address, telephone, fax, e-mail), and links to copyright, trademark and privacy policy information.

• Every page on your site should have a consistent presentation format with consistent layout and navigation, and include elements such as a heading, summary, author and date of publication if appropriate.

• For maximum readability on screen, use sans serif fonts such as Verdana and Arial; they tend to be easier to read on a screen than serifs. The minimum font size recommended for documents displaying on a screen is 10 point. Although you may be keen to roll out your corporate color palette on your Web sites, nothing beats black text on a white background.

• Avoid using italics, which some people find heard to read on line. It’s also best to avoid underline for emphasis, as people will think it’s a link (moreover, underlining as a typographical device went out with the typewriter).

• Graphics should be in small file sizes for fast loading. If it’s absolutely essential to feature a larger graphic, you could use a thumbnail approach, where you display a small graphic and link to a larger version of it, which users can download if they want.

• Although Internet Explorer is by far the biggest player in the browser marketplace, you should still make sure that your site can be can be viewed properly in browsers based on the Mozilla standard such as Firefox and Netscape Navigator. Test your Web site using a variety of browsers, and different browser versions.

• Your Web pages should contain the information they need to present the information they promise to your visitors and nothing more. Keep your content focused and refrain from adding unnecessary graphics and multimedia elements.

• Frames are a technical device to break up a Web page into separate, independent sections. They introduce more problems than they solve, however, and are difficult to code, maintain, and even print.

• A splash page is an introductory or initial page presented to visitors before they can get to the actual home page: splash pages are sometimes used to advertise a hot new product, for example, but tend to annoy visitors as they are another (functionally useless) to get through before they can do what they came to do. Think carefully before you use them.

• Use hypertext (links) liberally; the colors that have become accepted as “standard” are blue for unclicked, purple for clicked. People have become accustomed to these colors.

• No gimmicks: blinking or swirling logos, animated e-mail mailboxes, and page counters (who cares!) are signs of an amateur Web site.