Good Website Design Practices

Posted on February 22, 2008
Filed Under Websites, Wordpress, design |

If you've enjoyed reading this post then please subscribe to my Full Text RSS Feed.

In my last article I wrote about Website design guidelines. Here are more pointers that I found useful and you may want to consider when designing your website.

Website optimization

a) Reduce the number of images on your website.

Images make your website load very slowly and the more images you have, the longer it takes to download your web page.

Include only images that are essential on your website. Make sure the images are optimized for web using your image editing tool so that they have a minimum file size.

b) Keep text paragraphs at a reasonable length.

How you structure your content on your website is important.

Example:

How many articles should you display on your main page?

Do you show the entire article on your home page or just teasers and a click here to read the full article on a different page?

I limit my WordPress home page to display five most recent articles. Others may decide to display more articles or less articles. That is a personal preference but remember the more text paragraphs there are to download, the longer it takes. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

c) Cross browser compatibility

It is important to make sure that your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

d) Scripting language

Most browsers these days support JavaScript but avoid using scripting language unless it is absolutely necessary. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

f) Style sheets

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

Sphere: Related Content

Other Related Posts:

Website Design Guidelines

When Is the Right Time to Redesign your website?

Positive note from Bill Gates on blogging

New banner is up on my site

Donate rice to the poor by playing the word game

If you've enjoyed reading this post then why not subscribe to received updates by email.