How to make better websites Part – 1
This small guide can be useful for anyone who makes websites of any kind. Here are some points that one should remember:
1. Never just start a website because you want to, make plans and think ahead of like which age group will mostly visit your site, what kind of people will get attracted to it more. Once you make a list of targeted visitors, it will help you a lot in designing the website.
2. Do something new. Yes starting with the design of the website, the design should be new and unique so that people may recognize it easy and don’t get confused with other similar sites. You need to think like a person who will be browsing your site for this and not as a designer.
3. Use pen and paper. With paper and pen it’s very easy to make a rough idea on how your website will be; especially the design part can be done easily. You can draw complex designs on paper easily rather than doing vector thingy on heavy weight graphic software’s. I do it like this only and most of the design made by me comes right from the canvas.
4. Easy navigation is important. People may like your website for few seconds but as soon as they will find that they are not able to find things for which they have came to your site easy, they will simply close the window and open google.com again to search for some better site. Trust me if your website offer ease of navigation, enough content and update frequently; your visitors will see your site as a standard to judge any other similar website.
5. Clean and correct codes pls. Try to make your site a valid XHTML as much as possible. I am not talking of strict validation and if there are some errors then no need to worry, it’s ok. Only simple web pages can be made valid and as the website gets complex, keeping it valid is real pain I know. A valid XHTML site (or invalid but with few errors only) is easy for search engines to index. Keep you codes clean and use CSS wisely to make your site as light as possible so that it loads quickly. I use Dreamweaver and it creates valid codes and CSS. No one likes a slow website; if your website is slow then you are loosing many visitors because of it. Using too much JavaScript will also make your website heavy and make browser unstable.
6. No funny gif animation. The animated images with flashy colors distract the visitor and give a cheap feeling to the site. Use of flash is ok but with moderate and decent looking animation / effects. If you are using some flash, then it should be big as it many take a lot of time to load and again the visitor is annoyed.
Will continue it in part 2…
