The success or failure of a web site is in many cases solely
due to the way your site looks and the ease of navigation.
There are a number of creative and technical elements involved
in producing a quality website, all of which should be considered
when first designing your site. These include creating mock-ups,
defining interfaces, database design, system platform and
web page aesthetics, just to name a few
First impressions count, your visitors will expect to find
the information they seek easily; this is the fundamental
reason for their visit.
It is the overall harmony of the web site components that
will be key in its performance and efficiency. There must
be balance through all the pages, whether it is a three page
mini website or larger.
Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) came to be used as the
primary web design language, which has had several upgrades
in the past, the current version being HTML 4.01 which was
set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). HTML files are
simply standard ASCII text files with special formatting
codes that web browsers can interpret and appropriately display
on screen.
The W3C is a multi-national consortium recognized all over
the world. The main goal of the W3C is to further the development
of standards for the Word Wide Web. You should try to make
your site as W3C compliant as possible when designing your
website, to ensure browser compatibility, and it will also
help with your search engine rankings too.
As the internet became more and more popular web designers
began to develop systems to ensure their job was made easier.
This resulted in the production of web development tools.
These tools include Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which can
be used to separate site design for content, for example
by removing tables and using absolute positioning instead.
With the increasing popularity of web sites designers became
exposed to a whole new world of server side scripting languages
such as PHP- (Hypertext Preprocessor), Active Server Pages
(ASP), Java Server Pages (JSP), Python and ColdFusion.
Macromedia Flash in particular has given web designers other
alternatives to improve how their web pages will look. Many
web sites have been developed entirely in Macromedia Flash,
but search engines could hardly index web pages created in
Macromedia Flash. For this reason, usage of macromedia flash
should be seriously considered before attempting to create
a web site.
To maintain the best balance of ease of use and full functionality,
most web designers use HTML along with several web development
tool hybrids to have their website running optimally.
There are other web design criteria to be considered when
undertaking web site design, the paramount categories are:
• Content
• Organization
• Appearance
“Content is king” is a phrase that has gained
a lot of prevalence in recent years, and is the truest words
on the web. If a visitor finds relevant useful content on
a site, the chances are that they will come back again.
Give the visitor quality content! What is quality content?
Quality content is information that your viewers can benefit
from, without having to trawl through confusing links and
getting nowhere. When first designing the site, the web sites'
purpose should be clearly defined and the targeted audience
clearly identified. This means that when you come to writing
the content it will give the web site an identity.
The website should also have useful links to other web sites
of the same theme or similar purpose. Spelling and grammar
should be checked and double-checked so as to convey a professionally
created site.
Organisation is a topic we touched on earlier in the article;
the visitor wants to visit a site with clearly defined information
and character. They want to navigate through the site with
ease; start with the first thing they see and then make sure
the path they follow is clear and not confusing.
For this reason an important component of any site is a
clear navigation menu and a site map. A site map is in essence
a complete list of all the pages on the site, and it should
be pointed to from every page on the site. This ensures both
your visitors and search engines can easily navigate your
site to find the information they are looking for.
The appearance of a web site is defined by the layout of
images, text, links and animation. Visitors need to see clearly
what the theme of your site is, remember, first impression
count! Bear in mind that graphics and animations do take
longer to download, and not every visitor may have a high
speed internet connection. Ensure all your text is legible
and clear and that the color scheme does not induce headaches!
Overall, the effect produced by the use of a central theme,
well presented pages and a tactful use of colours, will lead
to a credible and efficient looking finished web site.
Jez Lacey is co-owner of 4-packs. Check out our latest release,
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