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Frankly, the design of your web pages is best left up to you. I'm not going to tell you what you should or shouldn't do. However, there are a few things to consider when you're making your choices:
I find the easiest webpages to read are those that have black text on a white background... like reading a page in a book. You want to make it as easy as possible on the viewers of your webpage. I use black text for the body, but I also use colored fonts for the page titles and subtitles. Like this page, for example. It makes a more pleasing presentation that way.
Believe me, this is an important consideration. If you use a lot of graphics, the page will take a long time to appear. And it helps to remember that many users do NOT have high-speed lines. It's usually 28.8 kbps on a phone line. If your page doesn't come up within a few seconds, the viewer is gone like the wind. Web surfers will not sit and wait -- they're an impatient lot. Your site needs to come up, good and fast.
(Note that I'm referring to your home page. Once you've got interested visitors, you can shuffle them off to a page with lots of graphics, because they'll WANT to see these pictures... and they'll wait. But it is a fatal assumption to think they'll wait for a long-drawn out home page.)
What I like to do is make a trade-off. I like my pages to have colorful graphics, and I like them to come up fairly fast. I do this by having a left border background with colorful graphics. Then I use one (and only one) main graphic image at the top of the page. I organize my text around it, in an attractive manner. The rest of the page is then just text and tables. Sounds like this page, hmmm? (Note what happens when you roll your mouse over the main graphic at the top of this page.)
(Putting color in your tables is an easy way to have a colorful page that still comes up fast.)
Examples: www.awakeningpath.com
or www.webwisesage.com
My own (ahem!) websites
If I want more than one graphic image,
I'll put them toward the bottom of the page. There is a sequence to how
the browser draws the page. You want the text to display first -- followed
by the graphics. That way, they can be reading the text while the graphics
are still being drawn. By the time they get to where your graphics are,
they've appeared.
Check out Yahoo! for how this can work
well. It has several graphics, but they're small. And a lot of text. It
comes up pretty fast. Of course, they're special. You can't afford to use
a page as cluttered as Yahoo! Your page has to come up fast, it has to be
neat and well-organized with a good amount of white space, and it has to
present a message that grabs the viewer's attention quickly -- or she'll
be on her way.
You've got lots of bodytext on your site
(we'd hope) and lots of places for people to go. How do you arrange your
homepage so that people can go to all your great pages?
Some creativity is required here. A long
list of links is usually counter-productive. Yahoo! gets away with it, but
it's not likely you will. Think about it -- do you like to look at a long
list of links, so you can figure out where to go?
On my homepage, I present the most
important links arranged around the main graphics. Then, on each
individual page, I'll put a link at the end of the text to "carry the
viewer forward." Sometimes, I'll put a "What's New?" box at
the top of the home page, too.
And on the individual pages, I sometimes
use a right border with a list of no more than 8 main places on my site.
Using more than 8 tends to overwhelm people.
(I'll give you a little example
here. If you have a newsletter, you only need to put one link to the
newsletter on your home page. Then when they get to the newsletter pages,
you can put links that apply to the newsletter, such as "Search For
Articles", "Back Issues." etc. It doesn't do a whole lot of
good to put all those links on the homepage.)
I also use the bottom border to provide
buttons and more links for navigation, but I've found that most people
tend "not to see" the bottom border. And sometimes, I'll get
email asking me how to find things, when they're clearly marked at the
bottom of every single page of the website.
Try to make it as obvious as possible to
navigate your site -- without, at the same time, putting a confusing
number of links and buttons all over the pages. I know -- this is tricky,
but well worth the time to design.
If you want to establish credibility
fast, it’s important to put your contact information on the website.
Lots of sites use a "Contact Us" link. I recommend a Contact Us
page that does NOT have your email address on it. Spam harvesters love to
grab email addresses off your website. Here's how I do it. See
the Contact Us links on this page. It's more than you need, but it'll
give you the idea.
You want to make it easy for people to
get in touch. And you want to establish trust right away.
Web Pages That Suck www.webpagesthatsuck.com
Great Website Design Tips
Free Tutorials for Beginners
Copyright © 2004-2005 Web Wise News
by Vidya Ishaya
(also known as Burton Smith)
Ashland, OR
