1. Keep It Simple

Beyond 400-600 words, heading tags, a Call To Action or two and a list of recent posts a blog or news website doesn’t require any extra content. From an SEO perspective any extra images, videos or Flash may actually have you penalised.

2. Use A ‘Subtly Bold’ Color Scheme

Sounds like a contradiction in terms – right? Think cigarette ad campaigns of the 80s. They often featured black and white imagery with one or two highlights of striking color. The reason for this is simple – the eye is drawn to that area where it focusses rather than being shunted about all over the place. Similarly a web page derived of cool blacks and greys, especially if graphics are placed on a white background, looks striking with say a blood red phone number as the Call To Action.

3. Think ‘Repetition’

Viewers love elements that are consistent and predictable. There is no point in reinventing the wheel unless that is the reason for your website. Don’t make every page exactly the same – leave sidebar elements off gallery pages for example – but ensure a clean, congruous layout is used throughout which is in tune with your content

4. Be Aware Of Browser Dimensions

It sounds obvious but many people view the web on laptops – sometimes tiny little laptops or even smaller devices. ‘That’s their problem’ you say but it can be amazingly frustrating to discover a website which seemingly has all the answers only to find it is the size of Australia. Tame those widths to a maximum of 1000px and most laptops and other mobile readers should be able to display your content with no worries

5. Keep File Sizes Small

Everyone has broadband now but that’s no reason to get slack with keeping file sizes small. Quite often broadband is as fast as people think, especially in Australia as of early 2010, and graphics and other media can take a while to load. Take advantage of optimisation tools in software such as Photoshop and encode all videos down to the smallest possible file size. People are far more likely to be forgiving of low quality than they are of slow streaming and download speeds. If you have the time and resources upload a high definition alternative to your You Tube account (so that your own bandwidth isn’t taken up) and post a link to it. That is also good from an SEO perspective.

6. Use Web Safe Colors

It may look fine on your screen but unless you follow the rules and use web colors you risk your website looking very different across the whole spectrum of monitors. Unlike with print design you won’t often come across problems trying to upload CMYK images or non-specific web colors but from an aesthetic point of view it is a good idea to keep within the web safe palette.

7. Use External Code References

Large volumes of code are bad for SEO and slow down the browser and cause cache issues. It isn’t hard to learn how to make references to snippets of code which you can place in the same root folder (or in any location provided you enter the whole link). Once you’ve got the hang of it your source code can look as minimalist and groovy as the layout of your web pages. Voilà!

8. Use Appropriate Colors And Fonts

Think of how a movie theatre is dark. It stands to reason that a site about movies should have a dark background with light text. Similarly a black or grey background wouldn’t look great on a hospital’s website.

9. Limit Columns

Just because you can provide three, four or even five columns – don’t. There isn’t any real benefit to cramming huge amounts of content into one place. Sure – on the home page you may want to impart all the most important information so if you feel the need use the most columns here and reduce them on the remainder of the site’s pages.

10. Have Fun

That said, there is still plenty of scope to have fun designing your web pages. In fact the restrictions that you impose on yourself can actually form a strange kind of liberation when you realise you have control over that initially scary blank canvas. Also the impulse to go crazy has been tamed and whoever you show your work in progress to is likely to be impressed by the ease of use. Go ahead and create then upload those files for all the world to see.

By Russell Steedman

Having an effective and attractive web page design may often times be a main factor to make your company or business successful in the internet. However, the products and services that a company or business has are best and appropriate in the market. If there is no proper and right advertised or promoted, then it will just be worthless and useless. Majority of the expert professionals in different areas of industry employed themselves in thorough and precise training for to have a perfect web design for them to be able to master reliable strategies and techniques to have a good quality design.

When you make a web design, bear in mind that you must keep it simple and uncomplicated. Even though it is better to make a profligate and excessive web design with the use of sounds, colors and flash elements, in different cases, majority of the web developers stick to their philosophy that having a simple design is effective and better. Many consumers will just be destructed in a certain page that has a very exaggerated and blown up design. As a result, they will rather switch to other websites that are available.

Simplicity has a great impact when it comes to the usability of the web page. Many of the web design professionals agreed that having a simple design will generate or create higher consumer traffic due to the fact that visitors do not really have to guess everything. Keep in mind that consumers do not like to work on anything, if the web page is clear and can easily be understood, visitors will be interested and comfortable in reading the entire content of the website.

You must be able to relate usability with attention because when you give a visitor certain plan of action; they will focus themselves on the importance of the content of the website. For you to be able to catch the attention of the consumers in opening a link, make certain that you make things easier for them to see it. By giving them several distractions, majority of the visitors will be able to see the importance the importance of the web page. It is quite decisive for every web professional to incorporate reliable and effective advertising into a certain web page. Making a bold, short and effective statement will really get the attention and interest of the readers. A very broad and long paragraph that contains complicated information will make all the readers easily get bored and will no longer read the entire content of the web page.

Perhaps, the most essential strategy for you to understand the importance of a certain web page is testing. With the test that was done, you will be able to determine if visitors are really checking out your website every day. It is important to have a simple web page design because this more effective compared to a very complicated design which will really affect the interest of every viewer who will be checking your website.

By David L. Allen