Basic Website Design Guidelines

A website is an important aspect of a business or an organization. It is one way to convey your messages to your customers and possible clients. The advantages of a website in today's world cannot be overemphasized.

But many people when designing websites more often than not overlook the most basic principles in web design. They may concentrate too much on the visual design and fail take care of the load time. A professional web design is one that will try to balance all of the principles below to achieve it targets.

1. Website design/Interface
This cannot be overemphasized. The simpler the website, the better it is. Look at some of the most famous websites like Google website. It has very simple design. Simple design helps to keep the pages look neat, load fast and do not distract visitors from the intended message.

Make sure that your website is simple, smart and professionally looking. As much as possible avoid using different bright colors, different font sizes and styles on a single web page. When using graphics, make sure you use professional designed graphics that are optimized for the web as opposed to using clip arts.

It is also a bad habit that may even lead to prosecution to steal graphics from other websites to put on your own. As much as you can, avoid the use of animations or splash pages. They often distract people from the main purpose or content of the website. Avoid busy or loud website backgrounds. Avoid having pages that are not complete or with the banner "Under Construction".

2. Load time
Make sure that your website loads fast. This you can achieve by making sure you use small and minimal images that are optimized for the web on a single webpage. Slow loading pages are quite frustrating and may make potential visitors or clients to abandon your website for another one. Make sure you also host your website on reliable hosting companies which will ensure that your site is uptime most of the time for easy online availability.

3. Web Graphics
You should use clean, simple, professional looking web graphics. You should use the alternative text attribute where you put images. This helps to show the text as the image is loading or shows the text where the image is non-existent.

4. Navigation
You should use navigation that is simple, easily visible and consistent in all the pages. This helps your website visitors to easily navigate through your website from one page to another.

5. Search engine optimization (SEO)
You should make sure that your Meta tags are correctly put. Also make sure you put the relevant keywords in the description area. This helps some engines to index your websites. It also helps to give results based on your keywords on queries done on some search engines.

6. Website name /Domain name
If your website name is the same as the domain name, make sure you choose a good name that is easier for visitors to remember. At times it may even make sense to buy a domain name from a third party to use on your website. This is because a website that people will not remember is of no purpose since people will nor visit or revisit it again.

7. Advertising
Avoid excessive advertising on your website. Visitors are usually disgusted by such. If possible, avoid the use of splashing or animated banners which may distract visitors from the main content of your website. Also using pop up or pop under advertisements without warning the visitor may appear rude.

8. Relevant details
Some people always ignore or fail to put the necessary contact details in a website. The se may include the name of the company, official logo, address details, phone numbers, fax numbers and email contacts. Visitors are often suspicious of websites without such contact details and are usually hesitant to buy anything from them. So you may be loosing enough customers if you overlook