Food for Thought

Here are some things to consider when designing a website:
• Keep in mind the purpose of your site is to provide current information about your business or organization. This information should be presented in a concise, consistent and tasteful manner.
• Site continuity is very important. Keep organized and avoid “dead end” pages; those that have no internal links.
• Avoid poor navigation; people will get lost, especially with recursive linking. Having been lost once they will likely remember the feeling and be reluctant to return.
• Keep the website layout fairly simple; too much clutter creates confusion and mental congestion.
• Page backgrounds should be kept relatively simple. It can be very difficult to read words on a busy background.
• Avoid poor color combinations. You may have some favorite colors, but using one for a font and the other for a background may be REAL hard to read, e.g. red on blue or vice-versa.
• Also, colors that look good on your display or monitor may not on look good on others. Photos and graphic images on your monitor may look darker or brighter than other people’s monitors due to differences from manufacturers and/or the brightness and contrast settings people use on their monitor.
• Don't have different fonts on all your pages. It's better to stick to one theme, using only one or two fonts throughout your website.
• Don't use high density photos and graphic images as this can lead to viewer frustration due to slow loading times. A JPEG of about 75kb is should be quite sufficient for a good rendition.
• Also, don't have too many photos or graphics images per page. Again, this will lead to excessive long page loading times resulting in people going elsewhere!
• Use pop-ups or pop-unders only where necessary as they are annoying to most people.
• In this day and age, don't say: “This site is best viewed with [browser]”. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser in the Industry. However, FireFox, currently used by about 20%+ of viewers continues to grow and one can not forget Safari used by most MAC owners.