Website Design Tips:

These are a few of my top design tips to keep in mind while developing your site, in order of importance.

Clear Navigation

Your site has to have good navigation. What use is the best content if no one can find it? Like keeping your colour theme consistent, navigation has to be consistent too, if it isn't people will feel lost and your site will be a collection of pages not a real site.

If you went into a bookshop and the books were all very good, but they were hard to find, mixed up and not listed into categories, you would find a better bookshop and go there instead. This is like a website with bad navigation. Like bookshops they are thousands of websites on different subjects, it wouldn't be hard for a user to click away and find a better website.

Good Content

Once your visitors can move around your site easily and effectively you need to give them something. You've got to give them good, in-depth content, on what they want to find out. If I go to a site and find a brilliant article on how to add a pop-down menu to my site, I'll most likely go back to see if there are any more brilliant articles that might interest me. Good content is the main way you get people to come back to your site. 

If you went into a clothes shop and you could easily find your way around, but the clothes were all rubbish, you wouldn't go back. The clothes in the clothes shop represent the content in a website.

Readable

If text is hard to read visitors will click away without looking at your content. Examples of this are if you use strange fonts, size text too small or have dark blue text on a black background ect.

When reading web articles users tend to scan and not read. By arranging blocks of text into sub-headings users will scan through and find what they want to read under the appropriate heading. Or they might look through an article and see a sub-heading that interests them and then read it. Take a look at a demo of this page without sub-headings, see how it is harder to read and less interesting.

Keep it up to date

So you've got users coming back for good content, you have easy navigation and your articles are readable?

But what happens if a users keeps coming back so many times and each time nothing is updated and no new content is added? The user would probably start to think, as I would, that the owner of the site doesn't care and has stopped working on it. Then they would not bother to come back anymore.

You've go to stop this happening, but how? One good way to make sure there is always some fresh content on your site is to add a message board. Take the time to go through it every so often and post to knew articles so that users can see you're still bothered about you're site. This builds an online community and it could get big, if users come back every day to see if anyone replied to their posts or to add new posts then the chances are they will occasionally browse through your content, and tell their friends about it.

Another way is to have a "what's new" type thing on your homepage, this way as soon as visitors arrive at your site they will immediately be able to see all the new content.

Don't Be slow

Another big turn off for surfers is web pages that are slow to load, if you're page is too slow to load not many people will wait to see it, even if it is really good. I, myself, will only wait about 20 seconds before going somewhere else. Like in the clear Navigation paragraphs above, their are so many thousand websites on each subject imaginable that it isn't hard for a user to click away and go somewhere else. 

Animations/graphics make a page slow to load, so use them sparingly. So do large background pictures. Don't get me wrong and exclude these from your site, they make excellent additions, but use them sparingly and make sure they don't take forever to load.