Good design principles always make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and products and services sells to as many people as possible.
Navigation navigation navigation
Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be easy to locate and uncluttered. Make sure to leave the navigation bar at the same place at all times this way your visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
Balance your images with content
Reduce the number of images on your website. If you have lot of images and clip art, they make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary if not used correctly.
If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using an image editing program so that they have a minimum file size which leads to faster loading times.
Never ever let your images out weight the content on the site. Besides slower loading times, your website will be the least optimized for search engine rankings, if all you have to offer is images. Search engines will not list your web site on the top result pages, if you have little to no content.
Text, How long is too long?
Keep the text paragraphs at a regular reasonable length. Longer paragraphs should be split into separate ones so that the text blocks will not be too big in length. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
The web standards
You need to make sure your website complies to web standards and they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
The debate about scripting
if you can try to avoid the use of scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Do use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, but absolutely not on any circumstances to create visual effects for your website.
Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are turned off by some users across some browsers for security reasons, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
Tables and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
HTML Tables came along way since the fist introduction. Tables are used to align objects on your site. Tables are a nightmare if you have a large website with lots of pages. Since content is not separated from the formatting, you will find a had time updating your site, since every page has to be edited manually.
With the use of Cascading Style Sheets or CSS for short, it’s the complete opposite of tables. Unlike table designs, CSS separate the content from the formatting. You can use one style sheet to apply formatting to to all your pages on the website.
So when it comes time to update your layout for your 10 to 10,000 or or unlimited pages, a simple edit to your main style sheet will apply the new styles to all the pages.
