Design
The design of your website also plays an important role as it has some impact on visitors. It is important that you keep the visitors in focus when designing your website and don’t get carried away by technical gimmicks just to show that you can do it. Instead you should keep the design simple and clean. Let the following tips guide you:
- Try finding a strategy for your design that suits your content best. Images help explaining facts and make your text visually more appealing. However, using too many, large or centrally positioned images can also distract the reader.
- Choose a font style and size that will make the text easier to read.
- Select colors that don’t tire the reader’s eye. Dark (especially black) font on a light background makes the best contrast and is the most comfortable to read text.
- Don’t use too many colors. Too colorful websites get less across and can look disturbed. It’s also important to use related colors.
- Think of what colors suit your project best. Plain colors are often the better choice against garish colors (even if you might like the later ones better).
- Use the same structure and layout on your subpages.
- Using less elements and gimmicks will improve the site’s load time and visitors will appreciate it.
- Use known symbols for known functions, like the shopping cart for order pages.
- Highlight links with one of the common methods.
- Use thumbnails for large images to improve the page’s load time and keep a clear structure.
- Use few, if any, animations and acoustic signals. They could annoy visitors.
- Use clear and user-friendly navigation elements for visitors.
- Avoid making the visitor to croll horizontally.