The Most Important Things You Need To Do To Design Your Website

[ About This Author :: Request Reprint :: Print Article :: Tell A Friend ]

The Most Important Things You Need To Do To Design Your Website

By Ben Sinclair
http://www.webmaster-resources101.com

Has your Website got everything that it should have?

Here are some basic tips I use each time I design a site. I make sure they have all been used. These will make your Website more professional and keep your viewers coming back.

Compare these to your site and add anything you don't have.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT COLORS

First off you need to have the right colors. They need to look good together. I have been into sites that have on their home page the colors blue, yellow and white. Then I click on links and they use the colors black, red and grey.

This makes your Website inconsistant and VERY unprofessional. Keep to the same colors and your site will look fine.

If you ever go onto a Website and like their color, use them! It will save you thinking up your own colors.

USE CASCADING STYLE SHEETS

Use Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) because they can make your Website look even more professional. With CSS you can make all your <H1> tags the same color, all your links not underlined or underlined on mouseover and heaps more.

Here is an example of a Cascading Style sheet:

<STYLE TYPE="type/css">
<!--
H1 {
font-size: 24pt;
font-family: arial;
color: #ff0000
}
a {
font-size: 10pt;
font-family: arial;
text-decoration:none;
color:blue;
}
a:hover {
text-decoration:underline;
}
-->
</STYLE>

You can find a great tutorial on CSS by going to:

http://www.webmaster-resources101.com/tutorials/html/css/


GOOD NAVIGATION

I have been into a number of sites and couldn't even find CONTACT. I hate that. You need to have a good and easy navigation system on your site or viewers won't know where to go. They will think to themselves, "Where on earth are the rest of the links?" and leave. You need to give your viewers a good experience and they will love coming back.

You might like to have your links to the left or right hand side of the page or maybe on top, but remember, make sure it is easy to use and that all your sites links are there. The important thing though is to BE CONSISTENT. NOTE: Make sure CONTACT is on every page and people like me will love your site.

WHAT DOES MY SITE LOOK LIKE IN OTHER BROWSERS?

Ever wondered what your Website looked like in other browsers like Netscape, Opera and Mozilla?

You may have all these great effects using JavaScript and DHTML, but not everyone has the newest and best computer and even some of the newest versions of the other browsers may not be able to see it either. So be careful what you use.

I wondered what my site would look like until I went and downloaded the other browsers onto my computer. Now I could see exactly what it looked like. My site didn't look too bad. I only had to fix up a few things. But your Website may look very bad, so I recommend that you download the other browsers.

Here are some links where you can go to download the other browsers:

Netscape: http://www.netscape.com/
Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org/
Opera: http://www.opera.com/

Also at http://www.anybrowser.com/ you can see what your site looks like in an older browser.

Discuss this in our Webmaster Forums

[ About This Author :: Request Reprint :: Print Article :: Tell A Friend ]