Web Design Tips and Tricks

Understanding Good Web Design Principles

Get Web Design Tips and Tricks on mps-web-design.com. Understanding Good Web Design Principles topic will increase your understanding on Web Design Tips and Tricks. We at mps-web-design.com only provide news, articles, information in Web Design Tips and Tricks. Web Design Tips and Tricks at mps-web-design.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

In the real world everyone judges you (and your business) by the image you project. The same goes for your website.

For many businesses, a website is the first point of contact for potential customers so it's vital that you make a good first impression.

The three key components of any web design are:

1. Presentation
2. Functionality
3. Usability

Presentation refers to the way your website looks.

Great websites are easy to spot because they:

• Look clean and professional
• Make sensible use of colors and graphics
• Attract the right target market

Bad sites are equally easy to spot, because they:

• Are difficult to use
• Make bad use of color combinations and graphics
• Have text that is too difficult to read
• Pages that take too long to load

Functionality refers to your website's ability to give users what they want.

For example, if you wanted to a book an airline ticket online, a site with good functionality would allow you to:

• Easily view the available flight times
• Compare pricing options
• Make a booking with your credit card

A less functional site, would:

• Not have the ability to check pricing or book flights
• Contain vague or ambiguous information
• Have a confusing payment process

And finally, Usability refers to how easy (or difficult) it is to use and navigate your website.

Have you ever visited a site that took too long to load?
A website where the text was too small and you struggled to read it?
Or a website where the menu system was confusing to navigate?

That's bad usability in a nutshell.

If you want to create a website that is functional, easy-to-use and quick-to-load, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

DO:

• Immediately tell visitors what your company does.
• Allow visitors to find information with a minimum amount of clicks.
• Keep your menu options clear and simple.
• Use decent font sizes that are easy to read.
• Keep sentences short and split paragraphs into chunks.
• Give your visitors relevant content.
• Use dark text on light backgrounds.
• Make liberal use of 'white space' as it helps break up the page.
• Keep your website quick-to-load by using graphics sparingly.
• Design for your target audience, not your own personal preferences.

DO NOT:

• Use more than 3 main colors on your site. Try to stick to a consistent color theme across your website.
• Use multiple font styles, sizes and colors. Stick to the one font style to keep your site looking consistent.
• Overuse graphic effects, flashy logos or sound effects - they'll simply distract users from the main message of your site.
• Use lots of industry 'buzz' words.

Okay, one of the reasons why posting has been light on this blog is because we have been busy. My wife and I have also had our first child (well, two years ago) and to be honest, our work has become less innovative in terms of doing cool new things and more iterative, as in we have been applying a lot of the cool things we learned and developed over the last few years.

This happened because we changed our business model from agency style to "plug us into your operations and we will be your dev crew" style.

Anyways, every once in a while we like to take stock and see where we may be able to gain some time so as to try and work in our next direction or new model, whatever that may be. The applications that we use are often places where we can find cool new stuff and gain time.

What things have you done to find extra time? Please, share below!

Here are three things that, in the last year point five have helped us find some extra time.

1. Navicat: we moved all of the bits of PHPmyAdmin accesses over to navicat at about the end of 2007 and this was an excellent move. Tonnes of time gained.
2. TeamViewer: for quick support and desktop sharing with remote staff.
3. Buying a netbook and using Maxivista and Ultramon: adds two new monitors to my existing setup. I now have a 4 monitor two computer setup which allows me to not only have two more monitors but I can also have open two versions of many of the apps that I use (useful for multitasking with teams etc.)
4. Moving simpler client sites to WordPress: now that it has one step upgrades and almost doesn't require the use of an FTP client to get up and running on some hosts.
5. Dictation Software: I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking for writing some course and blog materiel lately (pre-writing for my new blog). I find this is saving me a load of time and I am getting more written then ever before.

So what solution have you implemented lately to buy you some extra time?

More Articles: