The whole point of creating a website is so that people will visit it - so you don't want to turn them off as soon as they arrive by offering them a poorly conceived and designed experience. Here, however attractive it might be, an impractical page is a useless one.
Here are our tips for creating web pages as popular as they are beautiful.
- Keep graphics small - don't alienate your visitors by making them wait 30 seconds or more just to load your homepage. - but don't worry too much, lots of people have broadband now and graphics are often more interesting than words.
- Keep text short and sweet too - too much text can slow down your site's load speed just as much as chunky graphics. Also, text works differently online, and text heavy pages will put visitors off fast. Use shorter sentences and paragraphs. - 10 words per sentence, 3 sentences per paragraph, 3 paragraphs per page is not a bad guide.
- Readability is the key - make your backgrounds as light as you can. If you use a background image make sure nothing in it interferes with the text too much. Use text at least 12 points high.
- Try not to think too sequentially - unlike when they're reading words in hard print, people tend to browse web pages in a non-linear way. Your visitor may begin in the middle of your content and finish at the start. Try to remember this and consider offering backwards links. i.e. Top of the Page. Keep navigation consistent on all pages and put most important messages at top left as people tend to scan top left to bottom right.
- Less is more - don't try to add extra emphasis by using lots of capital letters; online they're considered rude. Instead try using boxes, bullets, numbers, bolds and italics.
- Break it up - split large chunks of text into bite-sized pieces to make them easier to swallow, and don't clump too many images together in the same place or without borders.
- Ease of contact - it can't hurt to include your contact details on every page or, if you don't want people constantly calling, just include e-mail and postal details. Ask for feedback. People are surprising helpful and forthcoming.
- Keep it fresh - unlike printed material, websites aren't static, but live and ongoing. To attract repeat visits, be prepared update your pages as often as you can. This helps to get you ranked higher on search engines too.
- Be your own visitor - viewing your site only offline may just paper over any problems, and probably won't give you a true representation. Test your site at various speeds and screen resolutions and with different browsers to see what it's like to actually make a visit.
- Above and below 'the fold' - the concept of 'the fold' comes from the publishing industry, where newspapers run their most important stories 'above the fold' across the middle of the paper. Try to put key information above the imaginary line in the middle of your page.
