When designing a website for your company or business, there are many important factors to consider such as design principles, colour schemes and the business image you want to portray to your potential clients.
For the majority of people who are not familiar with web design, it can be very hard to put together a website that will be of a high standard; one which meets both visibility and usability.
I found the following article very interesting and a necessary read for anyone wishing to design and create a ‘working’ website….enjoy!
Eight important criteria which could help the designers in creating a successful website are as follows:
1. TEMPLATE: Template is something which maintains the uniformity of the website and speaks with the user letting them clearly understand what the webpage is for. The user should be visually treated by the kind of template used. Template tells how creative you are. If you know that you aren’t creative then better go for any predefined templates you get online.
2. BACKGROUND COLOR: Once the template is designed or chosen, the next thing which needs more attention would be the background color. If template is the skeleton, color adds flesh to it. Make sure you don’t use mix of so many colors or different colors for different pages. The best advice for the background color from many experts was to keep them simple and unique.
3. MISSION STATEMENT: You might be wondering what this mission statement is all about. It is something which has very clear and short tagline which tells all about your site. So it is more desirable to have a tagline which states the mission of your website rather than telling some irrelevant stuff.
4. USE OF GRAPHICS: The next criteria which attract people towards your site would be the use of graphics. The most common mistake from all the designers is over usage of graphics. When you use graphics more than what is necessary, it irritates the user and hence your mission fails.
5. SEARCH ENGINE: It is always preferable to have a search engine attached to your site. The most important point that needs to be considered is the location and length of the search engine bar. It is finer to keep your search engine at the top of the site and in such a way it can make the user view up to 27 characters.
6. UI CONTROLS: UI controls play an important role in any professional website. The appropriate use of controls such as dropdowns, buttons, checkboxes, etc will help the user to interact with the website very well. Don’t ever design a dropdown like button or the vice versa which will confuse the user.
7. ADVERTISEMENTS: Though making money through ads is essential, it is not that the entire page should be filled with only ads overwhelming the actual content of the website. User will click the ads displayed only if it is relevant to the content of the website. So keep them relevant to your site. Also pay more attention in the size of the ad images. It is advisable to keep a simple small sized image and not a rotating or striking image.
8. COMPATIBILITY: Lastly it is very important to check the compatibility of your website. The website which works in Internet Explorer may not work in Firefox. Also website which works in Windows OS may not work in Macintosh. So it is mandatory to have your website tested in all possible Operating Systems and Browsers.