General tips for the design of your website
Would you like to know what we personally would consider a "good website?" We could give you many tips and hints on how to design your site. However, it might be more useful in this context to simply tell you how not to do it!
A simple rule of thumb: Have a close look at every element of your site, and answer the following question: Must this element really be included in this site? If your answer is a clear "yes and no", remove it. You will be surprised, how "clean" and well designed your website will look after you have analyzed it in this way.
If you find the above approach too radical, we have a few tips for you on things you should avoid at any case:
- "Click here to enter our website": What is the point in having such a welcome page? Let's face it, there is absolutely no reason why a visitor should not directly access the useful information rather than being "welcomed" in this way.
- Music: A guaranteed way of annoying every single visitor! First of all, they have to wait until the music file is actually loaded. Then, they will likely see their browser freeze. And then there is a good chance that the music they hear is not at all of their taste.
- Graphic gimmicks: Many websites can simply not be designed without graphics (e.g. product catalogs). However, if graphics are used without any good reason, they are probably as irritating as music, as they slow down the loading of the page.
- Lost graphics and broken links: Ensure that all graphics are correctly displayed and that none of the links in your page is broken. Broken links give the impression of a home-made job that is not properly maintained.
- Spelling and grammar errors: If you do not have the time to check your writing properly, how can you expect people to read on in a text full of errors!
- Slow pages: Have you booked free website space from Geocities and similar services and loaded your 1MB-site? Well, before visitors ever see your page, they will have moved on, as they are not willing to wait.
- Superfluous Java applets: Leave Java applets out, unless they serve a real purpose. The same applies to JavaScript scroll texts as they are an old hat anyway and will let everybody know that you are clearly a beginner.
- Text in color on colored or image background: How do you expect visitors to read your text?
- More than one ad banner on a page: Your visitors will click the nicest banner and will be gone without ever returning!
- Large pages: Is your entire site set up on one 3 megabyte large page? Why not do it as they do it in books? Divide your text up into chapters!
- Boring content: Please, only show us your cat, if it has five legs or something else that make it special in this world. Please, do not show us your cat because you love it. If there is not a very good reason, why it is on your website in the first place, remove the picture :-)