Do and Don't

Hey guys, I was reading the email in my hotmail account and found 2 articals that I thought you might like to read. They are about the do's and don't of designing a site.

Don't ask me where they came from or who wrote them because I have not one clue. (A friend sent them to me.) These are mostly for the new guys. Hope they help. :specs:

Don't Of Internet Design
Your website is the life and soul of your Internet presence, if your
website appears and acts unprofessional you will seem unprofessional as an online entity and people wont feel confident buying from you.

With that said webdesign is a complex issue and I could discuss it for days with you, but for this article and for the moment anyway, I will concentrate on sharing the things you should not do when it comes to designing your site, as ultimately bad webdesign affects people more than good webdesign. These don'ts of webdesign are in point by point format.

Don't use frames, frames are a thing of the past and are out of fashion, they mostly confuse visitors and they basically destroy your chances of getting good search engine traffic. Not to mention the problems associated with bookmarking and printing pages that use frames.

Don't limit access to your site by requiring visitors to already have or download a certain plug-in, this is the same as increasing download time and most people wont bother to wait for the download, they'll just visit your competition instead.

Don't have scrolling pages which requires the visitor to scroll sideways to see the whole page. This is so annoying to most visitors that they will leave straight away. This happens when you design your site at a certain resolution and someone visits with a resolution lower than that. Design for a resolution of 640x480 if you want to be sure that your pages avoid having scroll bars but you're pretty safe designing and maximizing your pages for an 800x600 resolution because most people surf in that resolution.

Don't annoy your visitors with blinking text, pages full of banners,
continuous background music that slows down everything, pop-up windows, text that's hard to read because it's a similar color to the background etc. If you do annoy them you can bet they wont return.

Don't use under construction pages - you are only wasting peoples time if you direct them to a page that's not ready, so never link to pages unless they are finished.

Don't make them wait, if people have to wait for a page to download
because it's bogged down with too much graphics and other media they'll just leave.

Avoiding the above don'ts of webdesign will at least give you a chance of retaining visitors and maybe even have a few of them return.

Webdesign do's
You may have read the article entitled Webdesign don'ts, the article as the name suggests covers some of the things you should avoid when
designing a website, things that will likely cause the visitors to never want to visit your site again.

This article concentrates on the things you should do when designing a website to add to the experience of the visitor and make your site
easier for him or her to use. This is important because each visitor to your site is a potential customer and the more they enjoy their visit to your site the more likely they are to buy from it. As with the don'ts of webdesign I have put these do's of webdesign in a point by point format so they can be easily read.

Do tell your visitors what your site is about on the main page, this
saves them times if they are not interested in what your site offers and gives you the chance to use some keywords when describing your site.

Do optimize every page for the search engines by including keyword rich titles, keyword rich meta tags, a keyword rich introduction to each page.

Do have a constant style and navigation system on your website, if they are not constant then visitors will find it difficult to know if they are still on your website.

Do have an email address on every page - make it easy for people to
contact you, if they have to search for an email address they will
become frustrated and probably leave altogether.

Do link home on every page - not all users will enter your site via the home page, many will come through other pages via the search engines and when they get there they will be stuck unless you direct them back to the home page.

Do make navigation as easy a possible, every page should be accessible via two links from the home page and no more than 3 from any other page.

Do use alt text to provide people with images turned off an idea of what your images are, also some search engines index keywords inside the alt tag.

Do define height and width in all tables and graphics as this aids
download time.

Do use space to break up long pages of text, long paragraphs look
unprofessional and are hard to read. If something's hard to read people just wont bother reading it.

Using all or most of the above when designing your website will surely enhance a person's visit and make them more inclined to buy from you.

Looks like it is from a mainstream resource of some description.

A lot of that information is valid but a couple of points seem somewhat outdated to me.

Regards,

Lee

Yea, I was thinking along the same lines. Maybe it will help someone. (that was the goal anyway.) :specs:

Most of that is still good advice ... although I'd not design below 800x at this point in time... and I'd be using some sort of code scrambler before adding an email address to every page!

One point they did mention that I find a personal pique on some sites is that missing HOME button! Navigation is CRITICAL! It needs to be obvious, and on EVERY PAGE! There are some who think linking the Logo substitutes for adding a HOME link -NOT!!! Most aren't even going to scroll over that to see if it goes anywhere!! If that's the only space you have, then add TEXT somewhere on that Logo that says HOME.

just my 2cents