By Andrea Wilson
Expert Author
A professional-looking web site goes a long way to establishing you and your product as legitimate and trustworthy. It doesn't have to be fancy (shouldn't be, actually), but a nice, clean design is essential.
1. Keep the design simple. Period!
2. Maintain a consistent style throughout so visitors always know they're on the same site.
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This is a very basic rule that must not be ignored.
3. Make sure your design looks decent on older versions of both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Archived versions of these browsers can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.asp? http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive.html
4. Keep web pages uncluttered. White space is GOOD! Don't try to put everything on your Home page.
5. Provide "alt tags" for all images so the disabled can use your site. The blind use a special "reader" when they surf the web. It reads the alt tags of your images. Make the alt tag (description) of each image clear. "My new car, " tells them almost nothing. "My 2002 silver BMW, " tells them a whole lot more.
6. Forget the Flash and the animated GIFs. If anything moves on your site, it should be VERY subtle and the visitor should be able to get away from it or turn it off. Forget the scrolling marquee, the mousetrails and the hopping bunny. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
(However, if statistics prove that a scrolling marquee sells product, ignore this rule! Nothing is written in stone and as a marketer you have to pay attention to what's working today! Check the gurus's sites and see what they're doing. Then do it! )
7. Keep graphics to a minimum. Be more concerned that your site loads quickly and contains great content or a terrific sales letter.
8. Use a sans-serif font (Verdana is your best choice) for the body of all your content. You can use a serif font (Times New Roman or Georgia) for headings to provide some contrast. Use no more than 2-3 fonts, in total. Don't bother with fancy fonts. Each visitor's browser will use whatever fonts it has loaded. Often your fancy font ends up as Times New Roman to the visitor.
If you want to use fancy fonts in page headings, you must create a graphic for each heading. I don't recommend it unless you only have a few pages. Adding new pages becomes a chore when you have to create a new graphic for the heading every time.
If you want to use a fancy font somewhere, make a graphic for your web site's name (include your logo and your USP - Unique Selling Proposition, if you wish) and post this graphic on every page. It will need to be loaded only once so every subsequent page that uses this graphic won't require it to reload. Re-using graphics helps speed-up the load time of your web site.
9. Unless you are an advanced HTML programmer, stick to "fixed width" designs. Set your main table size to 650-700 pixels maximum. If you set your table size to 100%, yes it will shrink and grow according to the visitor's browser, but you can get some ugly, unexpected results.
10. Learn HTML! When the (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor you're using produces messy code, or an effect that you can't fix or don't like, looking at the code and understanding how you can change it will make your site work better, look better and often download faster. Recommended HTML editors: MS FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver (Note: if you can use MS Word, you can use FrontPage).
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