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To create your plan for a new or existing site, sit down and consider what
your site will achieve. Get out a piece of paper and a pen, draw a circle in
the middle and mark it 'home'. Draw boxes connected by lines radiating out from
the centre circle and mark them with each of the main areas your site will cover.
Don't forget a site map if your site has more than 8 or 9 pages. Repeat this
process for each secondary circle until you've planned your site. If you've
already got a site, do this exercise and include every page on the web site.
Good navigation is vital and poor navigation leads to visitor frustration.
Once you've created your plan, you can create logical navigational links. Make
up to 8 main navigational links to use on all pages of your site. You don't
want to confuse your site visitors with too many options. You can offer more
choices later, as your customers drill down into your site.
If you have lots of links, then consider creating pages that list each group
of links instead. For example, Click Art Gallery, (www.clickart-gallery.com)
has hundreds of pages within the site, but only 8 main links. Two of the main
links are to sub navigation pages. The first is an 'arts' page. This lists all
the pages on the site only relating to the displayed artworks. The second is
a 'services' page that lists all the extra services on the site.
Once your navigation is taken care of, it's time to focus on content. Common
questions we hear are, how much information should I put on a page and how big
is a web page?
The size of a web page, and therefore the content are dependent on the type
of information being provided. However, many site visitors don't want to read
a condensed version of 'War and Peace' on a single page. See if you can logically
break the content down into easy to read chunks.
Unless your site is an art gallery, keep images to a minimum. Try using simple
16 colour GIF images as they're small and fast loading.
The following list gives you a few good design tips to consider when preparing
your web site content.
-> Do make your text easy to read. -> Do use short sentences. -> Do
break up your text into paragraphs. -> Do use bullets and lists to make your
point. -> Create textual variation with heading size and colour but don't
make your text too small to read easily. -> Be consistent - consistency creates
a professional image. -> Don't use fancy fonts except as 16 colour GIFs as
your masterpiece may not display correctly on every browser. -> Don't use
weird text colour/background colour combinations. -> Stick to one colour
for each font type (eg Headings - blue, sub headings - teal, main text - black)
-> Don't be too adventurous with changing hyperlink colours. Many people,
especially newbies, expect blue, underlined links. -> Leave white space to
create a 'clean' looking design. -> Ask two or three friends (who's opinions
you value) how they find your site navigation and layout.
You can also experiment with cascading style sheets (CSS) and bold, italics
or even highlighted words and phrases. For example, this code inserted into
your document will create a yellow highlight over the word 'Highlight'. Highlight
All the preparation may seem like a whole lot of hard work, but it will pay
off. Over the lifetime of your web site, good layout design and navigation allow
your site to grow without creating you massive headaches.
About the Author:
Breal provides cost effective web site design and hosting with a full 30 day
money back guarantee. Web hosting even comes with six months free hosting on
yearly accounts. To find out more visit http://www.brealweb.com For a complete
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