Web Page Design

If you have a website you need to give the visitor an easy way to find the content they are looking to find. Try to find a particular place in a book without a table of contents and you will know what I mean.

Easy to Read,Easy to Find

Even prior to that you must make sure your site is legible and easy to read. The font size must not be too small or so large that the visitor must scroll left-to-right in order to read the page. People hate that and I am one of those people.

Also, even though it may seem artsy or you just like it, refrain from using hard to read color combinations such as black pages with white type. I know you will see those out there but if you have a site where information is king then I think you should not give the reader a headache in order to get them to read your page.

Have a sitemap and at least a navigation bar with sub-pages or a full-out index for those sites with many pages of articles for example. You may also want to incorporate a search-driven capability if you have lots of content.

Load Time

Take care to ensure that your site loads quickly. This is done by not using too many images and making sure that the images that you do use have been optimized to load quickly. There are many ways to compress images or further reduce their file size. Most image editing programs have this capability and a good place to start to learn about it is: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

It also goes without saying that you must test every link on your site before you place the site on the web. Broken links are a sure sign of sloppy work.

Keep your text easy to read by making smaller paragraphs. This is something that is easy to overlook, especially if you are a writer and have come from a printed-page background. The website reads differently than a printed page. Give generous paragraph breaks so that you are easy on the eyes, so to speak.

Check your site in different browsers. The most important is Internet Explorer, but many people prefer Mozilla Firefox  as well as others.

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