Janvier Design Services

I, like many other web designers out there, have been caught up in “killer design” techniques. Things like CSS tabbed navigation that saves page space and give the “wow effect” to the site.  While this is a good idea, there’s more to designing a webpage than just how it looks. The truth is, most visitors don’t care that you make your site look like a mideaval piece of art  as long as you provide them with the information they are looking for.In other words, when you design pages, keep in mind they areto be read  by human beings, so avoid anything that makes the visitor  fetch for the information they are looking for. We are becoming more and more geared at accessing information really fast. Try to follow  some of the tips below.

1. Keep it simple.
   Ever wondered why Google doesn’t make their site so complicated and yet stays as the top online portal for the past few years? Because they keep it simple. Visitors are not looking for “CSS wizards”. As a matter of fact, just a small portion of them actually know what  CSS is, let alone knowing what it does. Visitors want information really easily. So, the easier to navigate the site you design, the better the user experience will be.
2. Graphics moderation is key.
   Clogging your pages with so many graphics means one thing: search engines won’t like you. Why?
   • First, because Search engines don’t understand the data contained in the graphics than the graphic’s title and hopefully its URL.
   • Graphics don’t make your site any faster. Actually, they slow it down and this can meaning nothing but bad news, because your site load time is one the key parameters search engines consider while indexing pages  from your site.
   • Graphics are relatively larger files than average text or html files. So, for an account with limited  bandwidth thi can be a source of trouble.
3. Be at their place. Will you?
   When you design a page or a bunch of them, very likely it’s for someone else. Some audience out there. If you were part of that audience, how would you like them? Ask yourself that question, to avoid being part of the 85%  webmasters who will see their websites go down in less than a year because they failed  to consider this trivial but rather  crucial info.  I see web designers who spend so much time on “flashy” techniques and forget what really matters;  User Experience!!
4. Color combination.
   It may not be your choice, but from different surveys and polls data, most web surfers preffer clear backgrounds to dark ones. In other words, a white background and a black font is better than a black baground with a yellow font. Google chooses that combination. So does  Yahoo! and many others including wikipedia, facebook,… Do you think it’s a coincidence? Think again.
5. Be unique
   Yes…Uniqueness is quality. Even if you use a highly popular theme or template like the wordpress omni theme, make sure you can get a professional designer to customize it for you to give it a unique look. This is because you simply don’t want to have a site looking like your competitor’s  who might buy the same template!

With these few  design tips, I hope you can a new insight in making your pages more appealing and more attractive. The main point to focus on is the visitor, because in the end their behaviour  will read the final verdict for the content and organization for your site.

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