Website Design Rules
There are so many myths and ideas that are floated around the net these days and we have heard most of them. Multi Media students are always over loading site with heavy flash or fecking intro pages that take a few seconds to download and when there are ready you just have another button to click on to actually get into the website so now I’m just going to name a few basic rules for what a well designed website should have.
- A Small amount of Flash
- Try to limit the amount of flash a website uses, if a user does not have flash installed on their pc they can be asked to install it, This is when users click BACK and don’t view your site.
- Navigation Menu
- People who are new to website design nearly always forget that a website is not like a book, that in fact users are often brought into a website via a search engine and therefore not onto the homepage that may contain the navigation system. You should be able to access every page from every page.
- Make sure users know where they are.
- This is a follow on from the last rule, meaning that that you can do a “Hansel and Gretel” and follow links back to the homepage. In the industry we call this having “bread crumbs” links on the site.
- Font Use
- We are often asked to make a website look like a flyer and clients ask to mad looking fonts to be used. This has it pros and cons. Pros, yes it can look funky, cons are , sya they don’t have they font on their pc, the browser will display a default on, therefore loosing the desired effect you wanted to achieve.
- Loading time.
- This is a following on from rule no 1, designers often forget that the people using the site are not all on 10MB Office broadband lines and infact still on basic dial up as they can not get broadband. Make sure your website downloads within 10 seconds or else….. they have clicked BACK and are gone from your site before they even got in the door !
