Good site layout importance

June 6, 2008

When you create a website you must think first to the content and layout. All those things are very important for you content and are the most important things that make visitors to came back and visit again. Everyone is not born with a quality of creating layouts that are pleasing to the eye. In order to keep you visitors is important to carefully chose the colors and to create all the possible combination offering to your website a special design.

Points to consider while designing a website layout

When you create a website is very important to consider that you may change something on the site and that must be an easy job. That’s why:

Keep it simple:

In major situations a simple website layout is user friendly. It’s better to not create complex navigational links using complex scripts or images that may not be viewable correctly in different browsers. It’s also very possible that search engine to not index the site properly if complex navigation is involved. You should use small icons to attract visitor’s attentions because using larges images cam make your website difficult, laborious.

Readable font size and face:

We recomand you to use standard font size of “-1” (11 or 12 pixels if using styles) because that way visitors can read the content easily. Select a professional looking font face (Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif are very common). Avoid using fancy fonts like Comic Sans (unless it is a personal website). Use appropriate spacing between lines (12 or more pixels) to avoid clumsiness.

Use web safe eye pleasing colors:

You must select that color you feel are best for you website subject. However, it is a wise decision to get feedback from users or friends about what they feel about the color combination of the website.

Web pageDimensions:

Here, an important thing is to keep track of dimensions of a web page. Most successful commercial websites limit the width and height of the web page so that the important content of the web page lies within the top 600×600 viewable area without scrolling. The best choice is to limit the width by placing a table with a fixed width of 750 or 775 pixels and to work in this table. The page height should not be any more than 4 scroll lengths. Limit the content of the page and if more content needs to be added, move it to a new web page. Provide a navigational link to the next page and a link back from the second page. This will also increase your web site’s page views.

Tips & tricks

Extract JavaScript code and styles from within the HTML page to external .JS and .CSS files. To decrease you individual HTML page size create a link from each HTML page to these external files because browsers download these files only once and caches them on the user’s computer. Use server side includes for centralizing common content, use a background which creates a contrast to the font colors and graphics and why not look at media sites to inspire.