It isn’t very difficult to design a bad website. In the past you needed to know how to format and program in HTML, but with today’s WYSIWYG (pronounced whizzy-wig, what you see is what you get) editors, even those provided by free hosting sites like angelfire.com and geocities.com, anybody can setup their website within a few minutes, for better or for worse. Other free weblog hosting services, like blogger.com, give you all sorts of website design options, called templates, which you can alter to fit your needs and desires. Again, going through the free signup procedures through these sites is a snap, and you can add your two cents to the overall content of the world wide web in minutes. But is anybody going to read what you’re writing? Are they going to want to?
Website design choices range from the boring and mundane to shiny, gee-wiz java applets that can make the text literally jump off the page. If you’re just getting into website design, either for a business or for your own personal site, you’re going to want to learn the HTML basics, even if you’re using a WYSIWYG editor. Find a tutorial, there are lots of them out there, and learn how to create boarders, add text, manipulate photos, and setup links. Once you’ve figured out how to do these things you can go onto designing your site, either from a pre-made template or from scratch. There is a lot more to learn, and it’s to your advantage to keep learning once you get started. Figure out how to add backgrounds, page dividers, and how to manipulate the text you’ve entered. However, don’t feel the need to get too flashy.
One of the biggest mistakes in website design, both by professional programmers and first-timers, is that programmers try to make their websites too flashy. They include flashing banners and text and animated images. Big intros eat up bandwidth before users even get a chance to find the information they’re looking for. Colored text clashes with colored backgrounds and shimmering headers. Though all of these extras may show off your design chops, they’re going to make your website hard to navigate for users.
So, follow the golden rules of website design.
- Keep your site simple and easy to navigate.
- Be sure to link your pages internally; nothing is more frustrating to a user than having to navigate back to the front page every time they want to get to another area of your site.
- Colors are great, but pick a color scheme and stick with it.
- Make important content easy to find, and link every single page back to the home page.
Follow these rules of thumb and you’ll keep your website from looking like a train wreck, and more people will listen to what you’re trying to tell them.
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