25 Web Design Principles and Techniques

Information Technology Resources

by Jayaram V

Here are some of the techniques to make your website user friendly and search engine frinedly.

1. Create user-friendly navigation. Make the menus simple and straightforward. Connect every page in the website to at least one other page so that they can be found by the search engine crawlers. Keep the navigation and basic page design consistent through out the site unless you have a very large site and have a specific reason.

2. Use user-friendly colors, font-sizes ands formatting styles for your fonts, images, symbols and backgrounds. Ensure that your site is accessible to even people with certain disabilities such as color blindness or vision problems.

3. Make the pages visually appealing but without compromising the basic purpose of what you wanted to display in the page.

4. Avoid information clutter. Avoid using too many graphics or memory intensive flash images that would slow down the page downloads. Keep the total number of links on a page to a maximum of 100.

5. Ensure that all the links are active and alive.

6. Use correct html tags and client side scripts.

7. Keep the browser variations in mind while creating the web pages.

8. Make the pages search engine friendly.

9. Ensure that the pages download within a reasonable time into be browser on slow networks.

10. Use alt tags for all your images.

13. Provide a site map so that your site visitors can have an over view of what is available at your site.

14. Avoid using image maps or hot keys to link your site pages.

15. Create contact forms and submission forms with proper client side and server side validation and let the visitor know in advance which fields are required fields. Ensure that the forms are functional.

16. Provide adequate help information to the users wherever there is a possibility of user interaction.

17. Create a privacy policy for your site and post a link to it on each and every page.

18. Create a term of use agreement and post a link to it prominently on every page.

19. Provide some information about your site and its purpose to the site visitors.

20 Create your website for the users not the search engines. Ultimately it is the quality of your site which will determine its success and ensure its survival.

21. Avoid posting too many banners and inserting pop ups and pop downs.

22. As far as possible if you are posting commercial links along with general links, let the customers know which are which so that they would not feel deceived.

23. Design your website keeping in mind the least efficient browser, modem and network speed, unless you have specific audience in mind.

24. Give due credit to the content writers and creators.

25. Create appropriate meta tags, titles and keywords for each page. For more information regarding search engine optimization click here and here.

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