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Designing Web sites needs careful thinking and a
lot of planning.
The most important thing is to KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.
Users Are Scanner
Less Is More
Navigation
Download Speed
Let Your Audience Speak!
Designing Web sites needs careful thinking and a
lot of planning.
The most important thing is to KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.
Users Are Scanners
If you think a typical user will read the entire content of your
Web pages, you are wrong.No matter how much useful information you
put into a Web page, a visitor will only spend a few seconds
scanning it before they decide whether to leave it or to stay.If
you want a visitor to read your text, be sure to make your point in
the very first sentence of the page. After that you should try to
keep them occupied with short paragraphs and interesting new
headers all the way down the page.
Less Is More
Try to keep all sentences as short as possible. Try to keep your
paragraphs as short as possible. Try to keep your chapters as short
as possible. Try to keep your pages as short as possible.
Use a lot of space between your paragraphs and chapters. Pages
overloaded with text will kill your audience.
Don't place too much content on a single page. If you have a
lot to say, try to break your information into smaller chunks and
place it on different pages. Don't expect any visitor to scroll
all the way down to the bottom of a page with thousands of
words.
Navigation
Try to create a navigation structure that is common for all the
pages in your Web.
Keep the use of hyperlinks inside your text paragraphs to a
minimum. Don't use hyperlinks inside text paragraphs to send your
visitors to every random page of your Web. That will destroy the
feeling of a consistent navigation structure.
If you must use hyperlinks, add them to the bottom of a
paragraph or to the navigation menus of your site.
Download Speed
A common mistake made by many web designers is to develop a site
on a local machine with direct access to the data, or to develop
the site over a high-speed Internet connection. Sometimes
developers are not aware of the fact that some of their pages take
a long time to download.
Internet usability studies tell us that most visitors will leave
a Web page that takes more than 7 seconds to download.
Before you publish any content heavy pages, make sure they are
tested over a low-speed modem connection. If your pages take a long
time to download, you might consider removing some of your graphic
or multimedia content.
Let Your Audience Speak!
Feedback from your users is a very good thing. Your visitors are
your "customers". Very often they will give you some valuable
wisdom, or advise you, completely free of charge, about what you
could have done better.
If you provide a simple way to reach you, you will get a lot of
positive input from a lot of people with different skills and
knowledge.
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