Simplicity is the heart of effective web design Keep it simple. Will ya? Have you ever wondered about the striking similarities in some of the tremendously functional sites of our time? Just spare some thoughts on the features of sites like Cisco, Marshall, Dell, Amazon, etc., and the answer would not miss you. Yeah. You got it. Plain and simple. Friendly and functional. No cosmetics. No facelifts. No hassle. Simplicity in web design questions, as in other areas of life. Web design is not a medium to show your technical skills. Nor, you will have to demonstrate your superb graphic acumen. These are necessary, but only in moderation, let them not dominate over your site friendliness and usability. Here are some useful and rather important tips to help you – on the right track again – to build a professional website in appearance, and in high quality and user friendliness. Formulate your mission statement and understand your target audience A m ission statement or statement of direction, where the company intends to go in the foreseeable future is critical. It will certainly give some stability from which the website can springboard forward. You must pursue some explicit goals to excel on the web. You need pretty clear on the counts, such as: What is the purpose of the site? Who is the site’s audience? How success will be measured? How to gather feedback and involve your audience in your design? Mere high intentions and a cool design does not go to your development and manufacturing processes lasting miss a concrete statement of your goals and how to reach them. In its sheer absence, a website can not be a consistent, steady message delivered to the customer, can hardly be a platform for quality. Ponder also on your layout and navigation A clean and neat navigation system that employs a lot of white space enhances your site and see appeal. Be focused on your content. You can better use Dreamweaver templates for your website – all pages or a group of pages have one basic design and only the content varies. And this is noted, hopefully with an appreciative glance. Make sure that it is the load time on the site ideal for the production of low-load time on your site, you can choose from the following options. Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They take a lot of space, and therefore must be minimized. Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your site does not have any unwanted tags or unused scripts. Use Server Side Include (SSI) files: SSI files once stay out of the web server with the name in its cache, and on subsequent requests they load faster. When planning consider all screen resolutions A site that is easy to use always encourages visitors to stay and read your content. If your site does not seem to see for a certain resolution, it is likely that the visitor the browser window feeling that the site is close not just for their good. Therefore extend to design layouts that any screen resolution is a visually appealing and professional website to ensure fit. Make your website interactive and rich in content To make your website sticky you can add a few simple applications such as interactive web site surveys, polls, a guestbook, a calendar of events, newsletter subscription, etc. There are many network applications, but you must choose wisely. Macromedia Flash is another way to add interactivity to your website. 95% of the world’s browsers have the Flash Player plug-in, so you need to have compatibility as long as your movie by lower versions of the Flash Player can think of to play. You can also try using an HTML and Flash Sections “Entry (Splash) Page” if you take a serious film, users on slow connections. Make your site scalable and cross-browser-compatible Your code and design scalable pays you off well. This is crucial because as the technologies advance and configuration of computers and their monitors always higher and varied it is impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and platforms. Also, check your site for Internet Explorer 5 +, Mozilla Firefox 1 0, Opera 7 0 and Netscape Navigator 6 + as they constitute 95% of the world’s browsers. Incorporate consistency of your website Consistency is crucial to give because it could your site a professional look and feel, and so does penetrate for easy navigation. For the sake of consistency throughout your site, templates, try using a common data base look and feel for your site. Although database template is generally not the answer for all sites, and may not be practical for smaller sites, it is a great help for all your website pages to share common elements, and reflects a high degree of site to site consistency. The advantage of the fact that it is all the more easier to create, and make your site consistent regardless of personnel changes. Database templates also facilitates you to make changes to your site much easier and help you change certain elements without the entire page may be out of nowhere, the dividends of simplicity will be ignored and put at stake during the design of the site it is important that the site is attractive, fast-loading, user friendly, focuses on your content and has a high stickiness factor to it. This is probably what it is to be professional in appearance, quality, and value added in functionality. Any departure from the basic principles of simplicity can also go off to the back, and so spent can go down the drain energy. So miss the subtleties of simplicity and stay tuned to face the music.
Simplicity is the heart of effective web design
Deepak Sharma is a Web designer at Blue Apple, a Web Design and Development Company with a well connected development infrastructure in India with a strong superior web services and solutions to offer competitive costs.