Design Tips

The days of parsing HTML for your web Design are pretty much over. New programs are both sophisticated and user friendly, but that doesn't eliminate common web Design flaws.

In this article, we are not looking at specific code issues. Instead, we are stepping back and looking at more universal problems that commonly pop up with even the most advanced sites.

Ah, where to start? The logical first place is with the page size. No, I don't mean the dimensions. I mean the total kilobytes. Most people that are new to web Design tend to use a ton of code. This leads to problems when you publish the site because it takes the page a long time to actual load. If people have to wait for it to come up, they will leave.

To this end, a second common web Design flaw has to do with a lack of focus. Your site is serving a purpose of some sort. It has a subject matter. Maybe you are offering a product for sale or a number of products in a particular category like pottery. If so, the pages need to focus on that. Adding "cool" little bits of code or irrelevant things like the weather in your town hog up space, make the site load slower and distract visitors. Don't do this.

Using proper meta tags is another web Design flaw that is often seen. Most people new to Design don't realize something about meta tags. The meta title and description for each page are what appear in the results of search engines. As a result, make sure they actually make sense. If someone can't figure out what your site is about, they are not going to click through.

For a final tip, try to create and automate a template for your site. Why? Well, what if you need to make a change to some part of the site that appears on every page? Do you want to manually change each and every page or just do it one? If your site has 100 plus pages, you'll want to make sure everything is automated.

As you can imagine, there are plenty of other common web Design flaws that come up. If you avoid just the ones mentioned in this article, you are far ahead of most Designers on the web.

Aazdak Alisimo writes about Designcompanies.com" target="_new">professional web Design for ProfessionalWebDesignCompanies.com.

// posted by gng @ 3:22 PM 0 comments