When a person comes to your website, what does he notices first? The quality of your content or is it the design that retains the visitors?
Well, the first thing that gets noticed is the design. People come to your website, and decide to read or leave your website on the basis of how it looks. Not on the basis of how it reads. No matter how informative your website is, or how well researched your content is, your website is not going to witness visitors, unless you have a well-designed website. If you want your website to be read, make sure that it doesn’t look visually cluttered. There are 3 elements that you need to keep in mind while designing your website.
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Clutter-free layout: Content is the king. No one is contesting this fact, but no one will care, if a king is draped in rags. Hence, a visually appealing website is a must. A visually heavy and informative website will have the same effect on the visitors as will have a non-informative website. In either case, the users are not going to stay on the website.
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Flat Navigation: Navigation of your website, as the name suggest, is the doorway through which one person travel between different pages. If you have not planned a proper link structure then your visitors will have hard time in going from one place to another. And the more difficulty they face, the quicker they will be out of the website. Navigation also helps search bots in crawling through the pages; therefore, you should avoid using JavaScript or other opaque elements in your navigation link.
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Awe-inspiring Over-the-fold elements: use over-the-fold space of your website to garner visitors’ interest by seeding website content that excites the visitors. Do not waste this space by explaining everything. Rather, use it to pull the visitors to the inside pages. You can use it as teaser, but be very judicious in using this space. You can also put your highest-paying ads in this space.
Along with these, there are quite a few more things that affect the quality perception of the website. Can you suggest some? Use the comment box below to add your view.
Tags: Awe, Clutter, Doorway, Elements Of Web Design, Free Layout, Hard Time, Informative Website, Link Structure, Navigation Link, Rags, Search Bots, Website Content, Website Navigation
From the all-text beginning to today’s Flash and AJAX based website, website designing has come of age. Many things have changed in these years, but what hasn’t changed is the focus on usability. Usability of a website was at top of the priority list, back then, and it is at top of the priority list even now. The question now arises, what makes the website more functional?
There are certain elements that go into making or breaking the users’ experience of a website. The web design Professionals know these things, and beginners should aspire to know these things. Let’s make it clear: It does not matter how great your website looks, or how great a concept you have, if your website is not easy to use, it will not cut.
Let’s put the elements that go into making a user-friendly website in order here, so that the beginners can refer back to it when executing their projects. These elements will help the professionals as well in finding the missing part.
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Navigation and navigational structure: This is the most basic thing. Navigation and navigational structure is stairs and an elevator for your website. Visitors will use it to go from one page to another. Make the navigation structure as flat as possible. Do not use too many layers.
Apply 3-click rules: The 3-click rule means that the visitor to your website should reach wherever he or she wants to go in no more than 3 clicks.
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Page Layout and structure: The structure of a page and the layout you will employ should not look cluttered. Give as much breathing space as you can. The more whitespace you will leave on your web page the easier your web page will go on the visitors. You can use other colors as the background color, instead of white, for your website as well, but I prefer to keep it white. It makes the web page look serene, calm, and non-obtrusive.
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Loading time: the website’s loading time is another factor one should care about while designing a website. A website that loads faster gets more visitors. You can improve the loading time by removing unnecessary lines of codes, optimizing images, flash, JavaScript, etc.
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Screen Resolution: Let’s accept it, you might have the latest screen, but not everyone own the same screen that you have. Hence, do a little bit of research to see that what screen resolution is in fashion now and make your website compatible to that. There is nothing like standard screen resolution. The screen resolution changes with changing technology.
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Browser Compatibility: Your website should look the same across the browsing platform. At least make it look good on Internet Explorer, and Firefox. I would also not suggest ignoring Opera and Chrome.
Tags: 5 Elements, Ajax, Background Color, Breathing Space, Colors, Designing A Website, Elements Of Web Design, Elevator, Loading Time, Many Things, Navigation Structure, Page Layout, Priority, Stairs, Usability, Users Experience, Web Design Professionals, Web Page, Website Designing, Website Visitors
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