02 Sep 09 5 Elements of Web Design to Care For

Written by: bikram

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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