Please visit our sponsors !

Web Site Design

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 he decides 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 him 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.

Computer Joke

Support: "Then hit F8."

Customer: "Do I have to hit 'F' and '8' at the same time?"

Jump to: Top of Page or HOME or Printer friendly page

Search W3Schools:

What Others Say About Us

Does the world know about us? Check out these places:

Dogpile Alta Vista MSN Google Excite Lycos Yahoo Ask Jeeves

We Help You For Free. You Can Help Us!

• Tell your newsgroup or mailing list
• Link to us from your pages
• Help us correct errors and broken links
• Help us with spelling and grammar
• Validate the XHTML code of this page

W3Schools is for training only. We do not warrant its correctness or its fitness for use. The risk of using it remains entirely with the user. While using this site, you agree to have read and accepted our terms of use and privacy policy.

Copyright 1999-2002 by Refsnes Data. All Rights Reserved

How we converted to XHTML