Five Rules For Professional Web Design
22 Jun 2008Design Elements
When creating a professional web design, the actual visual design of the site is very important. There are four primary pieces of the site that must be included on almost every design; header, menu, content area and footer. The header is usually at the top of the site and this serves as sort of an intro to the site. It usually has a mix of a graphical and textual description of what your site is about. This is usually where you would have the company logo so the user knows what site they're on as soon as they get there.
The menu is likely the most important part of a site second to the content area. The menu is the navigation that the user will follow to get to certain pages of your site. Menu's can be displayed in many different ways (horizontally at the top, vertically on the right or left side, or abstractly somewhere unusual on the site) but it's very important that the menu is very prominent and stands out right away to the user.
The content area is definitely the most important part of your site because this is where all of your information is. The whole purpose to a site is to promote whatever content is in the content area; whether it be text and information, or photos, videos, artwork, or a mixture of any of them. You want to make absolutely sure your content is easy to read/see and you don't want other areas of your site to dominate the content area because this is the focus of your site.
The footer is pretty much always on the bottom of the site (hints the name "footer") and this is usually where you've your closing information such as copyrights, design credits, and most importantly, your text-based navigation. The purpose of a text-based navigation is to create access to all of your primary pages through text links just in case your main navigation doesn't display properly for any reason (i.e. flash navigation or graphical navigation). Text-based navigation is also great for search engine optimization because it provides paths for the search engine spiders to follow once they get to the end of your web page.
Load Time
One thing to definitely keep in mind when designing a site is how long your site is going to take to load. A lot of internet users today have high speed internet connections that can load most pages pretty quickly but there are still some people that have 56k modems which take a pretty long time to load anything. When designing a new site it's a good idea to decide what kind of market you're creating your site for and determine who your target audience is so you can get an idea of what kind of things you can and cannot do. High resolution graphics and flash animation are two of the biggest design elements that take up a lot of space. A true professional web design will use these items sparingly and only if they really contribute to the content on the site.
SEO Compatibility
If you want your site to be visible to the search engines then it's a good idea to make absolutely sure that your site is designed with SEO in mind. A lot of internet marketers turn to things like link building and article writing to optimize websites; these are important to SEO but it's also very important to make absolutely sure the design and coding of your site is SEO compatible to get the most out of your optimization efforts. A couple things to consider when designing a new site is to name your images accordingly with your keywords (for example if one of your keywords is "dentist" then you can name an image "dentist_header.jpg"). This lets the search engine know that your site has other aspects associating it with keywords other than just your content. You also want to keep your code as clean as possible so it's easy for the spiders to crawl through it. You can use div tags instead of tables and put your javascripts and CSS elements in different files that are called by a single line of code. This brings me to my next point of site organization.
Organization
As a web designer, it's good practice to keep your site as organized as possible. This is true for a couple of reasons; SEO compatibility, keeps it easy to go back and make changes, makes it easy for anyone else working on the site to see what is going on, etc. You can keep all of your images in one folder, javascripts in another folder, CSS files in a folder, flash in a folder and so on and so on. You can also leave comments that are in the code but don't show up on the site itself; this is good to do if you've a lot of code or if you've any unusual code that may not be recognizable without a small comment to say what it's for. Good organization keeps your site looking like a real professional web design.
Browser Compatibility
One of the last things to consider in a professional web design is the compatibility of your site across different internet browsers. Most current internet users use Firefox or Internet Explorer but you also have to consider that there are different versions of IE that people use (5.5, 6.0, 7.0), Mac users use Opera and Safari, and there are a few other miscellaneous browsers. Most of these browsers view and read html and CSS differently than the other so when you're coding your site it's a good idea to test your site on a few different browsers to make absolutely sure that your site displays correctly to any user that goes to it.
For more information on Professional Web Design or Search Engine Optimization please visit the SEO Compatible Web Design Blog or if you're interested in our professional web design or SEO services please visit our website: http://www.seocompatibledesign.com
