There are so many "easy-to-use" web design software packages available nowadays that many people seem to think that they’re a web designer if they can cope with basic desktop publishing. The fact is that web design is far more complicated than creating pretty pages and putting them on the internet, and the evidence of poor web design is all over the place. As well as aesthetically ugly pages, there are sites which take far too long to load, sites which are difficult to navigate, and sites which don’t display properly in various browsers or on various machines. Avoiding these problems is simply a matter of having a few basic skills and a bit of foresight, but they are neglected by so many designers that if you can get around them, you will stand out from the crowd.

Sites which are difficult to read are going to discourage customers from the outset. Make sure that your text and background are suitably contrasting, and avoid busy background images that interfere with the text. You should make sure you’re your site can be happily viewed at all screen resolutions and at all colour-depths. Don’t put "Best viewed in X browser at X resolution", because that sounds elitist and smacks of lazy design. Choose as few fonts and colours as you can, as more than three or four colours, and one or two fonts, will make it look like you’re playing with all the features of your web design software, rather than focusing on style and consistency. Also, bear in mind that you cannot rely on your visitors having any fonts installed other than the standard web set. If you want to use a different font for your headings, make images of the font and insert those into your pages.

Speaking of images, make sure that you limit yourself to only a few per page, and use appropriate compression so that they do not increase page size too much. Try to keep your pages below 30KB in size, as visitors on a dialup connection (they do still exist) will be grateful for pages that don’t take too long to load. Make sure you utilise the alt tags when you add images, so that your visually impaired visitors, and those who turn off images, will still be able to navigate your page, particularly if you are using images as buttons. Make sure you also specify height and width so that the pages know how much space to leave for images as they load.

Put navigation and functionality before style. Your visitors will thank you for a site which is easy to navigate. Most people are less interested in your design skills and more concerned with finding the information for which they visited you in the first place. Have a link to your homepage on every page, and also to a site map, and any main categories of pages. You can use a breadcrumb trail navigation bar, which displays the nesting of your pages (e.g. home > category > subcategory > page) and which will make it easier for your visitors to find their way around and explore your site. Make sure that it’s obvious where every link goes: don’t make images into links unless they are images of text, or if you are using an image map which is clearly explained. (This is an image where there are certain hotspots in different rollover areas of the image. If you had a photograph of your staff, and a hotspot on each of their faces which led to a profile of that staff member, you need to explain next to the image map: "Click on a staff member’s face for a personal profile" would do perfectly.) Basically, make navigation as clear and easy for your visitors as possible.

If you are using a table-based design, remember that when tables load, they appear all at once rather than in chunks. Therefore you need to put your header and main navigational links or sidebar in a separate table from your page content, so that this header table loads first while the visitor is waiting for the rest of the content to load.

Don’t use any browser-specific functions. Firefox and Internet Explorer 6 users are in about equal proportions, the rest of the market being dominated by other versions of IE. You need to make sure that your site works in all of the leading browsers. Things do display differently in different browsers, and it’s really important that you check. Firefox users are often particularly indignant when things won’t work in their browser. If you must use a browser-specific feature, your site should still look good and apologise politely to those who won’t be able to see whatever it is that you’ve put in. Don’t exclude people if you can help it.

On a similar thread, you should also avoid "revolutionary" new plug-ins that your visitors are unlikely to have already installed. However fabulous your content is, if your visitors can’t see it straight away, they’re unlikely to hang around downloading a new plug-in (and no doubt a hefty dollop of spyware into the process) in order to see it. The only exception to the rule is Flash Player, which most people will have. (The number of Flash-based advertisements alone is a testament to this.) However, make sure you use animation sparingly, and only when it is strictly necessary. It is space-consuming and can look gimmicky.

Also be sparing with your use of Java applets. Only use them when they are going to add to the functionality of your site. They are notoriously slow and sometimes don’t load at all.

Finally, try to consider search engines when you design your site. If you’re using frames, make use of the "noframes" tag to make sure that search engines will crawl all the content of the site. Be sure to fill in your meta tags with keywords that are in the copy of your site. Don’t forget - an attractive and user-friendly site will encourage people to link back to it, further improving your search engine rankings.

By Natalie Catchpole

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