Web Site Design Projects

Web Site Design Tips

Do not distract your visitors with blinking text, scrolling text, animated GIFs, or sound files.

Animation and sounds are distracting. How can anyone read what's on your site when they're subjected to the equivalent of someone standing next to them poking them in the shoulder repeatedly? Also, visitors who have dial-up connections instead of high-speed connections may resent that you wasted their time by forcing them to load animations and sound files against their will. Research shows that animated banner ads may be no more effective than static ads, anyway.

Never annoy your visitors with pop-up windows.

Nobody likes them. They waste time and space. So try to avoid them as much as you can.


Try to Compress your image files.

Nothing is more annoying to readers than waiting for a 100k graphic to load when it should be only 20k instead. Graphics software can compress files so they take up less room on your disk, and therefore take less time to load into your visitors' browsers. Get some graphics software and shrink those file sizes! GifBot is quick and easy, and shrinks your graphics right on a webpage. Or you can download graphics software: Windows: HVS GifCruncher and JPEG Wizard. Macintosh: GraphicConverter, available at Download.com.

And as mentioned earlier, don't bog your site down with auto-playing sound files, either.

Do not let flashy multimedia ruin your site

Flashy graphics and multimedia controls may look nice, but they're bad when they make it hard for visitors to get the information they want from your site. Nobody wants to be annoyed by having to use a cumbersome Java scroller to see all the text in a field, much less wait for all the doodads to load -- if they even work at all. Stay away from sitebuilders like Moonfruit.com. (The exception, of course, are sites whose content is art rather than information.)

Put your contact info, or a link to it, on the top or bottom of every page.

Don't waste your readers' time by making them hunt around your site for how to contact you. Make your contact info easy to get to. Put your contact info (or a link to it), on the top of every page. [Example]
If you're not printing your phone and/or email anywhere because you don't have the resources to handle inquiries, then do your readers the courtesy of letting them know that, so they don't spend forever hunting in vain for contact info that doesn't exist.

And while this should be obvious, when you list your email address, link it so that people can click on it to email you. (Amazingly, some people don't link their email address.)