Knowledge Base
Q&A For Popular Website Design Questions
How To Pick A Memorable Website Name?
Most good single word and two word website names are taken so, unless you can buy florist.com or loans.com, choose a website name that's nearly just as memorable:
- Avoid website names with more than 1 dash
- Get a short website name. Two words maximum, preferably one.
- Use real or made up words that are easy to pronounce and remember. Avoid words that are awkward to pronounce.
- Use a thesaurus to replace longer words with short and common words. Aim for 1-2 syllable words that even a 10 year old can say and remember.
- Find a website name that rolls in your mouth. Test this by asking your friends to pronounce and spell it.
- Pick words that also have an emotional charge to match the subject of your website.
Buy variations and .org, .net extensions of the perfect website name for your own website. Some people may misspell it while competitors will try to steal it.
How To Ensure That Visitors Find What They Search For?
You must know what your visitors are interested in before you start to create content for your newly built website. The more your content matches what they are searching for, the more happy visitors you will have. Happy visitors buy more easily and gladly recommend your website to their friends.
Most people use search engines to look for stuff so use keyword tools such as Overture's term suggestion tool and Wordtracker's free trial to see what keyword combinations they use to find sites with your subject.
You can also see what people look for by checking out some of these resources:
- Discussion lists, message boards, forums related to your subject
- Feedback from visitors if you already have a site
- Public feedback on other related sites
- Guestbooks on your own website or on others
- News sites
- Published interviews
- Government statistics or published on other websites
- Public surveys
- Polls
- Blogs
- Specialist communities
- Online journals
- General communities like Orkut and then navigate to a specific group
- Chat rooms, IRC networks
How To Design Good Navigation?
Navigation works in the same way aisles in a supermarket do. They take you to the stuff you want to buy. But sometimes the signs above the aisles do not make it clear where the stuff you want could be. This is why it is so important to create good navigation on your website.
If the information is not organized how people expect it to be, they might never find what they were searching for, however good your content might be. You cannot afford to make it difficult for your users to go through your pages.
Put links where people expect to see them. Build a horizontal menu bar with 7 options maximum. Put it at the top of the screen. Create a left hand side menu to list options at deeper levels.
If you have more than three levels, you might consider hiding some of the options from the level above. Listing only local options related to the page people are on.
Always keep the main menu visible. Avoid drop down menus. These do not always work and can confuse people Remember to use breadcrumb navigation to let people know where they are in the structure of your web site and a bottom text menu for easy access.
Also embed links in your content to related pages, products or external sites.
Why Use CSS To Build Webpages?
The source code can make a website good or bad and it decides: how fast the website loads, how it looks on other browsers and how search engine robots get to the content.
HTML is the language used to build websites. It is simple to learn how to make your own web site with it. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can create and control the style of the page (colors, sizes, spacing) but also the layout (the position of text, navigation, graphics).
These are some tips to make your own website source code as effective as possible:
- Do not use tables to control placement and layout on your web site. Use CSS instead.
- Do not use font tags in the HTML document. Create a CSS file that controls font color, text size, weight etc.
- Use CSS to control the way your website looks as much as you can. This makes it very flexible to manage and change
What Background Colours Work Best?
Years of testing have shown that black text on white background works best on websites. We are used to read black text on white paper and the screen is simply a different kind of paper. Avoid to create your own custom graphics to use as background. Your visitors will find text on a background with patterns difficult to read.
If an image must be used as background it should not disrupt reading. Make sure the text color contrasts well enough to be easily read. If your text is white, for example, make your background image dark.
The best choice for a background has proved to be a single color. When choosing the background color remember that users will not see it the same way you do. Screens of different quality have different settings and colors do not appear the same from person to person.
The rule of thumb is to build a website with dark text on light colored background. Some argue that the background should not be completely white, but just slightly darker. On some screens the black and white contrast is far too strong and tires the eyes. You do not want to give your users a headache.
What Should Stand Out On Each Page?
A common mistake is to try to attract visitors' attention with everything you have got: graphics, animations, banners and advertisements. You are trying to keep them at your website by confusing them and making it difficult for them to decide where to go next. Make it simple for them to find what you came for. This is the realistic and effective approach to building a website.
Create a list of important features to go on every page. Decide which is the most important element. On some pages it might be the marketing copy, the special offer link or the buy button. Make it singular, keep it down to a single important element per page.
If you want visitors to look at the special offer, do not distract their attention with other banners and graphics. Their attention span is very limited. Unrelated graphics often distract from making the sale if your website is commercial in nature.
Have someone glance over your website and pay attention to where they look or click first. If it is the "Buy now" or "Special offer" link, or anything else that takes priority on that page, then you have created a successful page. If they first glance at the flashy graphics at the top then you have probably lost their attention.
How To Make The Text Easy To Read?
The fonts that work best in print are serif fonts such as Times New Roman. Serif fonts are extremely detailed fonts that do not read well on screen because of low resolution. Most printed material, however, is using mostly serif fonts because it is very readable on paper.
The type of fonts that work best on websites are sans serif. These are simplified type letters created to be very readable at small sizes and on most screens.You too have probably found it more difficult to read a web page written in Times New Roman than in Verdana or Arial (sans serif fonts).
Using the same font size throughout your text proves not only monotonous but discourages users from reading the entire page. How to make your text attractive to read? Make sure to use different sizes and colors for headings, subheadings and paragraphs proves and give plenty of space in between.
People who wear glasses should be allowed to increase font size for easier reading. Nearly all browsers have an option to increase text size but only if the webpage is designed to allow it. This is one of the most common mistakes made. Putting the font size in pixels instead of points or ems disables this feature. It makes the font size fixed and that can be too small to read for partially sighted people or for those wearing glasses. If they cannot read the information they came for, they will go to a website where they can. No one is willing to strain their eyes to read information that they could probably find somewhere else.
Why Serve Information In Bite-sized Chunks?
Breaking up the information in smaller paragraphs can greatly cut the time people need to scan the content. People scan first to see whether what they search for is on that page. Long blocks of text can put people off from reading through.
Emphasis and briefness make content on the web attractive to read. A web page should have a primary heading describing very briefly what the page is about. It should also have secondary headings for each important section.
Break the text in short paragraphs (3-5 lines), use short phrases that read quickly and use as few stop words as possible (e.g. and, to, when, etc). Try to use words with few syllables that even 10 year olds can understand. Use a thesaurus to find alternatives to long and pompous words or both.
Dashes and bullets are excellent tools to increasing readability while bold and italics can make key points stand out. One and a half or double paragraph line height can be used but never use single line height or the text will look too crammed.
How To Use Links On Your Website?
People learned early on that links were the blue, underlined phrases you can click on. Visited links were purple. All other text was black. Designers, however, started using other colors for links and text to blend in better. Nowadays we see links that are not underlined, have the same color as the rest of the text. The use of visited link color has dropped too. Links should stand out and cry "I'm a link, you can click on me!"
Build your own website with these tips in mind:
- Users expect links to be blue and underlined and text to be black. Keep these colors if possible.
- Links should always stand out and be easily distinguished from regular text.
- A color other than regular text should be used for visited links.
- Text color should contrast well with the background.
- Create a special effect on mouseover to emphasize that they are looking at a link.
- If possible use web safe colors.
Why Put Load Speed Above Everything Else?
Your own web site should be all about load speed. Building your website for the widest possible reach means your website has to be blazing fast. Pages have to load nearly instantaneous even on slow modems.
Cut load times to a minimum by doing the following:
- Take out any graphic that doesn't add to the user experience. A useful graphic is one that present the information in a way that is not possible using words alone. Anything else is just one extra delay between your website and your visitors.
- Source code weight is another source of extra load time. Thanks to many website software packages you might pay little or no attention to it. With a little DIY work, you can reduce source code bloat and keep your design as visually appealing as before.
- Remove font tags and use CSS instead to style your text. You can also learn to convert your layout from tables to CSS. This can reduce file size by up to 50%. The resulting files are much easier to update and manage.
How To Make Websites Popular With Search Engines?
Most people use search engines to find the information they want on the web. If you can get top rankings for keywords that match the content of your website you are guaranteed to see a spike in visitor numbers. Some people use less than legit methods to rank high but their success can only last a couple of months.
One way to make sure you can dominate the top of the search engines in the long term is to:
- Learn how to make your website easy to use by visitors
- Focus on giving out useful information
- Make sure your navigation works well
- Follow the guidelines the W3C gives to make websites accessible and usable.