Basic Web Site Design
Opening
Page
Respect your visitors
Formatting
Desirable page elements
Testing
the site
As the entry point to your site is the opening page, make it as qualitative as possible. This is the main reception point to your entire site. So, devote significant portion of your design time to this page. There are a number of ways to make the opening page - normally index.htm - as attractive and eye-catching as possible. Do not be misled into thinking that the more 'jazzy' graphics you add the more attractive the page becomes. NO. In fact, if your graphics files are very large, the time taken to download the page will be considerably increased, forcing the visitors to scurry along to another site. Normal thumb rule is to keep a page size (including all the graphics and text) to 50 K. The more you exceed this threshold size the less will be the number of visitors.
Establish your identity right here in this page. Tell the visitors who you are. If your site is going to contain a number of pages, present a well laid-out site map in the opening page with proper icons or text alongwith a brief description (if possible) of what the visitors can expect in these pages.
Fix the target audience for your site and then proceed with your design. If the pages are meant for a professional group, do not give the opening page a cheap look. Similarly, go for a colorful and graphical design if your target visitors are kids.
Just because you are using a Pentium-II machine with 266 MHz speed and 64 MB RAM, do not assume the rest of the world also have switched over to such speedsters. There are a large number of people who are still using 486 (some may be using 386 machines too) with 8 MB RAM. If you want your site to be visited by all these people, your design consideration should match their hardware configuration. Do not be content with checking your pages in your machine. Check them out in slower machines and satisfy yourself with the speed of download. Remember : Visitors to your page have come to your site expecting some content. It should be delivered to them as quickly as possible if you want them to revisit.
Another factor that is to be borne in mind is the wide variety of browsers in the market. Even among the same brand browser, each version will have varying capabilities. Keep your pages as browser-independent as possible. Not everyone uses Netscape 4.0 or IE 4.0. If you are fond of introducing a specific browser-dependent feature (e.g. Frames) , be sure to offer an alternative page to visitors who use other browsers. You can do this by checking the visitors' browser and loading the relevant page.
Use paragraphs diligently. Each paragraph should have clearly identifiable content. Do not clutter up the text in one large paragraph. Even if your page has only links to other sites, the links can be ordered or grouped into specific and easy-to-read categories. Make use of the ordered or bulleted list tags.
Do not overuse images and yet at the same time, do not give a blank look to your page. As earlier mentioned, keep the page size to 50 K. Place the images in a clever and meaningful way. A cleverly designed image will grab the attention of the visitor faster than a paragraph of text. Use this power of the image to your advantage.
Stick to a single font style. However, you can use HTML tags to make portions of text standout from regular text. Some of the features that can be rendered to the text are bold, italic and color.
HTML tables allow you to place the information in a tabular form that is easy-to-read. If you are ingenious enough, tables can be made use of to design very elegant pages.
Another design feature is the use of frames. When a browser window is split into two or more regions, each region is called a frame. You can display different documents in each frame. While this enables multiple pages to be loaded into the browser at the same time, the loading of the pages could become slower. If your design is better served with the use of frames, go ahead and use them. However, for the sake of visitors who use non-frames browsers, keep an alternative page ready.
As the users would always want to know whether your site is recent, include the last-updated date in the opening page. Note to update the page regularly, as otherwise, a very old date will make the visitors lose interest in your site.
Include contact information, typically your e-mail address. Note to hyperlink this information so that the visitors could compose their mail by clicking on it.
Provide easy navigation tools in every page. Visitors should be able to come to your homepage from wherever they are in your site. Other access paths should also be made available.
Another ubiquitous element is the site counter. Personally, counter is not my favorite. However, it is a very useful way of telling the visitors how popular is your site. If you cannot create your own counter (you need to write CGI script and your server needs to support it), go for free counter service provided by many.
Similarly, if you wish, you can get free guestbooks from many sites. Use them and request your visitors to sign in them. (My feeling is that hardly 1 % of the visitors sign these guestbooks. So, it may not be worth it really.)
Once you have completed your first version of the site, test it thoroughly yourself. Ensure that there are no broken images and broken links. Use different browsers to ascertain that the formatting and the contents are the same as intended by you. Try loading your page at different connection speeds. Keep this thumb rule in mind : whatever be the speed of your connection, if your page takes more than 15 seconds to load, it is time to redesign the page.