50 Surefire Web Design Tips (Part 2)

Tips On Writing For The Web

26. Write in layman's terms so that everybody can understand your content, unless you're running a technical site for technical people.
27. Reading from a screen is painful: use 50% less words than you would use on print.
28. If a page is too long, break it into several pages and link to them.
29. Don't use font sizes smaller than 10pt. for the body of your page. Specify your fonts in percentage terms instead of pixels to let users set their own size preferences using their browser's text view options.
30. Use a spell checker. Spelling mistakes are embarrassing and hurt credibility.


Tips to Know Your Customers

31. Ask for feedback: include a feedback form in your Contact Us page.
32. Publish an ezine and include a subscription form in your homepage. Give your customers valuable information and encourage them to contact you.
33. Include polls and other tools to gather market intelligence.


Tips on Linking

34. Make your links descriptive. They should indicate what the user will be linking to, as opposed to just saying "click here".
35. Don't underline anything that is not a link.
36. Underline your links and use a consistent color for them across your site (preferably blue).
37. Use a different color for visited links, so that your visitors know where they've been (preferably purple or a more subdued tone of the unvisited links color).
38. When linking to a non-HTML file, such as Excel, Word or Acrobat, make it evident, by including a small icon next to the link.
39. Don't link to "under construction" pages.
40. Make sure that your links work and that you don't have broken links. There are free online tools that can help you with this.
41. If you use graphic links, don't forget to use the ALT attribute. The ALT attribute should describe what you are linking to.


Tips On How To Use Graphics

42. Optimize your graphics. Use only .gif and .jpg formats. Make your image files as small as possible while maintaining acceptable quality. Use a free online graphics optimization tool.
43. Use thumbnails (miniature versions of a picture) and make them clickable to the actual size picture.
44. Avoid graphics that look like ads. People ignore them.
45. Use the ALT attribute on pictures, even if the image is not a link. It helps users with disabilities and people who have turned off graphics.


Tips To Optimize Your Site For The Search Engines:

46. Create short, descriptive page titles, to entice search engine users to click on your links.
47. Create a site map containing all your pages, and link to it directly from your homepage. Search engine robots will follow the link to your site map and will most likely add all your pages to their index.
48. Decide what the two or three main keywords are for each page (the words you believe search engine users will type to find your page) and repeat them often in your page title, description meta tag and page body.
49. Create a Links page and call it Resources. In it, place links to those sites that have agreed to place a reciprocal link to your page. The more inbound links you have from quality sites with a topic related to your site, the better your site will rank with the search engines.
50. Use more text than graphics, and minimize the use of Flash and JavaScript. Search engines heavily favor text and will crawl and index your site faster.

by Mario Sanchez