Top 10 rules of best practice website design

Web visitors are global Netizens

A website is an important marketing collateral that is viewed across the world and is benchmarked with many millions of other websites. A good website that appeals to a majority of the targeted audience needs to follow a balanced mix of technical, design aesthetics, colour combinations, information architecture, navigation and layout. As the readers of web content engage in un-aided brand interaction, it needs to be intuitively aligned to the visitors' sensitivities, business necessities and technological limitations. As the Internet pervades almost all human activities and interactive web promotions take the centre stage, website design best practices are now key to overall brand positioning strategies. For online businesses, their web-presence is the primary brand vehicle; hence web design necessities are key to its marketing edge.

10 Commandments: Good Website Design

Web usability experts, marketing strategists and business thought leaders have converged to formulate simple yet effective website design best practices. These not only enhance website attractiveness but also sales conversion rates by enhancing the web-visit experience significantly. These tips will help everyone to develop extremely popular and functional web-pages. These are:

1. Make web pages for multiple web browsers' viewing to enable easy access to majority of the web visitors. The Internet remains non-browser specific and a multi-platform medium. It is your web visitors who choose the platform based on their individual needs and are not compelled by your website medium's choice. Thus they could be using any one or even different types of web browsers like Explorer, Netscape, Linux, Lynx, Opera, WebTV, Mobile Telephones, NetPhonic's Web-On-Call, or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs, or palmtops). Each browser needs to serve your informational web pages without any viewing problems.

2. Test your web pages in different web browsers as every visitor will see your pages in different browsers differently. For example, test pages in a browser like Linux to see how the "text-only" world finds your web-documents, as search engines are text-only browsers. Make documents Linux-friendly. Try different preferences, colour & font settings, and the window sizes too. Also remember to see how webpages look with lower/ higher monitor brightness settings.

3. Put your Web pages through a validator test to measure their compliance with common HTML specifications. You need to modify web-pages till they validate, since compliant pages always stand a greater chance of being rendered by different Web browsers, as it was originally intended. It is always better to work with the strengths of HTML rather than trying to incorporate a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) page design system.

4. Keep the content crisp and to the point to fit the needs of a busy web visitor of today. Following the usual journalistic 'inverted pyramid' style, of starting the content with the conclusion first is a great way of 'hooking' the choosy web reader and being more 'info-relevant' right from the start.

5. The web today is more conversational from a written content perspective (unless you are design dependent business like a photo studio/fashion designer). Even search engine spiders can only interpret written content, besides heavy images make the website painfully slow to download and function further. Hence it is advisable to always have small, byte wise graphics so that the website loads more quickly in browsers that are graphics-capable. Please remember that is not a good idea to use GIF images for all graphical tasks. Ideally you should choose between JPEG and palette based formats. Stop blindly selecting GIF images to save yourself from many graphic related problems.

6. Always remember to provide textual alternatives when using graphics. This is to provide for text-only or image-disabled Web browsers & indexing agents. Besides there may be cases where some web visitors may never turn your website images on.

7. Specifying a background colour or image? If you do not specify link and text colours, the web visitors' link and text colours will be used against your background. In some cases, there may not be a contrast between the user's text & link colors and your background colour / image, making your text and links disappear! Remember that if you do set one colour then you will need to set them all.

8. Be careful about the many pitfalls of special character sets - like the currency signs, it can create unnecessary confusion. It is always safer to write the currency in full with the concerned country too. For example you mention $25.00 without the geographic qualification. Well its actual (local) value in different browsers globally would be different across many international locations such as in a browser in Australia, Hong Kong or Canada.

9. Eliminate errors, like spelling mistake, grammatical errors and also routinely check & locate internal and external broken web site links too. Always remember to add your updated copyright on all web pages.

10. To add presentational effects for the future and for a friendly web page style, simply validate documents at HTML 4.0 level for a cleanest possible markup. This way your web pages will contain little/ no HTML 3.2 presentational markup or proprietary stylistic hacks, and use the World Wide Web Consortium's Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) language to add stylistic effects to your pages.