Many web pages are designed in a very bad way indeed, I am often guilty
of doing so myself but I try to minimize the effects through the application
of a little thought and planning. As I see it, there are three golden rules
which should be obeyed as much as possible.
1 - Keep The Blasted Thing SmallThe smaller a site is, the faster it will load, this means that the number and size of images should be kept to a minimum as they will be the largest components of any page. Before you use an image, ask yourself if its really needed first, or at least warn people that a page may take a while to load before they go there.2 - Have Something to SayI have tried to keep the amount of useless information on this site to a minimum, as I am pretty dull, you only get a short biography and my yearbook page. After all, who cares which CDs and films I like.Content should be something which someone else might want to look at, not a list of useless facts or a reproduction of content which is provided elsewhere. The only content on your site should be your own. 3 - Make it Easy to ReadBrowser windows are really very large things, try to present text in blocks which are between 40 and 70% of the width of a browser window. This makes the text much easier to read as the eye has less distance to travel before beginning another line, just think of newspapers and books.Also, try to use Plain English, nice short succinct words which say what you mean. Large tracts of long words are very hard going indeed. You can effect this change yourself if a site uses very wide paragraphs, just reduce the width of the browser window on your screen until you are more comfortable reading the text. |