Website Design – 3 Questions You Need To Consider
 by: David Benton


When someone visits your site, do they know what they are looking at?

Too often we distract the user from the primary purpose of visiting the site by all the clutter in design and secondary offers that are presented. Put your primary offering or service first and put the focus on that.

Great examples of such sites that do this are

http://www.google.com (search engine) When you visit google, they are a search engine. What to you see when you get there? A search box and not much more….

http://www.cm-recruiting.com (a recruiting site) When you visit CM, they present you with just 3 choices, info about them, the jobs they are offering, and a way to contact them.

http://www.4leafdesigns.com/templates/scabies/ (an info site) When you visit this information site, you find everything you are looking for immediately. The links to more information on the subject are clear and easily found.

Will it look the same to everyone?

Most website designers have a favorite browser they use to check the site design as they build it. There are subtle differences between the many browsers, but when built to W3C standards, website’s will look the same no matter what platform the user is using.

Check your work for CSS compliancy at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Check your work for HTML compliancy at http://validator.w3.org/

SEO will be much easier if your site is built to these standards, a bonus for the extra effort. Typically those sites that rank high on the search engines are W3C compliant.

How Fast?

Strange question to those of us who design sites, but not to those who visit. More often than not, the designers of sites have high speed access, but not all of your visitors. While we feel we are the majority, we are not. How often have you visited a site just to wait, and wait, for the content to load? Consider the users experience. If you are offering a service to a sector that does not need high speed connections, they probably don’t have it.

If your web page does not load in 10 seconds you are going to loose 80% of those who visit. Speed is important.

Check your speed at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

When considering speed, web graphics play the largest role in increased webpage size. Try using small background images that will repeat whenever possible.

A good example of a website that uses background images and loads quickly is http://www.4leafdesigns.com

Follow their example of use of images and W3C compliancy and you should have a nice clean site that others will enjoy.

About The Author
David Benton is a freelance website designer in Raleigh, NC. He maintains a site at http://www.4leafdesigns.com and is active in the local developers community. When looking for a website design Raleigh looks to 4Leaf Designs.