Useful Tips for Effective Web Design

Listed below are some useful and rather important tips for designing a professional and high quality web site:

• Neat and Easy Navigation: Navigation of links on your site plays a big role in determining the stickiness of your site (how long your visitor stays and explores your site). Ask yourself this, what do visitors do as soon as they open your site? They would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find any other page that interests them. Read our article on Web site Navigation Tips.
• Clean Layout Design: A clean layout that uses a lot of white space enhances a site's looks. Try to keep the focus on your content, use dreamweaver templates for this. Use fonts that will be available on all computers to prevent your site looking messed up.
• Program using pure CSS: The world is moving away from table based websites to pure CSS websites because it offers accessibility, reusability and considerably reduces file size apart from giving greater control over the look of your website. The single most important skill you can learn today to become a quality web designer is CSS programming! Even if you are not an expert at CSS you can learn to use the following simple CSS Styles Effects to enhance your website:
  1. Cool Text Effects using CSS Styles: Text Links Rollover, Text Case Setting, Text Spacing and Line-through Effect
  2. Bullets in HTML or Deamweaver: Using CSS Styles with bullets (shapes, decimal, roman-numerals, images, etc.)
  3. Links without Underline: Use CSS Styles to display links without the appearance of the underline.
• Optimum Load Time: Make sure your load time is low. For this you must:
  Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They hugely increase your file size.
  Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your site doesn't have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
  Use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever possible. SSI files once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster.
  Read our article Tips for a Fast Loading Site for more.
• Design for all Screen Resolutions: A site that is easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay and read your content. For site with long pages of content this is very crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. Suppose your site doesn't look good for a particular resolution it is very probable that the visitor will close the browser window feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. Designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and professional site.
  Read our article Designing for all Screen Resolutions for more.
• Ensure Web site scalability: Make sure your code and design is scalable. As technology advances and configuration of computers & their monitors keep increasing and varying it is impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and platforms.
• Cross Browser Compatible: Make sure you check your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1+, Opera 7+, Safari 3+ and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the world's browsers.

CSS Website Design Guide: Learn how to easily design a professional website using Adobe Fireworks and then build it into a CSS website using Adobe Dreamweaver. Create step-by-step the cool CSS website shown above.