Your website’s design has a significant impact on your site’s popularity. When you wander into the wastelandof a poorly designed site, you’re likely to cringe, press your Back button and never return. Clutter and distraction are like kryptonite to a website. You don’t need Superman-like design skills to save your site from design hellStudies demonstrate that average web surfers spend 30 seconds evaluating a home page What’s the point of sticking around a site that has a confusing design layout or pages that take forever to upload? You have literally billions of other options out there. Read on to learn about how to design a website that will appeal even to today’s community of attention-deficit web surfers.

Usability

Make your site as user-friendly as possible. How easy is it for visitors to move around your pages? Most websites include menus that alert users to the site’s main pages For example, restaurant websites get visited most often by interested customers who wish to find hours of operation; if this information is not found immediately, your potential diners will find grub elsewhere.Think about what what users will want to find once they reach your website. Menus must be quick and easy to read, with short, descriptive titles. If you use marketing-speak, or creative titles for your links, users won’t appreciate your humor. They’ll be too busy checking out a more user-friendly site.

Typography for the Web

Typography is the art of choosingtype and type design. This includes the font, size and arrangement of your website’s text. Design a free website with text that users can easily digest Make it as easy to read as possible with smart typography. Stick to fonts you can be sure visitors will have on their computers, or your website won’t show up with the font you’ve selected. Safe bets are Arial, Courier or Courier New, Verdana and Times New Roman installed. Whatever font you choose, stick to it throughout your website. Consistency contributes to branding and can give your text a “voice”.Limit your font selection to one or two fonts to include in your website. Textwith multiple font styles looks sloppy and unprofessional, and can be a real pain to sift through Present readers with dark text on a light background, to create a contrast and make the text easy to read. And in choosing your text’s alignment, don’t use justification; stick to left alignment. If you’re catering to a western-society userbase, this is the preferred format of text.

Page Layout

Pages packed with content, graphics and/or text are unattractive and uncomfortable for visitors. Leaving a little space between your elements can do wonders for your site’s visual appeal. Designers refer to the empty space between design elements as whitespace, but the space doesn’t necessarily have to be white. The whitespace on a page is usually the same color as the page’s background. Separate text, images and menus with margins of empty space. This allows your site to instantly become much nicer to digest. Easily adjust the positions of your page’s design elements with the help of an online website builder that has a drag and drop interface. But exercise caution and don’t go overboard – if you have too much whitespace your site will seem empty.

Minimize Loading Times

Page load time is the time between the moment a user requests a new page and the moment the user is exposed to the full rendering of the page by the web browser. Keep in mind that not everyone has high-speed internet. There are many things you can do to reduce the loading time of your pages, but the golden rule of all things design-related can be applied here: stick to what’s necessary. Cut out what you don’t need from your website, like intro videos or large images that can be resizedDon’t set up your site to automatically revert to full screen in a website browser, as this is consideredoverly aggressive.

Know Your Audience

Unless you designed a personal free website to share with friends or family, odds are the entire purpose of you deciding to make a website in the first place was so that other people will get some sort of product or service from you. So build your site for them, and not for yourself. A business site that goes on and on about how great the company is but doesn’t describe its services is pretty pointless. Try to put yourself in your visitors’ virtual shoes. Most people are attracted to simple, visually-based homepages, and sites with a high-level of contrast. A fun exercise involves learning from websites that suck, to make sure you don’t commit the same design sins.

Author Bio: Free Website Builder I have been in the online marketing industry for over two years and love all things related to e-marketing, writing for the web, SEO and SEM. I’ve been working for a large company that specializes in web design, and love how dynamic this field is – I am constantly learning new strategies and concepts as the world of online marketing evolves.

Category: Internet
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