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Web design tips&tricks - Part 5

Please read the introduction before reading part 1 - 6.

So here we are at Part 5 - Look and feel.

The look and feel of your site/layout is very important in keeping your visitors have a comfortable stay. It can make them say "Wow!", "It's good." or even "Eww!". Visitors who are displeased by your layout might leave right away. It's important to provide Quality content for your visitors, but it's a good idea to actually make your layout of good quality too.

  1. Keep it simple and easy to navigate around. Don't shove mazes off your visitor's face. Make sure your visitors can (very easily) find the navigation. Make your links organized.
  2. Don't use too many flashy colors. They might just run away out of horror. Or maybe to look for an eye doctor.
  3. The load time of your layout is important as your visitor wouldn't want to wait 5 minutes for the page to load. They are likely to go away if your site is too slow. We're all human, and our patience has its limits.
  4. Splash pages aren't all that useful. It's a good thing if your site can support all resolutions and browsers. If not, well, try to. But unless it's an urgent exception of some sort, don't make a splash page. They just drop the visitors' patience level down by a mile. What they want to see is your actual site, not some old warning about browser compability. When my site couldn't work with IE (I use Firefox), I had to almost completely change the layout. Just avoid making splash screens if you can.
  5. Fonts. Don't make them too big or too small. Use default computer fonts. Don't use fancier fonts for your text. Some visitors might not have it on their computer, so instead ugly fonts might show up.
  6. Main image/layout header. Don't make it too big nor too small. Don't make it stretch the screen, and keep it smaller than 800x600.

Those are just a few tips about your layout. Just put a lot of effort into it. Maybe ask someone to take a look at it and give comments or criticism before you put it up. Good luck! Keep these things in mind, and you're ready for Part 6 - Be a nice webmaster/mistress!