Web Design is a huge element in web development and can make or break your business. Web Designs are sometimes over lookup in web development. But your web design affects your customers decisions and your overall performance. Listed below are some of the most unincorporated web design elements that every website should think about.
Yes that Image is Cool, but We Need Content
Read up on some Search Engine Optimization or SEO before you start you web design. Search Engines read your pages through your code. So if your text is images or you have non related content before your body content, the search engine is going to read it like that. When the search engine bot doesn't have anything to read, it doesn't think your site has anything on it. Removing images as text and adding more content will help your site rank better.
Tables = Bad
For design check out Cascade Style Sheets or CSS. Tables are out of date, slow and not search engine friendly, again please use CSS. CSS is very easy and better to control your design on your website. With CSS you can do anything you want with your design down to the pixel.
Website Design Navigation
Don't change your navigation on your website. Keep it the same for every page. Various changes in your navigation is bad web design. This can cause confusion for your visitors. Icons are very pleasing to the eye, but can hurt your design if you are using them for navigation, add text to help visitors decode your icon. With the help of text explaining what the next click will be with an icon will help visitors recognize what they are getting into.
Contact Information for your Business
If you have a business, have a contact page so they can get a hold of you. With a business it is a good idea to put your business name, mailing address and phone number on your website. Spammers looks for websites that have contact@webpage.com, make it more unique. Most places use contact as their contact email, but spammers have caught on to this and will just send emails to contact@whatever.
Enter Page Titles
Placing something other than your business name in your page title can give you an advantage. This is one of your most important elements in SEO. Your page titles should be a small pitch of what your page is about. Don't use up your page title space for you business name, put some keywords and relative content in there instead. Put something that describes your page and then your business name after your keywords.
Get a Site Map
Having a site map is a good idea for your customers or visitors when they are looking for a certain topic. But not only does it help your visitors it will help your search engine awareness. A site map for those who don't know is a one page that includes all your pages with links to them.
Viewing Resolutions
There is a hand full of web resolutions that users use. You should try to optimize for the most popular ones. A website with a liquid layout will adjust itself depending on what the user has set for their resolution. Finding out which resolution to optimize can be tricky, but Google Analytics will give you an idea on what people are using.
Choose Your Web Browser Carefully
Make sure to test your website in all the popular internet browsers. There are web browsers that are easier to work with than other. Don't optimize for only one of them. Leaving out any popular web browser is like leaving out visitors or customers.
There are even more factors to web design. These are just some that web designers miss in their designs. Having some of these elements can help your visitors be more comfortable on your site, meaning more sales or less bounce rate.