Web Design Elements to Watch out For

Author: webdevtime | Posted: 22.02.2012

Web Design is a huge element in web development and can make or break your business. Sometimes web design is over lookup, but can be a significant element to your overall performance of your website. Here are the most overlooked elements that you should consider when you are design your website.

1. Text as Images

One big mistake for web developers is that they don't understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This results in text as images, side content before body content, or not the proper use of header tags. This can keep you from getting traffic from search engines. Search Engines love content, they really don't care how your site looks. Keep lots of text in your design can help you get to the top.

2. CSS

Please use CSS for your website design. Tables are out of date, slow and not search engine friendly. CSS is very easy and better to control your design on your website. Easier to update and manage for future changes.

3. Navigation

Keep your navigation the same through your whole site. There are some sites that change their navigation depending on what section or category you are in. This can make your visitor get lost. Also the use of icons or pictures to represent where your navigation is going can be bad. Icons can be helpful with text, but icons by themselves can result in confusion for your visitor. They just might not get it.

4. Contact Information

Have somewhere for your visitors to contact you, especially if you have a business. This is very important. Also a business name, address, mailing address and phone number on your contact page can help give your business credibility and shows your visitors that you’re legit. For a tip to cut down on spam, don't use contact@website.com. Most places use that as their contact email, but spammers have caught on to this and will just send emails to contact@whatever.

5. Page Titles

This goes with the same reason as images as text. This is one of your most important elements in SEO. Makes sure that you titles bars are relative to each page of your site. Don't just put your company name in every title bar. Put something that describes your page and then your business name after your keywords. You'll get more traffic this way.

6. Site Map

Have a site map. This is good for your visitors that get lost or need to find a specific page. And it helps search engines index your pages and strengthen your internal linking. For those who don't know what a site map is, it’s a page with all your pages listed with links to them.

7. Resolution

For your layout, keep in mind that computer resolutions are changing every day and your website needs to be optimized for all of them. Liquid layouts work well with the changing environment. Use Google Analytics to see what resolutions your visitors are viewing.

8. Browsers

With the same principle with resolution, test your website in all major internet browsers. Yes some are better than others and some are used more than others. Just make it easy and adjust for all. There is no reason to excluded visitors or potential customers from your site.

There are more than just eight different elements in web design, but these are some that seem to be not implemented as often. Keep these in mind when you’re designing your website and you'll be ahead of most websites on the internet today.

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