Best Web Site Design Tips & Tricks

Make Text Easy To Read

How many times have you visited a website with fonts which are so small you have to adjust your screen font sizes to read the text or simply leave the site.

• Tip: If your using the Firefox browser, try Ctrl+ and Ctrl- (control key and the plus or minus key) keyboard combinations to increase or decrease you viewing text size and Ctrl 0 (control key and zero) to reset the text size.

Once again, keep your visitor in mind at all times. Use a good font size, certainly not smaller than 12, don’t use too many font sizes on a page. Also keep the color contrast between text and background easy to see.

Don’t try using a fancy fonts. If your visitor doesn’t have the font on their computer they won’t see your design anyway. Keep to the standard Internet fonts, Arial, Garamond, Tahoma and Verdana, etc.

• Rule: Use A Reasonable Font Size.

• Rule: Use A Maximum Of Four Font Sizes Per Page.

• Rule: Use Standard Internet Fonts.

Font Size Should Be Flexible

You can, though I don’t advise doing so, use CSS style sheets to disable a Web browser’s “change font size” button and specify a fixed font size. This action produces readability issues for a considerable proportion of your market audience, i.e., most people over the age of 40. Respect your reader’s preferences and let them resize text as needed.

Also, if you specify font sizes in relative terms, not as an absolute number of pixels, then no mater what the reader’s browser font preference settings your style will remain.

• Rule: Don’t Use A Fixed Font Size.

Squeezing Everything Together Equals Stress

Give you text room to breath. If you increase the line spacing of your text it is much easier to read, a 150% or 1.5 ratio is a good.

• Rule: Don’t Squeeze Everything Together.

Don’t Use ALL CAPS For Everything

ALL CAPS are good if you want to emphasise a few words but if you put whole paragraphs in all caps you lose the effect and make the text very hard to read. Ever wondered why contracts are sometimes written with all caps!

• Don’t Use All Caps For Everything.

Use A Spell Checker

Everyone makes mistuks. So use a spell checker.

• Rule: Use A Spell Checker.

Create Page Titles With High Search Engine Visibility

Search is the most important way visitors discover websites. Search is also one of the most important ways visitors find their way around your website.

Your unassuming page title is your main tool to attract new visitors from search listings and to help your existing readers locate the specific pages they need.

The page title is almost always used as the clickable headline for listings on search engine result pages, with typically, the first 66 characters of the of the title being used.

Page titles are also used as the default entry in favorites when users bookmark a site and as the window title in the browser.

Start the title with the most salient keywords that describe the editorial on the page and try to make it “snappy”.

• Rule: Create Page Titles With High Search Engine Visibility.