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Web Design Guidelines for a User-Friendly Website

- by Mario Sanchez

Introduction

While specific instructions on how to design your web pages are out of the scope of this ebook, I will go ahead and give you some tips to take into account when you (or the web designer you choose) decide to start designing your website.

Why simple design wins

With the increased affordability of web space and bandwidth and the growing use of high speed modems, it has become common to overuse fancy implementation technologies like Flash, audio and video.

What differentiates good web designers from bad ones is the restrain in embracing every new technology that comes along. Good designers focus first on functionality (making sure that the web page achieves the objectives for which it was created) while bad designers rush to make gratuitous use of elements like graphics, flash animations and javascript, just "because they can" or because "it looks cool". I recommend a minimalist approach to web design. Minimalism is functionality and esthetics working together. In web design, minimalism involves removing all unnecesary frills, focusing on the user, and creating an interface that is at the same time pleasant to the eye, easy to navigate, intuitive, and effective in helping the user achieve his goals quickly and effortlessly.

Today, approximately ten years after the Internet started its exponential growth, and in spite all the technological developments, users still want:

a) quality content

b) ease of navigation, and

c) speed.

All your web design efforts should strive to give your users what they want. When designing your website, take into account the following guidelines:

• Code your pages efficiently

  The use of cascading style sheets is highly recommended. Cascading style sheets concentrate the style definitions in one external file that can be linked from each web page. This reduces the amount of code in each page, and, as a consequence, the pages will be smaller, will load faster, and will be easier to maintain. Furthermore, it will be a breeze to quickly implement style changes throughout your site. More on cascading style sheets later.

• Use graphics only when absolutely necessary

  Graphics should add value to what is being presented, instead of being just decoration. Also, graphics should be optimized and be as lean as possible. Using relevant graphics, and using them sparingly, will eliminate clutter on a page, will make the content easier to understand, and will allow for quick page downloads, giving users what they want, faster.

• Use color sensibly

  Good web designers use color to separate the page into different categories, and to emphasize what is important. For example, each section of a navigation menu can be given a different color to indicate that the tasks are related. Also, the use of bright colors for buttons that we want users to click is a good way to emphasize the importance of that task. If everything on a page has color, nothing will be emphasized and the page will look cluttered.

• Use ample white space

  Reading from a computer screen is difficult, so you must strive to make it as easy as possible for your visitors. You can improve on-screen readability by separating the different sections of the page with plenty of white space. That will make your visitors more comfortable, and stay on your site longer.

• Use legible fonts

  Don.t use tiny fonts. Use use a screen-friendly font, like verdana, in a big enough size to be read effortlessly. Also, the number of font types per page should be limited to two or three: one for the headlines, one for the copy and possibly a third one for the navigation buttons.

• Make your web pages search engine friendly

  Search engines love pages with a lot of text. Search engines don.t like pages with a lot of graphics and little text, since it is text what helps them determine the topic and relevance of a page. They also have trouble with pages that use Flash and Javascript. If you want your pages indexed quickly and have a better chance of doing well with the search engines, reduce the use of Flash, Javascript and images and using plenty of text.