Web Design Tips And Techniques For Site Usability

If you are a web designer or a webmaster, website design is one of the most important tasks you do. In designing a site, you need to create a design that is easy for users to use, is compatible with different systems, and is search engine friendly.

Making a site that is user friendly:

In some ways, creating a user friendly site is just common sense - other aspects are not so obvious, though. Obviously, you'll want to make the text easy to read, the navigation links easy to find, etc. Here are a few other tips: Put contact information on every page. Make it obvious what you want the user to do after reading a page.. Make it easy for the user to reach your homepage from any other page

Making a site that is cross-platform compatible:

The main factors you need to consider in platform compatibility are the user's browser, screen resolution, color depth, and plug ins.

Browser compatibility is easy - just test your site in various browsers, and fix any incompatibilities. The same for screen resolution - just be sure that you site looks good and is easily navigated with any common screen resolution. Color depth is also relatively simple. Just restrict your design to using web safe colors.

Plug-ins can be a little more complicated. If at all possible, try to use media that is compatible with most versions of a plug in. For example, try not to use a flash movie that requires the latest version of a flash player.

Making a site that is search engine friendly:

The biggest thing you can do to make your site friendly to the search engines is to give it a good link structure. Be sure that each page on your site is linked to from at least two other pages with a plain text link. Image links are OK, but not as good as optimized text links. Javascript and flash links are very bad for search engine usability.

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