Additional web design thoughts
This article will provide some general pointers regarding web design.
Choosing the appropriate mixture of content and graphics
How do you decide how many graphics, sounds, animation, etc. to put on your website? I guess that depends who you talk to. Some people feel that it begins and ends with content, and others feel that a good website needs to have a ton of graphics.
Those who feel content is the most important will say that when you add sound, animation, and lots of graphics, your web page will take too long to load, and that will drive your visitors to other sites.
Others will tell you that a good website should have as many gadgets and bells and whistles as possible. They would say that people don’t want a boring site with just articles and you need to grab their attention before they go away.
My thought is that you should try to incorporate an appropriate combination of content and graphics. I’ve always felt that content is king, and that if you want a successful site you should really focus on quality content. However, that does not mean you must ignore using any graphics at all. If you feel that a graphic serves an important function, it makes sense to include it. Decorative graphics are fine, too. If it makes your site look nice, people are more likely to return. Just try to keep them as small as possible. When you add a new graphic, test out the page yourself and decide if the extra time it takes your page to load is worth it.
Some Page Design Tips
If your concern is that your page should look good without being too slow to load, here are a few commonly used tricks that you may want to consider:
- Do not put too much text in one big block. Separate your information into paragraphs and include white space in between paragraphs. It won’t make your page load any faster, but it will look more readable.
- In general, a white background with black text works the best. You will see that most of the big websites will use white backgrounds, and I have to feel that they know what they are doing.
- However, if you want a colored background, make sure you test your pages in the different web browsers to see what they look like. Even though it looks good in your web editor sometimes does not look as good in the browsers.
- Reduce the size of the individual graphics files on your pages by using the following methods:
-
- limit the number of colors in the graphic
- limit the physical size of the image
- with animations, reduce the number of frames and put your moving objects in separate frames with transparent backgrounds.
If you found this article to be helpful, please consider making a donation.
