Hello again!

The other day a friend asked me to come up with a quick list of essentials for good web design. I jotted down a few things and I can assure you that if you have the following, you are well above average:

Text

• Background does not interrupt the text
• Text is big enough to read, but not too big
• The hierarchy of information is perfectly clear
• Columns of text are narrower than in a book to make reading easier on the screen

Navigation

• Navigation buttons and bars are easy to understand and use
• Navigation is consistent throughout web site
• Navigation buttons and bars provide the visitor with a clue as to where they are, what page of the site they are currently on
• Frames, if used, are not obtrusive
• A large site has an index or site map

Links

• Link colors coordinate with page colors
• Links are underlined so they are instantly clear to the visitor

Graphics

• Buttons are not big and dorky
• Every graphic has an alt label
• Every graphic link has a matching text link
• Graphics and backgrounds use browser-safe colors
• Animated graphics turn off by themselves

General Design

• Pages download quickly
• First page and home page fit into 640 x 460 pixel space
• All of the other pages have the immediate visual impact within 640 x 460 pixels
• Good use of graphic elements (photos, subheads, pull quotes) to break up large areas of text
• Every web page in the site looks like it belongs to the same site; there are repetitive elements that carry throughout the pages

Tags: creation, website, design, webmaster, designer, web development

design principles, Design Tips, Essentials, good web design, Graphics and Designs, Web Development, website, web designing, web standards

1. Akismet - comment anti-spam (from Matt Mullenweg available at Akismet)
2. Do Follow - disables the “nofollow” tagging in comments (by Kimmo Suominen available at his website)
3. Meta-Tags - meta tag management for your blog (by Can Erten available here)
4. Optimal Title - puts the title of articles first on the title of the page (by Aaron Schaefer available on his ElasticDog blog)
5. Recent Comments - shows recent comments with link back to commenter’s site and link to comment (by Liew Cheon Fong and available on his blog)
6. Related Posts - creates a list of posts that are related to the one above (by Alexander Malov, Mike Lu & Jon Bourne and available here [Editor’s note: the wasabi website seems to be down and has been for several days]
7. PHP Contact Form - adds a form based contact page that is spam proof (by Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley available here)
8. Subscribe to Comments - notifies commenter’s via email when someone else makes a comment on the thread (by Mark Jaquith and available here)
9. WordPress Database Backup - on-demand and scheduled backup of your blog database (by Scott Merrill and Atin Matzko and available here)
10. WP-Cache - fast caching of your blog pages (by Ricardo Galli Granada and available here)

Tags: web development, design, creation, designer, webmaster, website

Design Tips, design principles, Essentials, Graphics and Designs, Plug ins, SEO, top 10, Traffic, Training, Web Development, web designing, WordPress