Simple Rules of Web Design

1. Never design for wider than 800 pixels. There are still people who view their monitors at a low resolution of 800x600.
2. Never create a design that requires scrolling from side to side. While people are okay with scrolling vertically now, they find side scrolling to be annoying
3. Stick with variations on one color or 2 colors. We don’t want to distract people from the information with rainbow colors
4. Avoid busy backgrounds. They make things EXTREMELY hard to read.
5. Stay away from splash pages (also known as “intro page” with a “skip intro” button). People want their information now and asking them to do any extra clicks is simply annoying.
6. Use frames sparingly. Visit http://www.noodledesign.com to find out more.
7. Keep animation to a minimum. I’m of the opinion that there should never be animation unless you’re in the electronic card or entertainment business. It’s almost never necessary. Spend your energies on features that enhance your web site.
8. Keep the number of fonts to one or 2. One for the graphics on the site, and the other for the plain text on your site. Any more makes your site look too thrown together
9. Speaking of plain text, never put your entire site together in graphics. Search engines NEED content but they can’t read graphics so you’ll want plain text (and lots of it) on your site.

 

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