4Tips to Design a Better Site

These simple tips will help you on your way to designing a site that is user friendly and nice.

1. Keep all links the same.  Make it easy for your users to differentiate the links from the content.  You can have 2 different styles (ie. one for links in content, and 1 for links that are not a part of content) but that the maximum number of link styles I would recommend for most sites.
2. Keep your fonts to the universally owned fonts (Arial, Tahoma, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, Helvetica, and Comic Sans).  This will ensure your site is viewed properly on all browsers, plus you wont have to worry about a users browser substituting a horrible font by mistake.
3. I do believe that there should be some type of image to text ratio on each page.  Not only does it break up the monotony but it also looks much better than all text that scrolls for hours.  I usually go 60/40 text to image split most of the time and the rest goes 70/30.  The fact remains that people just don’t want to read a lot.  In other words we want it dumber (Most of the time).
4. We read left to right and top to bottom.  So with this in mind the most valuable area of each page is top left (this would be the left side above the fold).  Design with this in mind.  Information importance will flow downwards.  The most useless corner of a page is the bottom right.  Bury info there that isnt hugely important but is somewhat necessary for that page.  Keep your readers interested all the way through.

My next post, and I promise, will be about an advertising campaign.  Enough of this help stuff .