How To Design A Web Site

By Murray Hughes

I'm not a professional web site designer and openly admit there is a lot that I don't know. But if you're a beginner I probably know more than you do, so the listen up.

Rather than give a lengthy dissertation on web design I have broken it down into the following points:

Keep your navigation bars either at the top or left of the page (a recent tip I heard is: by putting the nav bar on the right of the screen it appears below your site content in the html code and therefore will be read by the SE spiders last). You can clearly see my navigation bar on the left of every page at http://www.007workfromhome.com

Have your navigation bars visible on every page unless its a sales page, in which case you don't want them to go anywhere else.

Divide your navigation bar into related groups of links for easier navigation.

Have you company name and logo in the top left or top middle of the page.

Keep the theme of your site standard throughout. Don't use different fonts on different pages or mix fonts on the same page without a good reason for doing so. A constant theme also includes the color of unvisited, active and visited links.

Keep your use of colors to no more than about 5-7 different colors per page (less if you can).

Include a site map which lists every page. Good for your visitors and site maps make it very easy for search engines to spider your site.

Don't have more than 3 layers in your web site. That means if I was to start at your home page I should be able to reach any other page in your site in 2 clicks or less. Any more and your visitors may become lost and search and engines will leave before they have finished indexing your entire web site. This is easier than it sounds if you have a comprehensive navigation bar and a site map.

Limit your use of graphics on a page unless they are essential to your marketing because they will drastically increase load time and some visitors won't be prepared to wait.

Keep your background white and the majority of your text black. Mixing background colors and texts not only looks unprofessional it is can also be difficult to read.

Include a links page which can be reached from the navigation bar. On your "Links" page have instructions describing how someone can post a link and the link you would like them to posted on their site. I prefer to view links before I post them in case they are not appropriate.