Friendly Website Design

There are a few web design principles and points that are agreed upon by majority of the web developers and designing communities irrespective of the type of website business or niche marketing. There are certain designs characteristics that every body knows is not good practice for web designing and must be avoided for comfortable web browsing. Find below a few tips while website designing (specifically web 2 designing) that must be followed by all responsible professionals.

Do not use strong colors

Sparing use of icons

Have plenty of white space

Have nice big text that is easy to read

Orientation of matter in webpage must be in the center

Design the content not the page

The page layout must be simple

Back ground should be only light neutral colors

Minimal use of 3D effects

Lay out of pages used to be left oriented or were very wide in the early days but not any more, as scrolling has been accepted as a part of the browsing process and centralized orientation is more balanced. The designer's focus must be on making the subject interesting and not on impressing ones designing skills.

One must remember the principle that designing is for communication and not decoration. Hence it is very important that one must first know about the user and what his likes and preferences. For this one may have to do a bit of a research. Similarly it is of great importance that the objective and the level of usability of the website be defined at the outset itself. The visitor should not waste time guessing on the site and hence one must only use standard conventions and everything has to be very self evident on then site.

The author of this article is Ricci Mathew of Outsource Strategies International (OSI), a US based company that offers services in Search Engine Optimization, SEM, Website designing for clients across the US.