The website has to look amazing in the sense that the design has to be user friendly and visually appealing. Usability, accessibility and some basic browser design guidelines are behind any new website to make it look fresh.
User friendliness, good look & feel, and fast & easy communication are some of the features of every successful and inexpensive website design to target prospects.
Only pretty pictures will not satisfy their search. A site that is not visually appealing can drive the user away before he completes the task. Certain other things are also required here for the website to be used.
Creative Design, Usability, Accessibility and some Basic Browser Design guidelines are essential to determine the fate of any wordpress website to look attractive and visually stunning too.
Creative website design:
Design a visually appealing website in such a way that prospects will find it attractive to stay on the website for a long time and get the info it needs perfectly. Provided, the website must be easy to read and also easy to navigate.
Just by following a few basic design standards this creative standard can be made easily.
Colors: The actual cross platform color palette is 216 colors.
Fonts: Just try to use common user fonts so the site will open on any computer. In this case, it’s worth pointing out that some plain fonts can make this happen. Times New Roman, Arial, and Helvetica are the most commonly used fonts. This font is easy to read on a computer screen.
Screen Resolution: 1024 × 768 resolution is the most common in the web design industry. The second most common is the 800 × 600 design. It’s wise to create a fluid layout that fits automatically on any computer without breaking out of pictures and info. The rigid layout, in this case, will obviously disappoint users who see a 1024 × 768 layout on an 800 × 600 compatible screen. Which resolution to use should be carefully considered.
Images: Almost every website uses images. Images are very useful for selling products and for displaying company branding. The use of unnecessary images here will serve no purpose at all, but are used to please the viewer. It is not necessary to make the page size larger. Using ALT tags with images for accessibility is very important.
Brower compatibility
There is more than one browser in use on the web. Designing one such site for a particular browser will only lose the true purpose of that website. Better to test all of them. The most popular are Internet Explorer (5-7), Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 7/8.
Uses:
“Put us first. Practice simplicity ”.
Jakob Nielsen, Usability Design Expert, “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity”
Not only to complement the information architecture for a site, but also for the creative design uses of any professional web design big or small is essential. Users should have no trouble finding what they really want.
Here are some basic usability rules:
- The same basic style should apply to all pages on the site.
- Apart from maintaining a basic style with the rest of the page, the Home should have a distinct design from the rest of the site.
- The brand (logo) and / or company name should generally be placed in the upper left corner (sometimes located elsewhere for Home Pages and larger).
- Only 20% of the page should be occupied for navigation, although for the home page it is something different. It actually varies from site to site according to topic coverage.
- Generally, the horizontal top of the page and the left vertical of the page are the two most common locations for navigation.
- Please don’t display the same links in the footer as you do in main level navigation. Footers usually contain links namely, Help, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Feedback, etc …
- You can have printer-friendly options if the displayed site content is suitable for printing.
- For any site with a lot of content, consider creating a ‘sub site’. Breaking the site up into sections (similar to chapters in a book) with each section having its own landing page will only make the site look organized. Often times users can easily remember what specific info they want to see on which sub site.
- Please use percentage (%) instead of pixels to specify the width of the table definition and background / border for Independent Design Resolution. Screen resolution users can get unaffected display quality using percentage (%). This can be a lengthy process and requires testing the site in different screen resolutions, but it will pay off in the long run.
Accessibility:
Thinking about disabling users while creating any website is the best option. If not for humanity, then at least not to miss the prospect that might be disabled, the issue of accessible website design should be handled with care and attention. These people use different technologies to surf the web (such as screen readers). Colors, fonts, use of certain development technologies, images; all of these things need to be carefully selected in order for the website to be accessible.
The W3C has also established Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is not expected that all sites have to follow those rules, but web design professionals can at least take a look at them and decide what can be done to make the site accessible.
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