10 simple ways to improve website design

...every page of content. This not only helps your Web site's visitors, but also helps you: the more readers understand that any inconsistencies between what you've said and what they read elsewhere is a result of changing information, the more likely they are to grant your words value and come back to read more.

#5: Content density: Including too much information in one location can drive visitors away. The common-sense tendency is to be as informative as possible, but you should avoid providing too much of a good thing. When too much information is provided, readers get tired of reading it after a while and start skimming. When that gets old, they stop reading altogether.

Keep your initial points short and relevant, in bite-sized chunks, with links to more in-depth information when necessary. Bullet lists are an excellent means of breaking up information into sections that are easily digested and will not drive away visitors to your Web site.

The same principles apply to lists of links — too many links in one place becomes little more than line noise and static. Keep your lists of links short and well-organised so readers can find exactly what they need with very little effort. Visitors will find more value in your Web site when you help them find what they want, and make it as easily digestible as possible.

#6: Decorative images: With the exception of banners and other necessary branding, decorative images should be used as little as possible. Use images to illustrate content when it is helpful to the reader, and use images when they themselves are the content you wish to provide.

Populate your Web site with useful images, not decorative images, and even those should not be too numerous. Images load slowly, get in the way of the text your readers seek, and are not visible in some browsers or with screen readers. Text, on the other hand, is universal.

#7: Link indirection/interception/redirection: Never prevent other Web sites from linking directly to your content. There are far too many major content providers who violate this rule, such as news Web sites that redirect links to specific articles so visitors always end up at the homepage.

This sort of heavy-handed treatment of incoming visitors, forcing them to the homepage of the Web site as if they can force visitors to be interested in the rest of the content on the site, just drives people away in frustration. When they have difficulty finding an article, your visitors may give up and go elsewhere for information. Also, incoming links improve your search engine placement dramatically — and by preventing incoming links from working properly, you discourage others from linking to your Web site.

#8: Recent features: The content dates point above (number four) mentioned changing content. Any Web site with content that changes regularly should make the changes easily available to visitors to the Web site. New content today should not end up in the same archive as material from three years ago, especially without a way to tell the difference.

New content should stay fresh and new long enough for your readers to get some value from it. This can be aided by categorising it if you have a Web site whose content is updated very quickly — by breaking up new items into categories, you can ensure readers will still find relatively new material easily within specific areas of interest. Effective search functionality and good Web site organisation can also help readers find information they've seen before and want to find again. Help them do that as much as possible.

#9: Thumbnail image size: When providing image galleries with large numbers of images, linking to them from lists of thumbnails is a common tactic. Thumbnail images, in case you are not familiar with the term, are smaller versions of images intended to give the viewer an idea what the main image will look like when it is viewed. When presenting thumbnail images, however, it is important to avoid making them so small that the visitor to your Web site cannot get a useful idea of the main image from the thumbnail.

It is also important to produce scaled-down and/or cropped versions of your main images, rather than to use XHTML and CSS to resize the images. When images are resized using markup, the larger image size is still being sent to the client system — to the browser the Web site's visitor uses. When loading a page full of thumbnails that are full-size images resized by markup and stylesheets, a browser uses a lot of processor and memory resources. This can lead to browser crashes and other problems or, at the very least, cause extremely slow load times. Slow load times cause Web site visitors to go elsewhere. Browser crashes are even more effective at driving visitors away.

#10: Webpage title: Many Web designers do not set the title of their Web pages. This is obviously a mistake, if only because search engines identify your Web site by page titles in the results they display and saving a Web page in your browser's bookmarks uses the page title for the bookmark name by default.

A less obvious mistake is the tendency of Web designers to use the same title for every page of the Web site. It would be far more advantageous to provide a title for every page that identifies not only the Web site, but the specific page. The title should still be kept short and succinct, of course. A Webpage title that is too long is almost as bad as no Webpage title at all.

The above considerations for Web design are very important, but often overlooked or mishandled. A couple of minor failures can be overcome by successes in other areas, of course, but it never pays to shoot yourself in the foot just because you have another foot to use. Enhance your Web site's chances of success by keeping these principles in mind while designing your Web site.