Web Design Tips

1. If you have a site in all Flash, consider creating an HTML version of the site as well. This will not only make your site search engine friendly, but also help users who do not have flash plug-ins in their web browsers.
2. The most important thing you should do while designing a banner is to feature a call to action. Placing a "Click here" or "Submit" graphic image on your banner can significantly improve your Click through Rate. Also note that bright colored banners like blue, yellow, and green have a higher CTR than black-and-white colored banners.
3. While it is important to make the home page of the site easily accessible to the users from all the site pages, one shouldn't force them to navigate to the home page each time for browsing other pages on the website. Placing a navigation/menu-bar on all pages of the website helps navigation and site usability. It also helps search engines locate your inner content easily.
4. Pop-ups are mostly used to present additional information, ads and other 'non-core' material to visitors. However, unless used properly, automatic JavaScript pop-up windows are the biggest turn-offs for any website. Pop-ups increase the bounce rate of your website.
5. Use a Crystal Clear Source Code (HTML/CSS). There are many web-designers who give too much importance to the look and the graphics of the website while ignoring the clarity and reusability of the source code. Clean and well-written source code is the first step to a successful website design. If a spider cannot crawl through all the pages of the site smoothly, chances are, that all website pages would not be noticed by Search Engines.
6. Alignment of design objects is one important thing you can't afford to ignore as it plays an important role in deciding the look and feel of your website and it is as important in web design as it is in print design. Good alignment doesn't necessarily mean that everything should be in a straight line; perhaps you should align your design to look more ordered, digestible & polished.
7. Most of the people specify size of fonts in pixels (because it relates with Photoshop). But using pixels as font unit has one major problem, pixels can't be resized in Internet Explorer. As monitor resolutions increase, visually challenged might struggle to adjust the font size. So it's better to use 'em' as font unit. According to wikipedia - an "em" is a unit of measurement in the field of typography, equal to the pt size of the current font. An em is roughly equivalent to 16 pixels. To use 'ems', your designer must set the font size attribute in the body tag to 62.5 per cent like this: body {font-size: 62.5%}.
8. Keep your website design consistent. It means that you must have a clear theme in your mind before starting the design so that you can select colors, font, buttons, spacing, illustration, pictures etc. accordingly and each element compliments the overall theme of your website. Inconsistent design looks unprofessional and low in quality. So make early decision and stick to them. Using smart CSS will help you achieve this consistency. Remember, even if your website design is bad, a consistent bad design will still look better then an inconsistent website design.
9. Keep an up-to-date backup of your existing files before any alterations to the original design so that if you find that your altered design has undesirable changes, you can conveniently revert back to your old design by re-uploading your backup files.
10. Center aligning the text, titles, taglines, and parts of copy is one of the most amateurish thing you can do to your design. Instead left-aligning is a much safer and usually better looking option on most websites.
11. Before starting the HTML of a website, make sure you have final pixel perfect PSD design of the internal and external pages. Making structural changes after final HTML conversion can be very time wasting. Try to follow these design principles for better looking designs which prompt user action.
12. Never compromise on the quality of pictures on your website as it has the power to make the most ordinary piece of design look like an amazing piece of art work. If you are low on budget and scared to spend dollars for the perfect image at a site like Veer, you may get your hands on non-commercial image providers like stock.xchng or Flickr, but do make sure that the license behind the photo allows its use. For commercial work, there are multiple microstock websites like iStockPhoto.
13. Follow these eight golden rules of Interface Design for providing a rich user experience and optimized traffic retention for your website.
14. Making a website design compatible for all browsers is a time consuming task for most of the web designers. It can be a real pain at times. To save your time, here is a list of the most commonly found CSS IE bugs that you are most likely to come across in the website design phase.
15. To guide the eye balls of your visitors on the most important areas of your website, you must understand the overall proximity of each design element. A Gestalt principle of form perception explains what makes a logo or design stand out of its surrounding area.
16. CSS Float attribute is undoubtedly one of the most messed up attribute by web developers and we can't blame it on float theory for this. Perhaps it's the misconception about the float attribute that causes such a problem. A floated box is positioned within the normal flow, then taken out of the flow and shifted to the left or right as far as possible. Content may flow along the side of a float. Here is a good resource on the float theory.
17. In advertising media, using animal and human Mascots to induce positive feelings in the target audience has always been a useful sales ploy. Even on Internet, many website owners use vibrant color schemes, photos and illustrations to leave an ever lasting impression on visitors of the website. Animals and human-like creatures are used more frequently than abstract creatures. Justin Bird, Twitter, BobrDobr & Potatoparade are good examples of how perfect Mascot designs look like.
18. Website designing is not just about throwing text and pictures in a three column design. The tinniest of spaces should also be used properly with minimalistic designs. These designs do not impress with the amount of presented information but with the way the information is actually presented. Here is a wonderful article by Mark Boulton that says how to master the art of using white spaces.
19. The time your website takes to load is one of the biggest turn on's or turn off's for any user. In order to reduce the load time, you must minimize graphics, flash and scripts as these hugely increase your file size.
20. When using frames be sure to include the META description and META keywords on the document containing the FRAMESET. It is always good to include a full description of your site along with all the important keywords between the <NOFRAMES> and </NOFRAMES> tags.

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