The Web Designer’s Pre-flight Checklist

It’s your money and your business of course. So you can design your website in ‘your way’; there’s nothing to complain about. However, to make your site a crowd-puller, you need to tick a basic check list. What that is? We will see.

1. How good is control?

Websites with static pages are gone with wind. Web 2.0 is going to pass the baton to version 3.0. Change is only static here. And if your web design is making the change difficult then you have to seriously think about it.

Web design should accommodate regular modifications and customization with minimum effort. And if that is taking lot of your time – you are running behind a wrong train.

2. Usability is king

Ultimately, it is not you but your customer would visit your website to use contents posted on it. The more satisfied your customers are, after each visit to your site, the more eager they will be to give a repeat visit. Otherwise, money and effort – both will be sheer wastage.

So make the usability a driving force behind the web design plan. Customer should feel encouraged visiting your site and not punished. However, you can ask how to know the degree of usability for your site? Use your own web browsing experience. If you require going back to home page often to get onto different pages then that a red signal.

3. Slim and trim

Nobody likes waiting. It always gets over our nerve. Your visitors won’t wait for you if your web page takes more than 10 seconds on a standard internet. Search engines generate plenty of results; if one page is not yielding visitor takes a blink to switch to other sites. So always be careful to keep your webpage ‘light’; standard size is ‘with everything’ below 60 kb. But that’s just the upper limit. Slimmer is better here.

4. Smart technology usage

Flash apps are good to look at and fun to use; but they are too lazy to load. So, restrict uses of such web technologies to cases, where they are unavoidable. Unwanted usage would spoil usability and lightness of your webpage.

Remember and never forget technologies are used to make things easier not to complicate. Don’t allow fancy to over ride purpose.

5. Speak the purpose

Every website has some purpose. It could be naïve or foolish but not useless. And webpage should be able to speak out that purpose as early and as easily as possible. Nobody would run around your webpage to excavate what they are for. You either state it clearly to your visitor or scare them away.

6. Browser adoptability

To show visitors what’s there in your website, you have to depend on browsers. You can stuff your site with lots of brainy stuffs but if they are not coming out properly on browser then effort is useless. So, be sure to make your web design browser friendly. And, do not consider only 1 or 2 major browsers. Take all of them into consideration as you don’t what ‘they’ are using.

The takeaway here is: visitors are king. They are doing favor coming down to your pages. Pinpoint your web design to make their experience enjoyable and useful. Or else, they would flee away.

Alia Haley

Alia is a writer/blogger. She loves writing travelling and reading books. She contributes to Luis Montalvan

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