When designing a website, it is important to bear a few things in mind.
To help you design your website and to generate top listings in the search engines , we have put together a quick checklist of secrets to follow, when designing your site.
We believe following these simple guidelines, will make your site: easy to use, eye-catching and most importantly have a better chance of being successful:
- Use a minimum font size of 10 and no fancy writing styles.
- Use either left and top bar navigation or both.
- Don't use blinking or flashing text.
- Don't use flash intro's
- Don't have background music on your site.
- Keep page titles simple and relevant.
- Keep the look & feel and layout of your site consistent throughout.
- Don't have automatic pop up windows.
- Don't have a busy background.
- End all your link URL's with a forward slash.
- Turn off all blue borders around linked graphics.
- Don't use too many colours on your website, keep all your branding consistent.
- Remember, light coloured text on a dark background is a lot harder to read than dark coloured text on a light background.
- DON'T use invisible text to improve your site ranking, you will end up doing the opposite!
- Use alternate text ('Alt' tag) for all major images, this will help with your accessibility.
- Don't use too many different font styles and once chosen keep them consistent.
- Use 'bold' and 'italics' minimally in body text.
- And finally, if in doubt - THE GOLDEN RULE - keep it simple!