Submitted by: Josef Willkommer
Nowadays a webpage is a standard communication tool of almost each company. You can have endless discusssions about the design of a webpage, but in times of an increasing web-usage there are certain things you should keep in mind if you re going to start a new page.
We will give you some hints for a user-friendly and modern web design.
1. Search function: The acceptance of a web page depends on the usability of the web site. Apart from the clarity and an intuitive navigation the web page – in particular pages with a lot of content – should have an efficient search function. In the past many of the webmasters paid no attention to this feature. Modern content management systems offer such functions as a standard feature.
2. PDF-Files: The PDF is a well established document format in the web. Unfortunately enterprises often miss to integrate this PDFs into an appropriate content page. Almost everybody knows the effect. Using a search-engine, people only get the web page of a company over a PDF-File, shown in the result page. PDF-Files represent a very good supplementation of existing contents, but they should not replace these contents completely.
3. Search-engine-friendly content: Particularly in the past some people tried to use print-content for web usage. Bear in mind that the internet is a completely different media. Normally there is a very limited space in print media whereas the web has almost unlimited space for publishing articles and informations with additional or corresponding features like graphs or photo-galleries. The content should be clearly arranged with appropriate paragraphs including meaningful headlines and sub-headlines, enumerations and accentuations.
4. Templates: The table-based designs of the past will be replaces by layer-based CSS and XHTML Templates. With this technology it becomes possible to place contents and design elements freely on a web page. Character sizes become thereby scalable – a basic condition for barrier-free web design. Later changes at the layout or complete revisions can be carried out more simply, since contents remain equal. Beyond that, such CSS layouts offer still further advantages. Especially search-engines love the slim source-code of a CSS based web page.
5. Design: Consistency is one of the most important usability principles. Fundamental segmentations, functions and navigation elements should appear on all web pages. The whole web page will be easy to use. Same applies to fundamental site allocations. Navigation und site-architecture should be orientated at classic-examples. Freaky design ideas should be banned. A navigation bar at the right or lower edge of the screen can become a design high light, a first-time user of that page could have significant problems however.
About the Author: Josef Willkommer is managing director of the german internet-agency TechDivision, located in Rosenheim. Besides web design, Techdivision is experienced in the open-source content management system TYPO3. You can get further informations at
techdivision.com
Source:
isnare.com
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