If you have a computer, chances are you’ve tried your hand at website design. Perhaps it was just something simple that you made with a graphical editor on a free hosting site like Geocities or Google Sites. Perhaps you really got into it and bought tons of books on HTML, Javascript, PHP, and anything else you could get your hands on. Honestly, either way is just fine. You can design absolutely spectacular sites with high usability either way, so long as you start with a clear design in mind. That’s why I’m going to show you how to plan your website design first, and then how to implement it. I will also show you how to avoid some common mistakes that beginning web designers often make.

First, let us talk about some terms. When I say website design, I simply mean the creation of a website. Whether through the actually use of HTML code or through a point-and-click WYSIWYG(What you see is what you get) editor. When I say usability, I’m talking about how “user friendly” your site is. This could be everything from font size to layout to the interactive and dynamic elements of your site.

This leads me to the next topic: the website design itself. Now just wait. I want you to stop before you do anything else and just think about what you want this site to look like. Take out a piece of paper and a pencil and draw your layout. Think about what your audience will be expecting. Think about a color scheme. Think about other pages and sites that you’ll be linking to. Then take a look at some of your competitors sites and see what they did. Does it work for them? Will it work for you?

When you draw up your layout, ask yourself the following questions: “Where are the navigation links?(links to other pages on your site),” “Where are the links to other sites?(your affiliates perhaps),” “Are you going to have ads on your site, and If so, what kind(text, pictures, both?) and where will they be?,” and finally, “Where will the main content go? What will that content be? How should the audience to react to it?”

Now, consider your color scheme. What is the main subject of your site? If it’s a conservative subject like business or finance, you’ll want to use “cool” colors like blue, green, or gray. If it’s a more personal subject, like dating, or something artistic, like painting, you’ll want to use “warm” colors, like red, orange, or yellow. What is the mood of your site? If it’s somber, use darker shades. For a calm look use medium shades. And if you want a child-like or carefree kind of site use bright shades. (A note about children’s sites: the actual color is less important here than the shade. Use bright, extravagant colors for a children’s site.)

Now look at some of your competitors. What kind of layout and color scheme do they use? Does is seem effective to you? If so, it’s perfectly acceptable to try and emulate it, but don’t be a copy-cat. Your website design should be unique. If you’re competitors all do the same thing, maybe you should try taking a different course. Stand out from the crowd with your website design and it will be more likely to get noticed.

So now you’ve got a basic idea of what you want your site to look like. Now you’re left with one more big question: “How can I make this work in a way that my audience will be able to use it effectively.” That’s right, it’s time to talk about usability.

Usability is as much about code as it is about flow. Your site should allow the user to see what they want to see, but also make them see what you want them to see. This is sometimes easier said than done. As an example of what I’m talking about, let’s talk about ads.

First of all, you can assume that the user looking at your site is looking at your site because they saw a keyword they were interested in(i.e. they searched Google for your sites topic). So whatever ads you include on your site should fit nicely with your main content. A great way to accomplish this is with Google AdSense, but that’s another article. The point in this is that you want your ads to be relevant, but you also want them to grab the user’s attention. The best place to do this is at the top or right-hand side of the page. If you have an article-based site or a blog, you might try to incorporate the ads into the content of your site by placing them between each paragraph. That way your users see ads about things they might want, and you want them to see the ads. This increases the overall usability of your website design.

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The design of a website should be simple, easy to navigate, complete with essential contents and with immediate graphic visibility. The content of the website should be a reflection of your business. Therefore the design should be such that it allows the user to access your site easily.

When you design a website keep in mind that people use different computers and web hosts that use different browsers, and may display the same page of your website differently on different browsers. Some of the older version of browsers may not even display your pages and do not support new modifications and new tags. When you design a website, ensure that it is tested with the latest version of browsers - Internet Explorer and Firefox to benefit from all the new application softwares in use.

You can also check your design on BrowserCam,which allows you to choose different browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, and remote access to any of their testing machines. It also allows you to submit multiple URL’s. It actually allows you to view how your contents will look like when loaded on different browsers.

It is very annoying when it takes a long time to open the pages. It means that the loading time is more, making the system slow. The user might as well move on to another site where the information is quickly available. It happens when the size of graphics is very high. Keep the graphic size adequately small. You can speed up the response time by having same images on different pages. In this condition the images get loaded from the cache rather then the browser itself. It is very useful for title bars. How to use the graphics to the best advantage can be studied on Web Graphics and Web Page Backgrounds. In a nutshell keep the loading time low.

The design of the website should permit easy navigation. Building a small text menu at the bottom of the screen will aid in navigation. Web Site Navigation gives detailed information on navigation. The web design should have consistency, because it helps your site to be recognized with a brand name. The background, colors, fonts and other buttons should have uniformity throughout. Stick to the standard fonts. Check Web Fonts for more details. For viewing the website a resolution of 800×600 is best without straining your eyes.

Study what others are doing and take the best out of them to design your own eye catching website.

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