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This article lists the 5 golden rules of good web site design. Follow them, and you are guaranteed to produce a well designed web site.

Rule 1: A good web site design should have 3 levels of web pages - no more, no less!

This simply means that from the Home page of your web site (Level 1), there are 2 lower levels of linked web pages. Level 2 consists of the ‘chapters’, or topics, of your web site, and Level 3 consists of the sub-topics of each Level 2 topic.

The reason for this is that it has been proven that humans are comfortable navigating down 3 levels on a web site. Any deeper than this, and they can very easily become ‘lost’, which quickly results in them looking to make their escape! Alternatively, any less than 3 levels, and a web site appears to be too ‘light weight’ to be worth spending much time looking around - end result, the same as when it is too deep!

Rule 2: A good web site design has between 5 and 15 Level 2 web pages.

The reasoning behind this rule is as follows:

Any less than 5 Level 2 web pages, and it is difficult for your web site to ‘get noticed’ by the internet search engines, which also means that human visitors won’t find it either!

Any less than 5 Level 2 pages, and it is unlikely that your website will have sufficient content to encourage human visitors to ’stick around’, or to revisit in the future. Limited ’stickability’ will have a detrimental effect on the profitability of your web site!

Any more than 15 Level 2 web pages, and it is unlikely that all of your web pages will ‘get noticed’ (i.e. indexed) by the internet search engines. When this is the case, your time will be more profitably spent designing another web site!

Any more than 15 Level 2 web pages, and many human visitors will simply find your web site to be too big and unwieldly to be bothered looking around - end result, they look for a quick escape!

Rule 3: A good web site design has between 5 and 15 Level 3 web pages per Level 2 web page.

The reasoning behind this rule is closely tied in with the reasoning behind Rule 2, which in simple terms is - too much, or too little, web site content penalises you in terms of the volume of ’stickable’ traffic (i.e. human visitors that actually ’stick around’ long enough to buy something!) that is attracted to your web site.

Rule 4: A good web site design is easy to navigate.

The reasoning behind this rule is very simple - if people have to spend time trying to work out how to navigate around your web site, they won’t bother! Everybody is pushed for time, and, unless you are very, very lucky, there will be a lot of other web sites that supply similar information to your web site - the trick that you must master is to link together the information on your web site in a way that is very easy for your visitors to find.

A simple approach to achieving this rule is as follows:

1. Place a navigation button for each Level 2 web page down the left-hand side of your Home page. 2. Place direct links to your Level 3 web pages at the appropriate points within the text of your Level 2 web pages. 3. On each of your Level 3 web pages place a link back to the Level 2 page that it was accessed from. 4. On each of your Level 3 web pages place a link back to your Home page. 5. On each of your Level 2 web pages place a link back to your Home page.

Rule 5: A good web site design has an attractive ‘Look and Feel’.

The reasoning behind this rule requires no explanation! Your web site must be ‘pleasing on the eye’. In practice, this means:

1. Avoid using lots of bright colours. 2. Mainly stick to black writing on a white, or pale background. 3. Avoid patterned backgrounds. 4. Avoid cluttering up a web page with too much text or images. 5. Break your text up into small paragraphs - ideally no more than 3 or 4 short sentences per paragraph. 6. If your page contains a lot of text, break it up with headings to allow people to quickly scan it for the bits they are interested in.

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