As an important part in advertising a business, the process of website design can be really challenging to the webmaster or designer engaging in it. There are certain things that a web design specialist must not overindulge. Doing more than what is needed may bring negative returns and create a business loss.

1. Don’t use too many colors in the website

Keep the website’s color scheme limited to a couple of colors and keep it consistent across the website unless you want to denote a major section.

2. Don’t have more than a few words in italics, bold or in capitals

All these are ways to draw attention to text, but they make text harder to read. It’s OK if it refers to particular words but if you’re making everything the same, it loses its impact.

3. Don’t use <h5> and <h6> tags

These tags make the text smaller than the browsers default size and make it bold, which results in text that is really hard to read.

4. Do use the ‘alt’ tag

Alternate text is used by text only browsers. Do put meaningful information in ‘alt’ tag as text only browsers are used by the blind to surf the web. The alternative text will also help you with the search engines.

5. Do end the URLs with a forward slash in your links

By adding the forward slash you remove a step that otherwise the web server and browser would have to take; removing this extra step can give you a speed boost.

6. Do make the images that look like buttons act like buttons

In order not to confuse your visitors you must not create graphics that look like buttons but that aren’t in fact buttons.

The sitemap is aimed at helping visitors and search engine spiders to find information on the website. Today’s trend of web design is placing the sitemap in the footer area instead of creating a separate sitemap page. Placing a sitemap in the footer helps to enhance the website’s usability. Usability is foremost in importance in website design. Providing a site map in the footer, no matter how small, improves usability.

Placing site map in the footer of the website has the following benefits:

Increases page clicks and visit duration

Online readers don’t read everything on the page. They scroll and scan to decide whether to stay on the website and leave. The footer of your website is probably the last place they look at before exiting. Placing a sitemap in the footer may attract the attention of readers and increase page clicks and views.

Makes sure your visitors are not missing out

Sometimes the visitors might be too lazy to click on the sitemap link. Having a sitemap in the footer ensures your visitors are aware of what pages are available at the website with just a glance.

Promotes important pages

You don’t really have to use the footer to list out everything. You can use it as an alternative location to promote important links.

Saves readers’ time

Footer sitemap allows users to quickly jump from page to page. Also, by placing the sitemap in the footer rather than a separate page, you save the visitors a click.

Enhances layout design

Don’t know what to put in the footer? Perhaps a sitemap can fill up the page and make your website look bigger.

1. What should be the focal points of the web design?

Every web design is going to draw attention to certain parts of the page in one way or another. By knowing what you want to emphasize you will have more control over what gets attention from visitors.

2. How can the navigation be made more effective?

Navigation is one of the most essential elements of a site’s usability. If a significant amount of content or pages have been added to the site since the last website design, it is possible that navigation is no longer optimal. Before redesigning think about how visitors will want to move through the site, and make it as easy as possible for them.

3. What will visitors want from the website?

Meeting the needs of your visitors is important to the success of any website. Will visitors be coming to the site looking for information? If so, make it easy to find the information and make it a prominent part of the web design. Will they be coming to the site to find products? Will they be coming for some other reason? Anticipate what your visitors will want and do your best to give it to them.

4. How can increased user interaction be incorporated?

Blogs are great for this purpose because they allow for comments and discussion. Other possibilities are games, forums, user-generated content, quizzes, polls, etc. By making the website more engaging to your visitors you are more likely to get a high number of repeat visitors.

5. Who will be doing the maintenance/updates?

Will you or someone else be doing routine maintenance and updates? If multiple people will be using the website commenting the code becomes even more important. Keep it as clean as possible.

There are many things you can do in website design; the following is a list of some things you should avoid when designing a website.

1. Don’t force people to download special plug-in or a new browser to see your website. Unless you have a stunning website that people are dying to see, why limit your audience because you want to use some special features in a browser or a plug-in like Flash.

2. Avoid using framesets. Framesets make the website more complicated than it needs to be and they can cause you all kinds of problems with the search engines. Today, you can create fantastic looking web design with proper use of CSS and HTML.

3. Don’t try to fool the search engines by cheating- such as putting hundreds of keywords on the pages as invisible text, etc. Good content  that is presented honestly is more likely to ensure high rankings and high traffic for your website.

4. No page counters- as they do nothing except tell people information about your site you probably don’t want them to know! If you want to know how many people are hitting your site, just ask your host for server stats.

5. Don’t waste your time on Flash intros as the ‘skip intro’ button is the 2nd most clicked on the web today.

Instead of trying to shock your visitors with useless features, you’re better off designing a simple website with clear navigation structure that is full of useful content.

When designing a website, there are a number of web design styles you can adopt to transfer the message of a brand effectively to customers, users or readers. Use a style that matches the brand you are designing for. Also don’t stick to one particular style.  Here are the most creative styles in use in web design today.

1. Illustrations and Cartoons

Illustrations and cartoon drawings can bring a website design to life. Incorporating drawing into a website’s design is one of the most creative methods of presenting information on the web.

The variety of this style is only limited by the designer’s imagination.

2. Two Tone Color

Using only two colors to create a design doesn’t sound like a particularly inspiring style of design until you see it used well. When used well it can indeed be very inspiring and will allow more focus on other aspects of the design such as typography and layout. More focus can be placed on the content as this style of web design ties in well with the minimalistic design which increases the users’ focus on the content.

3. Transparency

Transparency is an excellent way of making text more readable when placed above images. Doing so preserves the part of the image below the text so that the full image can still be seen to some degree.

With the increasing demise of IE6 and different ways of making transparent PNG files behave in IE6, transparency has become a viable style in web design.

If you want to design an effective and quality website avoid the top mistakes that most web designers make.

Not thinking about the visitors needs

Design the website for the visitors and not for you. Make sure your web design matches their expectations and needs.

Poor navigation

Your website should have a navigation bar at the top or side of the website that is the same across all pages. Ideally no page should be more than three clicks away from any other.

Slow loading

A slow loading web page frustrates visitors as they want the page to appear as quickly as possible. If you use images you should optimize them in order to load quickly.

Unreadable texts

You should choose the right text and background color contrast to not cause difficulties for the reader. Font size is also important. Visitors may just give up and leave if the font size is too large or too small.

Not thinking about the text content

While worrying too much about good website design you should not forget about the text. It gives visitors the information they need and this is often the real purpose of the website.

Too many ads

Ads help generate some extra income, but for business websites it would be recommended that there are no adverts. If you do choose to have them make sure they do not take over.

Lack of consistency

Some web design specialists design each page with an individual feel. The content of your website should differ throughout, but the look and design should be consistent all the way through.

As a web design professional you should remember that if a visitor finds a link to your website through a search engine and lands on a page without navigation capabilities it is more likely your website will be abandoned.

It is important that each page on your website helps the visitor to understand what your website is for, what you offer and how to get from one place to the next. If your website has dead end pages the chances diminish that it will be as useful to customers as you want it to be.

Many websites are built with a front door mentality. In this case the home page is supposed to be the landing pad for all visitors. Actually, search engines rank all web pages making it possible for a visitor to come into your website through a page other than the home page. Sure, you are happy they came, but you have to give them a map to your website so they can really find what they need. In many cases this is done with a site map or common navigation links on all pages.

Another common web design faux pas is to burden your pages with high-resolution images and data. Most visitors will likely move on if it takes too long to download the website.

The rule is to make every page of your website navigable and quickly downloadable. These elements of website design can make an incredible difference in the usability of your web site.