5 Important Website Writing & Design Conventions.

February 8, 2010 by Dorian
Filed under: Website Design 

This article outlines the 5 most vital conventions for writing and designing your webpages.

Your presentation is every bit as necessary as your content. The best content in the globe won’t ever be browse if the presentation is therefore unhealthy that no-one stays long enough to scan it. If you maximize your website usability, your guests keep longer, browse additional, and you create additional sales.

If the aim of your web website is to teach your readers and/or cause them to a specific action, (like shopping for something) then you must seriously contemplate following these design and writing conventions…

1. Begin Each Page With Your Most Necessary Content.
2. Use Meaningful Link Text to Offer Information.
3. Write Scannable Pages.
4. Use Simple Website Designs.
5. Use Clear, Consistent Website Navigation.

1. Begin Each Page With Your Most Vital Content.
Folks are impatient; they can scan your page quickly and leave when they get bored. Place your best, most significant content near the prime of the page.

Design your layout therefore that nothing pushes your most important content down past the “page fold”. That’s your “Prime Real Estate” — do not waste it. Giant logos, unnecessary graphics, ambiguous headlines…. all this stuff are a waste of your must valuable space.

Begin every page with a outline or a brief list of page contents. Be specific, and place the latest items at the prime of the list or in an exceedingly “What is New” section.

2. Use Meaningful Link Text to Give Information.       
Net surfers decide in seconds whether or not or not your page is worth reading. When you use bland, content-neutral words for your link text, you miss an necessary opportunity to supply information. (Also - visually impaired net users usually instruct their computer to read the link text aloud, “Click here” will not help them.)

The words utilized in your anchor text should suggest what the reader can notice when they click on the link, and facilitate them plan to click or not.

* Bad: To find out regarding icebergs, click here.
* Better: Icebergs
* Best: Where icebergs come back from.

You can create your links even more informative by following them with a blurb:

Blurbs: Short Previews of Web Pages
A “Blurb” is a short paragraph that gives a preview of the page at the other finish of a link. You are reading a blurb now. If a blurb helps a reader decide to click the link, then it works.

3. Write Scannable Pages.
Offline, books and magazine articles are designed for sequential reading: You start at the start and scan to the end.

On-line text isn’t essentially sequential - it relies upon smaller chunks of text, that the reader typically does not read in order. So each page of your website must make sense to a visitor who failed to see the preceding page, or simply arrived from a groundwork engine.

Meaningful, informative headers & subheadings, bulleted lists, and daring keywords all help readers scan the page quickly and easily.

4. Use Easy Website Designs.
Your visitors did not return to see your fancy graphics. They came to search out data about prices or availability, they’re looking for contact data or directions, or maybe they just wish some technical details…

Unless your web site is about cool graphic effects, I can guarantee that your visitors don’t very care concerning your spinning brand or dancing unicorns, or maybe whether or not your menu buttons blink or change background images on a mouse-over.

Net-savvy visitors have ‘trained’ themselves to ignore ads. Anything that flashes, shimmers, blinks or dances around can not get the attention that it deserves.

The additional such things you place on your page, the harder your reader will have to figure so as to find what they want. An excessive amount of of that and they’re gone, never to return. Use pictures wisely. Every image on your page slows it down, sometimes a little, generally a lot….
* Use smaller pictures whenever possible.
* For massive collections of images, use an index with thumbnails that they’ll click if they want to see the image full-size.
* Use a picture editor to scale back the file size of your pictures

See our “Using images in your webpages” section for more about all that ~ http://blt-web.com/web_design/using_images.html

5. Use clear, Consistent Web site Navigation.
Next to pages that take forever to load (and pop-ups), the most important grievance that surfers have is difficult to perceive and/or inconsistent web site navigation…
* Use the identical menu on all of your pages.
* Use a logical link hierarchy, with connected items together.
* Be perfectly clear along with your link titles & descriptions.
* Use text links whenever possible.
* If you need to use image links, use the alt=”link destination” element.

A website with more than ten or fifteen pages might not want a link from every page to every different page… you’ll be able to link to each section from every page, however give every section its own “Table Of Contents”.

Every page ought to have a link to the home page and to the positioning map. (If you have got but 10 pages, you’ll omit a website map, however your home page ought to have a text link to each page for search engines.)

See our “Menu Style Tips” page for additional information ~ http://blt-web.com/web_design/menu_design.html

Following these five simple tips can help your website be a success.  With faster-loading pages and easier-to-find info, people can read a lot of of your content and are a lot of possible to take the action that you wish them to.

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