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Guidelines for Good Web Design

By Mohammad Yousef | July 2004

So, have you decided to contribute to the World Wide Web by building a personal website? Or do you wish to give your current website a facelift? If yes, here are a few basic tips that should help you create a good website.

Site map: A comprehensive and tidy site map should make it quite easy for your visitors to find their way around. It’s better to use a site map for a small or medium-sized website. You can have a look at other websites’ maps to get a better idea. It's also worth mentioning that a site map makes it easier for search engine spiders to crawl your site.

Search: If you have a large website with many pages, a site map won’t be enough. In this situation, you should include a search utility for your website’s pages. Read my recently written article if you don’t know how to do this.

Homepage link on every page: Add a link to your homepage on each web page of your site. You should do this so that if a person arrives at one of your pages through a search-engine, he/she can easily go to the homepage and tell what website the page belongs to.

Don’t use frames: For a novice webmaster, these might look very tempting to use. It’s true that frames make your web pages look tidy and organized but they have a downside as well. Visitors will be confused and they won’t be able to tell what particular page they are in because the address in the browser’s address bar is not the actual address of the page. For the same reason, your site’s visitors will also have trouble bookmarking certain pages. Instead of frames, you could use tables in order to achieve similar results but without these disadvantages.

Compatibility with different browsers: Actually when it comes to personal websites, it’s hard to ensure that the site supports all browsers. At least make sure there are no major compatibility issues with the most popular browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

Quick load: Many people (especially in developing countries) are still using dial-up to connect to the internet. Too many images, flash animations and background sounds take a lot of time to load, so try and use them as little as possible.