 Knowledge Tips for Web Designing and Web ProgrammingPublished Date: 2008-07-05 17:50:08 WorkOnInternet.com
Some Easy Ways to improve your Website’s Legibility: • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go - use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler. • Consider your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it's never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn't have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana. • The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colors if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there's not enough contrast. • Don't stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I'll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line. • Making your website's content more legible is easy. It doesn't take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that's more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors. • And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. Nothing irritates more on a web page than spelling errors - it simply makes you look like you don't care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spell-check tool. In fact, if yours is a website that sells website design services, that is, you want people to pay you to design their website; it is in your interest not to make your site too plain. Many potential customers see your site as an example of what their site can become. There's no point claiming "Content is King" at this time - they won't be around long enough to hear your claim. Such sites need a certain amount of color, graphics, etc, although of course making it take too long to load would also be a deterrent to your potential clients. Like all things, how you design your site depends on your topic and your target audience. Keep that cardinal rule in mind and you'll be fine. Decorative graphics on a page are fine. They make a page more pleasant to look at, and hence more likely to be read. But you should at least make them as small as possible. While I'm hesitant to give a hard and fast rule about how big such graphics should be, a decorative graphic that is a few hundred kilobytes in size is definitely too big to be tolerated. Once you start to understand how to make web pages, you will be tempted to go all out with animated gifs, rollover affects, and fancy designs. The problem with this is that it can easily lead to confusing pages for the viewer and hard to maintain sites for you. Web sites are always in need of changing and updating. You will be thankful when that inevitable day comes and you have an easy to update modular site to work with instead of an inflexible over-designed mess. Author Bio: Clear Concepts is a leading Saudi Arabian based software company focused on delivery the best and most cost-effective solutions to their clients in areas such as Web & Programming and design & Multimedia. To learn more about the clear concepts you can visit – http://www.clear-concepts.org
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