Web Layout Tips

Keep it simple:

1. A simple website layout is user friendly
2. Do not create complex navigational links using complex scripts or images that maynot be viewable correctly in different browsers. Also search engines cannot index the site properly if complex navigation is involved.
3. Minimize the use of bulky images which take long to load. Use smaller icons to attract visitor's attention instead.



Readable font size and face:



4. Use a standard font size of "-1" (11 or 12 pixels if using styles) so that visitors can read the content easily
5. Select a professional looking font face (Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif are very common).
6. Use appropriate spacing between lines (12 or more pixels) to avoid clumsiness.
7. The choice of colors may reflect one's personal taste



Webpage Dimensions:



8. Most successful commercial websites limit the width and height of the webpage so that the important content of the webpage lies within the top 600x600 viewable area without scrolling.
9. The best choice is to limit the width by placing a table with a fixed width of 750 or 775 pixels.



Limit File Size:



10. Webpage size is defined by the total size of text, images and supporting files (including javascript, flash etc.) that is downloaded from the server to view a webpage.
11. Most of the population on the internet use a slow 56K modem to access the internet. And smaller page sizes load faster. If you look at some very high volume websites like Yahoo.com and Google.com, they hardly have any images, making their site load faster.
12. There is a trade off between making your webpage look nicer with lots of graphics and making it faster to load. The rough target for page size should be below 35K for at least the cover page.