Home
Articles
highly
recommended books

Professional page design Tips

Keep it simple!

A guaranteed way to lose visitors is to have pages that are slow-loading, or worse, crash their browsers. All the web-marketing experts highly recommend staying away from Flash, Java, heavy graphics, etc.. Unless you are promoting graphic design services. Most visitors are looking for information and real content. They are not likely to be impressed with a Flash presentation that takes 20 minutes to load. You can speed up page loading quite a bit by reducing the file sizes of some of your graphics. Most simple web graphics can easily be reduced in size by decreasing the color depth from 16 Million colors to 256 colors, or even less, depending on the complexity of the image.

In any webpage, it is always highly recommended to use a main table centered on the page, to contain the body of your content, rather than simply placing the content directly on a blank HTML page. This allows you to nicely control how it fits on the screen. Setting valign="top" for each table cell, makes it so the text always starts from the very top. I personally like to set my main table to 95% or 90%, since this looks best on most computer monitors. It's generally recommended to use percentages instead of pixels to control table width. I see way too many sites with the text running off the sides of the computer screen, to where I have to scroll left to right to read the page. It's a real pain to read!

Common Mistakes & Typos

It's astonishing how many professional business sites are full of obvious misspellings and typos. If your webpage editor does not have a spell checker (most do), you can write your content in MS Word or some other word processor that has a spell checker, then C&P it over to your webpage editor. My personal favorite webpage editor is Macromedia Dreamweaver. There however are many common typos that will not be recognized as a misspelled word by a spell-checker, because they are otherwise correctly spelled words but are the wrong words. This is where a Grammer-checker might work.

Some of the most common examples are:
"you" instead of "your"
"I" instead of "It"