Consistent and simple web design
As a website designer, I see this as one of the most prolific problems of website design. Inexperienced website designers tend to create each page as a separate design, thinking that the visitor will get bored with just one design. That's not true. The Internet as a novelty passed years ago. What your site visitors are looking for now is information, not to see how different your design can look. In addition, 'funky' web designs could lessen what visitors think of your company. Also a simple site design looks 'clean', as we say in the web design business. It also allows the visitor to find the information that you are trying to present rather than hunting for it in a difficult or complicated design. Another benefit to simple site design is that it will load faster. This is another big reason your visitors will hit the back button. Unless you have specifically given notice to the visitor that if they click on a link it may take X minutes to download, they are gone. No one is going to wait for a huge logo or water image to load in the background when they are searching for information. Simple site design is easier to create. Think more about what your visitor wants information wise and not visually. Professional web designers normally use sophisticated graphic design programs like Photoshop to create the initial photo designs, then cut up the photos and import them into the website.

Web design organization
As simple as it seems to you, the visitor to your site can get lost easily if you don't have the website organized in a logical manner. I first design the layout for a website using an outline similar to writing a paper in high school. That way I know where everything goes before I start designing. At this point you can create the content for each page. Now the web site design for your company can begin. This approach will also allow you to maintain and add new pages to your company website easily. If you added a new product, all you would have to do is create the product page and add a link to the main product page. This avoids having to add a link to every page of your site. The same goes if you eliminate a page or product. You will also find that by focusing each page to a single purpose, it will help your search engine rankings!

Web design navigation
Along with website organization, another important design factor is creating an easy to understand navigation for your site. I have seen a huge difference in website traffic when the design is easy to navigate. Website visitors always look at more pages on a site where the navigation links are easy to find. I suggest creating a navigation bar in your design that should be in the same place on every page. Now that you can create HTML pages that may seem a little dull, but it is the best way for your visitors to get around. Imagine if you were looking in the phone book for John Smith, but it wasn't in alphabetical order but by age of the individual. You would have to look through the whole list to find John Smith. The same goes for websites. The difference is people will leave your site and look for another. The search engines are filled with 'others'. Also, this helps your visitor get the information they want fast, within just a few clicks of the homepage. Plus, by developing individual pages you will decrease loading times. Just imagine if you had all products and their pictures on one page, it would increase the load time significantly. Don't forget to include a homepage link in your navigation bar. That way the visitor can always get back to the homepage, and so can the search engine robots as they go through your site. Some designers suggest putting your links at the bottom of the page so people have to scroll down and see the entire page to get to the site's navigation. This is assuming that everyone likes what they see on the page enough to scroll, that they know how to scroll (you'd be surprised!), and that they are patient enough to figure it out. Put your navigation 'above the fold'. This means visible when the page loads without scrolling. No matter what business you are in, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of competitors that are doing a better job on their site than you are. The back button is your worst enemy. Just to let you know, only about 10-15% of your visitors will click past your homepage. And only about 1% will ever come back. You've got to give them what they want on the first visit!

Web designs with frames
The number one reason not to use frames is the search engines. I haven't had one client that has said, "Oh, I don't care if I am found in the search engines". And if you are trying to sell a product or service, then you need to be found in the search engines! The problem is search engines don't go past the first frame. So that center frame with all the content in it goes unnoticed. When you've got 316,345 search results under your specific keyword looking to be number one, if you don't do everything right, you will never see the top or anywhere near the top. If, by chance, you do get a page indexed in the search engines, when you click on the link you will get only the portion of the page that has the content. It won't have the full frameset. So the viewer won't be able to see the rest of your site! In addition to the search engines, some browsers don't support frames, which usually mean they focus on one portion of the page. Also, frames cause older browsers to crash. That assures you they will never come back to your site. You can create a non-framed version as well as a framed version, but that means you have two sites to maintain.

Photo sizes in your web site
When designing a website for your company, your photos should never be so large that they slow the loading time down to a crawl. Is there any set size that you always make your photos? Not really... These are my recommendations: Keep photos on your homepage to a minimum and small. This will help get the visitor interested in what you've got to offer and hopefully get them in a mindset that will make them wait for additional slower pages. Use clickable images where possible. That means creating a 'thumbnail' for the page, and creating a link to the larger version of the picture. That way, if they aren't interested in seeing the big picture, they don't have to wait for it to load. If you are going to have a large photo, make sure it is a good photo. Not out of focus or bad color. Here are two examples of download speed at 28.8 modem speed. Most of the world is still at 28.8. I know you can't believe that, but it's true. The download speed for a text-based page with no images that is 8.6 KB will take 3 seconds to load. That's good. A page with a few photos that is 60 KB will take 21 seconds to load. Count it out, 1 one thousand, 2 one thousand, 3 one thousand and so forth… pretty long. If it's your homepage, most people will be gone at about 8 one thousand. It's my 7-second rule. No more for a homepage. The times when a longer load time is OK is when the visitor is leaving your homepage to go to a product page or photo gallery. Here they are expecting to get information that they want or looking to see a series of pictures. However, it is best to use thumbnails that click to larger photos. And if at all possible, have a statement that reads, 'the image may take a moment to load' or something to that effect.

Backgrounds in web designs
In the thousands of website designs that I look at in the course of a year, I run across this problem with over 50% of them; backgrounds that are so intense that you can't read the text. Some of the worst offenders are sites with water backgrounds. Others have sites with dark picture backgrounds and then use white type. That is hard on the eyes. If you are going to have a photo or image background in your website design, make sure you lighten it up as much as possible. That way the text should still be readable. The best way to make your text readable is by having dark text on a light background. Not everyone wants to have black text on a white background as it is here, but it is the most readable. If you want a little more color on your page you can use pastel colors like beige, light yellow and other neutral soft colors as long as the text is readable. Go to some of the websites for companies like: IBM, AT&T, Ford and Microsoft. All had white backgrounds. Some used dark gray, dark blue or a reddish type, but all were very readable. That should be the first priority when you are selecting backgrounds and text colors.

Javascript in web designs
Ninety-nine percent of JavaScript used in website design is used in the wrong way. And it comes back to browser compatibility. If it crashes the user's browser, you will never see that visitor again. But if you want to use java, the words 'cute' and 'cool' should not be the determining factor in your selection of JavaScript. Your decision on the use should be preceded with this question: How will it improve the experience for my website visitors? The problem with using java in your website design is, no matter what you do, it increases your load time. So a visitor waiting for your page to load only to see it was a folding email envelope, a picture that has a reflection or graphics attached to your mouse pointer starts the visit off on the wrong foot. Button rollovers are a decent use of java. It adds a little action to the site and as long as you don't have 30 buttons, it shouldn't take that much longer to load.

When to use Adobe Flash on websites
The latest rage in website design is using Flash, which is a vector based graphic presentation that can present things in a continuous movie format. It can include sound as well as interactivity. This can present a richer experience for your visitor. Flash movies can be made to load faster than other scripting like JavaScript and other programs, but most designers have taken the 'look at what I can do' approach in their website design and overload the presentation. There are several considerations before using Flash in your website design. The first consideration is whether or not to give the visitor a way to skip the Flash presentation. If you come back to a site, and you've already seen the presentation, you should have a way to skip it, especially if it is long. In most cases, I skip the presentation altogether, and I'm not sure if it's because most of the Flash I've seen is designer grandstanding or that I am looking for information and not a show. So do your visitors a favor and build in a skip button. Flash is not search engine friendly at all. When your site's first page is a Flash presentation, you can be assured that no search engine will index your site. You also should be aware about the Flash development time. The more complex, which are more elements, the longer it will take to build the Flash movie. My suggestion is to develop your HTML site and get it up on line, then work on the Flash and add it later. You really don't have to worry about browser issues, as Flash works in just about every browser. It doesn't work in browsers as old as Netscape 4.7, but it does in most all new browsers.