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Websites are one of the best ways to promote and showcase your club, breed or company. They have many benefits and can produce excellent results however a poorly constructed site can do just the opposite. Here are some useful and important tips when designing a web site:• Clean Layout Design: Visitors should understand the subject of the site within the first few seconds! Choose a theme and stick with it! A uniform, clean layout that uses a lot of white space enhances a site's look and is great for sites with a lot of text. Use popular fonts so that they appear on all computers to prevent your site looking messy if it is browsed on a site that does not support those font styles.
• Precise and Easy Navigation: Navigating links on your website play a crucial role in how long your visitor stays at your website. As soon as they open your site, they would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find something else that interests them. Navigation links should be well structured and organised to maintain a flow when perusing your site.
• Load Time: Don’t assume all viewers are using broadband! Ensure sure your website loads in a minimum amount of time as possible. To achieve this one should: Minimize graphics, graphic file sizes, scripts and Flash files: These are amongst the main contributors to file sizes. Optimize script coding & HTML: Remove any unwanted tags or unused scripts in your site coding. Use Server Side Include (SSI) files when possible. Once called from your website server, these images are held its memory cache which means they load a lot faster on further requests.
• Design for all Monitor Sizes: A user friendly site always encourages visitors to stay and read your content. For sites with long pages of content this is very crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. It is highly likely a visitor will close the browser window if the content is hard to read and access. Designing layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that your site is viewable across a wide range and is more standardized in presentation.
• Cross Browser Compatibly: Make sure you check your site on different browsers. Remember everyone has different setups for internet browsing and your site should display correctly in at least the more popular ones ie (Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Opera 7.0 and Netscape Navigator 6+). These browsers comprise 95% of the world’s browsers.