What distinguishes a good web design from a bad web design are the key elements like text, navigation, links, graphics and overall general design are critically important.
Text:
For a good web design, you must ensure that the background should not obfuscate the text. Visitors come to the site principally to read the text and therefore the fonts should be sufficiently large not to cause eye strain and at the same time not too big. The content must be cogently written and in a user-friendly manner.
Navigation:
For a good web design, make the navigation buttons easy to understand and comfortable to use. If you use frames, make sure they are not too pronounced. If your site is large, provide for an index or a site map. Complicated frames, too many frames and avoidable scroll bars in frames – all make it a bad web design.
Links:
For a good web design, the link colors should coordinate well with the color of the pages. It is even preferable that links are highlighted so they are easily identifiable to the visitor. A bad web design has large and sometimes unwanted graphic files that are time-consuming to load. They have over-sized graphics that do not fit on the standard screen 640×460 pixels.
Graphics:
For a good web design, make the buttons elegant and of the right size. Make sure that every graphic link has a matching text link and graphics and backgrounds use only browser-safe colors.
General Design:
For a good web design, pages must be easy and quick to download. Good use of graphic elements such as photos, subheads, pull quotes to be used to break up large areas of text. Every web page in the site must be homogeneous and appear like it belongs to the same site. In a bad web design, there will be lack of contrast in color and text and haphazard presentation of content. Besides, bad web design also means that pages that look perfect in one browser but not in another.
To firmly decide whether the web design is good or bad, we must understand how users interact with web-sites, how they think and what are the basic patterns of users’ behavior – for the users are the ultimate judges. Visitors generally glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or indicative of the thing they are looking for. Unfortunately, there are large parts of the page they do not bother to browse. Please remember that while scanning a web-page, users usually search for some predetermined matter or anchors which would guide them through the content of the page. If a page contains high-quality content, users may be willing to compromise even if the site has too many advertisements and the design not of good quality. The golden rule is content is more important than the design which supports it.
It is strange that there are still so many badly designed websites in use. With a lot of tips from professionals available for designing good websites, it appears the web designers refuse to learn their lessons. It is cruel to make a visitor with a slow dial up connection wait for several minutes to load your site. The visitors are serious-minded and do not wish to watch some flash effects or a cartoon or some fireworks display, just to see your products on your site. Web sites can really drive people mad when you make them scroll left and right to read each line. Knowing no visitor likes horizontal scrolling, it is not clear why so many sites have horizontal scrolling.
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