Web Design Tips And Techniques For Site
Usability
Author: Gabriel Adams

If you are a web designer or a webmaster, website design is one
of the most important tasks you do. In designing a site, you
need to create a design that is easy for users to use, is
compatible with different systems, and is search engine
friendly.

Making a site that is user friendly:

In some ways, creating a user friendly site is just common
sense - other aspects are not so obvious, though. Obviously,
you'll want to make the text easy to read, the navigation links
easy to find, etc. Here are a few other tips:

Put contact information on every page.
Make it obvious what you want the user to do after reading a
page..
Make it easy for the user to reach your homepage from any other
page

Making a site that is cross-platform compatible:

The main factors you need to consider in platform compatibility
are the user's browser, screen resolution, color depth, and plug
ins.

Browser compatibility is easy - just test your site in various
browsers, and fix any incompatibilities. The same for screen
resolution - just be sure that you site looks good and is
easily navigated with any common screen resolution. Color depth
is also relatively simple. Just restrict your design to using
web safe colors.

Plug-ins can be a little more complicated. If at all possible,
try to use media that is compatible with most versions of a
plug in. For example, try not to use a flash movie that
requires the latest version of a flash player.

Making a site that is search engine friendly:

The biggest thing you can do to make your site friendly to the
search engines is to give it a good link structure. Be sure
that each page on your site is linked to from at least two
other pages with a plain text link. Image links are OK, but not
as good as optimized text links. Javascript and flash links are
very bad for search engine usability.

About The Author: Visit Web Design London for help getting a
great site design: http://www.datadial.net/