Here are some tips I have gathered while making my website 1. Choose a design that loads fast. Use www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ to get an idea of how fast your web page loads 2. Use white space. White space provides elegance and gives your eye a breather. 3. Don't use color combinations which hard hard on the eye. Have you ever seen a website with a blue background and black writing? Ouch. It really hurts the eye. 4. Avoid using colors like yellow in bulk. Their brightness makes it difficult to view the webpage. 5. Do use pictures as they provide a website with a lively look. You can get free pictures for use from websites like http://www.istockphoto.com/ 6. Try something different from "blog design." They have become so common that they are losing grace. 7. Add a touch of gradients to your webpages if possible. Everyone just loves gradients. 8. If you know javascript, use it to scale your website to 800x600 and 1024X768 if you plan on building a fixed width design. 9. Don't be afraid to use borders. Sitepoint.com has used borders very stylishly. Borders are not bad it's just how you use them. 10. Avoid flash animations. They slow down a webpage and are hardly ever provide any good to a website. Most of the time they give a website a "kiddy look." 11. Use browsershots.org to see how your design looks in different browsers 12. Use a simple navigation. You don't want to confuse your visitors! 13. Ideally keep the navigation in places visitors would expect it to be. Imagine if a visitor left your website simply because they could not find the navigation bar! 14. To keep the reader engaged use article snippets in the right or left navigation bar. 15. You do not necessarily need a full blown logo. Simple logs like the one http://www.suite101.com/freelance_writers/ look very elegant. 16. Avoid pop ups! Hope these tips help!
istockphoto.com is a paid site, it does not provide free photos. royalty free and free to use are 2 different things!
oops. my bad. Sorry about that. I guess you could use flicker.com or search for "free pictures" or "public domain pictures" on google for free pictures. Thanks for correcting that.
I'll agree with most of what you've said, except for #10. Flash when done right is none of the things you've described it as and can be a huge asset to a site. If it weren't for the terrible SEO (and content-management) ramifications I would do all of my sites full-flash, but that is just personal taste based on what I'm good at and enjoy doing the most Another GREAT site for free stock photos: http://SXC.hu Also, a GREAT site for helping you to choose a color scheme: http://colourlovers.com Thanks for the post, -P
It's not just the design, but also how you code (and optimize the images on) it that makes a difference. You can have a graphics rich Web site that can load quickly even on dialup if you reduce the image size without sacrificing quality and group various image states together (very useful for image rollovers with CSS) - or even menu elements (if done properly, though this does involve some advanced CSS). That's an no-brainer, but don't use too much that your page looks barren either. It may be fine for a home page (to help it stand out from the rest of the site - which can provide a point of focus for site visitors), but it's not appropriate for every page on the site (this isn't a license to cram as much as you can onto each page either - as with all things, moderation is the key). These have more to do with usability and accessibilitly than good design principles, though design does play a role as well. Don't select colors that contrast with each other so much that when they're used in a foreground and background they actually compete against each other for dominance. An example (to cite "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" by Jason Beaird) of this would be orange text on a blue background. As others have said, iStockPhoto is a paid image site, not a free one. If you want to use free (and royalty free) images in your Web site, go to http://sxc.hu instead (and read up on the terms of use for each image, as they do vary). Also remember, that just because an image is available online, YOU DO NOT AUTOMATICALLY HAVE PERMISSION TO USE IT. Those images are copyrighted by the person who created them (unless they either transferred the rights to a third party or released them to the public domain). If you find an image you want to use, always ask for permisison to use it beforehand. Otherwise you might find yourself in a bunch of hot water, such as all the Web designers who are being hounded by Getty Images and Corbis for copyright infringement (though the methods they're using to collect "settlements" from the infringers are illegal as well). Blog designs are common on personal sites, but yeah, I agree with you. Come up with your own design. If you know how to create a WordPress theme (for example), you can port your own static HTML or .psd design into it. Another thing that's abused by designers. If your site's design doesn't need gradients, don't use them. If they'll add a nice touch, go ahead and use them, but do so sparingly, and make them blend in with the overall design. You don't need JavaScript to do this. You can use the min-width and max-width properties in CSS to achieve this effect. Also, constrained width liquid/elastic layouts (those that will expand to any reasonable dimension and will not break the layout when the text is resized by the user) are preferable anyway. This has more to do with Web usability than actual design. Interesting that you mentioned SitePoint's use of borders (and not because I'm a Mentor on the Design Team there). SitePoint is not the only site to use borders effectively. There are hundreds of thousands of sites that use them effectively, and there are also hundreds of thousands of sites that use them poorly. Flash animations in and of themselves are not bad if they're used to enhance the experience on a Web site. Designing your whole site in Flash however is a disaster waiting to happen. When used appropriately (like for playing multimedia files - YouTube is a good example), they can provide a rich user experience, but when abused, they won't be anywhere nearly as effective, and will be seen more as a hindrance than an enhancement. Actually, if you're on Windows, use the latest version of Internet Explorer that you can (if you're on XP or Vista, this will be IE 7, anything older it'll be IE 6), and grab the Internet Explorer standalones. You'll have to learn how to modify (read: hack) the Windows Registry, but it can be done. Mac users can use Boot Camp (if they have an Intel-based Mac) and Parallels Workstation to run a virtual copy of Windows on their Mac (not to mention Linux, which I'll cover later), and can thus use the same software that Windows users can. Linux users can get IE onto their systems (as much as it'll break Stallman's twisted black heart - which is reason enough to do it) by downloading Internet Explorer for Linux. Once you have Internet Explorer on your system, go to www.getfirefox.com www.opera.com/download and www.apple.com/safari and download the latest versions of those browsers. Note that some versions of Linux (SUSE, if I remember correctly) don't use the newer Firefox builds, preferring forks of the 1.0.3 build due to licensing issues between the OS developers and the Mozilla Corporation. Safari 3 for Windows is currently a beta and should be used to test your own work, not general Web surfing. Any problems with the browser should be reported to the developers so they can be fixed, rather than trying to hack around them yourself. Another thing to keep in mind with Safari is to NOT install Bonjour or the other crapware that the browser will try to force feed down your throat like a farmer would stuff a duck full of food so that when it comes time to slaughter it, the liver can be used for fois gois. I agree with this. Also make sure you don't use JavaScript for your menu, since it won't be accessible to people who don't have it enabled on their browsers, supported (like with Lynx, screen readers and mobile devices such as cell phones) by their user agent, or even the search engines. Use an unordered list instead. If you need to use a dropdown menu, use a menu such as the Sons of Suckerfish menu instead. Which is usually directly below the header (across the top), on the left side, or on the right side. Just whatever you do, keep it as close to the header as possible. This may work with content sites, but not so much with ecommerce sites. People go to ecommerce sites to buy (and shop around), not to read articles. The only thing that would even come close to an article that I'd put on an ecommerce site would be a product summary. And sometimes fullblown logos are more appropriate than minimalist ones. Again, it all depends on the particular site's design. No, just avoid popups that don't enhance the usability of a Web site. Some popups, such as those that provide additional, relevant information, are appropriate. Others, such as the dreaded pop up ad, should be avoided like the plague.
Totally agree with number 6, I think you can have a blog design, but make it "not suck" lol like http://veerle.duoh.com/
There are many serious business websites with flash animation. Flash never gives a website a "kiddy look" if it's done professionaly.
Yes you are right that is why I used the words "Most of the time" and "hardly." But thanks for clearing that up for the readers!