Layout
Many designers will begin by cutting their page into sections. This usually consists of these basic elements:
- A top banner for the site/company name and logo.
- A menu just under the top banner, or down the left side of the page.
- The middle is obviously for your main content.
- A section down the right side, if any supplementary information is needed.
- A strip accross the bottom for any legal talk or email link you want to include.
If your site has many levels of depth, a cookie crumb trail is a good idea to help your visitors get back to where they were if they need to. This is a line, usually under the top banner, that tells you where you are in the site, and contains links to go back.
Here is an example of a cookie crumb trail:
Home / Page from home / You are here
Ads, if you have any, should go across the very top, down the right, or across the bottom. It's a good idea to stick to those. Putting ads in the middle of your content is a bad idea as it makes reading awkward. If an ad cuts across your content, users may think there is no more content and stop reading without scrolling below the ad. Ads down the left, as they are on this site, are appropriate if they don't take away from any content you may have there, or if it's the only content there. Use your judgement.
Put things where they are expected to be. I saw one site where the first menu item on their menu was a link to an outside site with no indication that it was. This was certainly unexpected and if I wasn't reviewing the site, I probably would not have gone back.
Along the same lines, keep your layout the same for every page. Menus and banners should stay in the same position across pages. The only thing that should change is your content, and possibly navigation links if moving to a different section of the site. Moving to a different page in your site should not involve a learning curve.
Design
Frames are very often looked down upon. There are very few instances where they are useful at all. They often create bugs where outside sites open inside a smaller frame. Also, since every page in a framed site shows the same address in the address bar, it is impossible to link directly to a page other than the main without it looking right.
Somewhere on every page should be a link to your main page, whether it's in your menu, or the logo at the top of the page. This is useful when users get to a lower level page in your site through a search engine. Having that link will allow them to get to the home page of your site with little effort to find out what you're all about.
Never use flashing anything; not pictures and certainly not text. Strobe-like flashing, apart from being horribly annoying and unecessary, can actually trigger epileptic seizures, even in people who have never had seizures before.
As a last note, try to keep as much text out of images as possible. While you can get cool fonts that your users probably don't have into images, search engines won't be able to pick up any of that text. If you do need to put text into an image make sure you set the 'alt' attribute of the 'img' tag. Search engines will pick up on that.
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