How to make a good website (Sunday, September 28th, 2008)

Published by Craig in Design, Technology at 10:31 pm. Skip down to comments or read the others.

Over the years, I’ve made lots of mistakes with the way I’ve designed websites. Below, I’ve listed 10 of the top things that from my own personal experiences of using the Internet, and from my experiences of using websites.

  1. Absolutely, under no circumstances, use Microsoft Silverlight for anything on your website. Nobody uses it, and nobody has it installed. Just use Flash.
  2. Don’t be afraid of using white text on a black background, but make sure you make the extra effort to make it readable. Make the text slightly off-white instead of a pure white, and make the background slightly off-black. Increase the leading past what you’d use normally. And above all else, try and read it yourself. If you can’t read it, nobody else will.
  3. Test your website in as many browsers as you can, but make sure you test it in the main browsers; IE6, IE7, Firefox, Opera and Safari. If you’re a Mac user, don’t use that as an excuse for not testing it on a PC. Websites can look radically different between the two – especially text sizes.
  4. SEO is good to make your website more visible in the search engines, but don’t go so far as to optimise your website for the search engines more than your users. Don’t load your title tags with keywords – make them useful to your users.
  5. Don’t focus all your attention on your homepage, because most people will never see it. Users usually find your website through the search engines, so make sure all your interior pages are just as easy to use as your homepage.
  6. Also, make your homepage easy to use. If people are lost on your website, they’ll do one of two things: They’ll click the home button if they can find it, or they’ll leave. Make sure that if they decide to visit your homepage they don’t feel lost anymore.
  7. Keep content short and to the point.
  8. If your page looks like it has lots of content on it, people won’t read it. Make your content look easy to read.
  9. Look at bbc.co.uk. This is an example of a good website.
  10. Make your content useful to your users. If it isn’t useful, don’t have it on your website.

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