This may be your first web page design, or perhaps you are an old hand. Either way, you will need to address a number of important issues to ensure that your web page design caters uniformly to all viewing needs. Here is a primer of essentials:

Web Page Navigation

Ever wonder why you let in viewers to your website in the first place? Well, the answer must be 'to explore your website'. If so indeed, your web page design ought to go easy on navigation. Proceed with a menu of links across the page at the top or down the left. Text links are always better. And yes, for a good web page design, the link pattern has to be consistent in all pages, no matter what the pages are about.

The Colors

If you are in for color background for your web page design, help yourself to some serious thinking. Not that color background is bad per se. Pastel shades do look nice, but if you consider that human eyes are more accustomed to white background (as in case of books), it will be all the more reason to do just that for your web page design.

The Links

Even if your main navigation links are trendy, ensure that other text links sport an easy look. In many a web page design, one fails to mark out text links from other content. This happens if you choose near-similar colors for both. The least you want in your web page design is to confuse your visitor with link anomaly. Another point worth attending to is denoting visited links with a distinct color. Nothing is more frustrating than visiting same page again and again.

Easy Reading

For any web page design, content is considered as bread-and-butter. Controlling text-size of content with styles is in vogue these days in many web page designs. Yet a common refrain among serious viewers is to allow them to decide the text size. This calls for ability to resize text as required.

Next on your list of good web page design must be to arrange your texts for easy reading. Let us remember that reading the screen is different from reading print. Attention on screen is brief. Opt therefore for a decent web page design that attends to specificities like bulleted lists, short paragraphs, subheads, highlighted keywords and suchlike.

Coming to fonts, numerous online tests have been conducted by usability experts. The ones that emerge as most legible and generally preferred are Verdana and Comic though other types such as Arial, Courier and Georgia also find acceptance in web page design.

Screen Resolution

Time now to explore screen resolution you would opt for your web page design. Despite perceptible shift to high screen resolutions, there are many viewers who still feel comfortable with lower resolution. 640x480 pixels may be passé, but not so are 800x600 pixels. If you are alive to this scenario, you will do well to span your web page design on percentage of screen size instead of fixing width in pixels.

If your preferred web page design is for high resolutions, you will find the headlines getting cluttered in small screens and the texts overlapping. The best option would be to work out a parity among various screen resolutions so that your web page design does not loose harmony.

Browser Compatibility

Not all browsers display your web page design in the same way. As of now, Internet Explorer 6 stands tall with about 60% of all users. Firefox comes next but lags IE6 by a wide margin at 25%. Since between them, the two manage an overwhelming 85% of acceptance, it may just be that your web page design compulsorily conforms to both, if not for others like Mozilla, Netscape and Opera, who collectively commands just about 5% of browser-reach.

Summing Up

Whatever your web page design be, remember a viewer takes only one-twentieth of a second to form an impression of a website [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10895934/]. Juxtapose that with F-shaped reading pattern of viewers [http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html], and you know your job is cut up to make a suitable web page design.

This article was posted on August 23, 2006

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