Design Tips

• One of the biggest problems I see on sites I visit is the unreal amount of time it takes for the site to load! This is the first tip any professional designer will give you. Limit your graphics, especially the animated ones! Limit the java scripts, and if you really just have to have music on your site, don't do it along with a lot of graphics. How many times have you gone to a website and got tired of waiting for it to load? You should realise that the vast majority of surfers will leave a slow loading site before he ever sees a thing that might make him want to wait for it to load. Graphics make a site visually interesting and nice, but no one wants to wait for a whole bunch of graphics to load, no matter how cool they are. If you use a lot of graphics, chances are people are not sticking around to see more of your site. And banners! People will join a caboodle of banner exchanges, and webrings, and put them all on the main page, along with java, music and a gazillion animated graphics. I have a top of the line computer now, with a cable modem, and have waited a long while for a site to load! If I had not been asked to see the site by a visitor to mine, I wouldn't have stayed past 2 minutes while waiting for things to start loading. What a nightmare. I am very patient, others are not. Make a seperate page for your webrings, your links, your personal stuff, your pics.... and use a little of the cool graphics available on each page, rather than all on one. Make your page fast loading, and people will stay in it and not mind clicking to see another page in your site if they know it will not take long to load. Trust me in this.
• Don't use light colored text on light colored backgrounds, and dark colored text on dark backgrounds. Make your text easy to read.
• And don't make your text large! It takes up a lot of space, and people have to keep scrolling to read, and their eyes get tired, plus, it looks like crap. On the other hand, don't make your text too small to read!
• Be careful when using backgrounds. Backgrounds are great, some are beautiful, but a wild background can make text hard to read..
• Content! Give your visitors something, not just some cool graphics. Make them want to stay, and make them want to come again.
• Don't use all caps! It is very irritating, and harder to read. Not to mention, it looks like crap.
• Check your spelling. Check your punctuation.
• When putting a picture of you or your bike or whatever on a main page, don't make it a huge slow loading picture. There are free online programs to use that will resize a picture for you, and even optimize it to make it lower in size. If you don't have a program, check my resources page for a few online programs. Make your picture a decent size, and if you want people to be able to see it much larger, link to the larger picture and give people that option.
• Do this; when you visit a site, and something about it irritates you, never do the same thing on your site. This is a pretty good rule of thumb.