Best Practices for Website Design

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When consulting business, we're often asked for our best advice for website design. We've outlined a few items that are common to all business, regardless of size.

Website Fonts:

1. Normally we use a style sheet (CSS) and run a special font for best appearance, then a backup font and finally a basic cover-all font. That way if you reach a user whose PC doesn't have the "Special Font" installed then they see the backup font, and if they don't have the backup font...etc.
2. Your better off sticking with a simple, well-known font that is distributed with every OS sold on the market (Windows, Mac, Linux).
3. The most common fonts are: Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, sans-serif, Courier New, Courier, Monospace, Tahoma, etc.

Website Design:

1. Use a web safe color pallet.
2. Use a table-based code structure.
3. Don't use "Flash" for navigation (or any other plug-in for nav).
4. Keep the graphics compressed and don't make the base page (template) size over 75K or the site will be too cumbersome and slow by the time you finish adding content, pictures, logo's, sponsors, ads...etc.
5. Assemble content before you plan the navigation scheme, and use a flexible, include-type of navigation (plan on it changing often).
6. Don't get too attached to any one design, management has their own idea of what they want (they can't always articulate it), but you can count on the fact that they will want to change yours.

Best Advice:

1. Remember to focus on who your audience is and their typical capabilites. Don't over estimate!

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