Over the next while, I will be compiling a list of little tips that can improve the appearance, visibility, and function of your website. Here are the first five:

Favicons - Now-a-days, mosts sites use favicons:

Favicons (or favorite icons) are a good way to “brand” your site. Especially with tabbed browsing and bookmark toolbars, they help to visually distinguish your site from others. A favicon is nothing more than a 16×16 pixel .ico file. You can make your own using your favorite graphic editing software or you can use one of the many free online favicon generators.

Tutorials to check out:
How To Create a Favicon (using Gimp) from publisheraid.com
How To Create A Favicon In Photoshop from photoshopsupport.com

Online favicon Generators:
Favicon.cc - www.favicon.cc
FavIcon Generator from dynamicdrive.com - http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
Favicon generator from degraeve.com - http://www.degraeve.com/favicon/

CSS Navigation Lists - In my opinion, site navigation should be written in HTML as a list – its just good structure. The use of lists make it possible for visitors to navigate your site if they are using a text-only browser or if their browser don’t support CSS. Plus, well-structured HTML is essential for web crawlers to index your site accurately. In this example from blendetta.com, you will see how the navigation structure stays intact with or without CSS support:

Since most of your visitors aren’t using text-only, non-CSS supporting browsers, you can make a big difference to your sites appearance by styling your navigation lists! As stated in my 10 Awesome Free Resources… article, “Listamatic is the place to go if you are looking for tutorials on CSS based navigation lists”. For a good example of how to make a list like the one seen on blendetta.com, check out Listamatic’s Bulleted Rollover List tutorial.

Get Rid of the Music - Let me restate that: don’t have music on your page that automatically plays when the page is loaded. A lot of people find it to be annoying. You don’t want people to leave your site over something silly like a music player.

Use PNG Images Whenever Possible - Let’s say that your web page has a blue background. You used JPEG images, also with blue backgrounds for your design. What happens when you decide to revise your page and change the background color? Yup. You’d have to change the background color of all of your images. Hopefully you still have the layered PSD file stored somewhere on your computer or you’d have to start over.

If you keep in mind that you may want to make some simple changes to your site one day (ie – change the background!), you should probably save your images as PNGs with transparent backgrounds. Displayed on different CSS styled background colors, here is a PNG of a cat that I drew in Photoshop many years ago:

All I had to do was change the background color of the page from #FF9900 to #990099 - I never had to edit the image. Whatever you do, don’t open that JPEG with the blue background in Photoshop and simply select and delete the background color - it leaves all of those ugly extra colored pixels behind!!

Don’t Junk it Up - It looks nice when a page has a minimal amount of buttons, banners and link images as long as they are well organized. I see way too many blogs with hundreds of link images, “latest visitor” type widgets, and other items that slow down and clutter the page. The content of the site should always be the main focus. All of the items that link to other pages should definitely be a secondary concern. Other things to avoid: adding too many colors, lots of scrolling text and excessive amounts animated anything. You don’t want your page to end up looking like HavenWorks.com!

Part two of the list will be coming soon! And as always - comments are welcomed.

Tags: Web Design, web design tips

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Lists, Resources, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.