Does a well designed web page really matter? Yes! We know it does and we are here to help guide you through some of the basic do's and don'ts of web design. It is very important that you set a good first impression with your website visitors or they may not return. Also poorly or inefficiently designed websites can be penalized with search engine ranking as well.

Though we feel the below basic recommendations are important, they are still just that - recommendations. Feel free to use them or not at your own discretion.

DO:

• Have a consistent look and feel in all your pages. Use a color scheme and layout that are clearly recognized across your site.
• Design your pages to load in less than 30 seconds on a dial up connection (150Kb maximum size, including pictures).
• Save the top of your page for your most important content. Remember: good content must flow to the top.
• Don’t use too many different fonts in one page. Also, avoid using small serif fonts (like Times Roman) as they are difficult to read from a computer screen. Verdana is the most web-friendly font, since it is wide, clean and easy to read.
• If a page is too long, break it into several pages and link to them. Your visitors should not have to scroll down a page forever to reach the bottom.
• Use a spell checker. Spelling mistakes are embarrassing and hurt credibility.
• Use more text than graphics, and minimize the use of Flash and JavaScript. Search engines tend to heavily favor text and crawl and index your site faster and with better ranking if these guidelines are followed.
• Design for the lowest common denominator. Design your website for small screens, few colors, and slow modems. Pages designed for large screens may annoy people with small ones.
  
• Use dark type and a light background. It's easier on the eyes. People also like to print the information on your website. Light type on a dark background will either print poorly or not at all.
• Keep photos on your homepage to a minimum and small. This will help get the visitor interested in what you’ve got to offer and hopefully get them in a mindset that will make them wait for additional slower pages.
• Use clickable images where possible. That means creating a ‘thumbnail’ for the page, and creating a link to the larger version of the picture. That way, if they aren’t interested in seeing the big picture, they don’t have to wait for it to load.
• Compress your image files. Nothing is more annoying to users than waiting for a 100k graphic to load when it should be only 20k instead. Graphics software can compress files so they take up less room on your disk, and therefore take less time to load into your visitors' browsers. GifBot is quick and easy, and a great alternative for those who do not know how to use a more complex program such as PhotoShop or Paint Shop.
• Check to ensure your pages have information, not just ads. Pages should be between 200 - 500 words in length.

• Don’t underline anything that is not a link.  
• Don't make website visitors with small screens scroll sideways to read a page. 
• Don't distract your visitors with blinking text, scrolling text, animated GIFs, or sound files. Though one or two may be considered acceptable, loading your webpage with these types of files does not produce a professional image.
• Don't let your site go stale. Ensure your content is up to date and fresh always. Out dated information or content unrelated to your site will leave your visitors with a negative feeling.
• Don't type more than a few words in ALL CAPS. It is hard on the eyes and may cause users to leave rather than try to read what you are trying to say.
• Don't forget the ALT text for images and hyperlinks. It is not only beneficial to the visitor, but the search engine index it as content and using ALT tags is considered HTML compliant.
• Don't publish your email address on your pages of your site. Spammers use Spambots to harvest email addresses from web pages. A spambot is a program designed to collect e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail. Publishing your address on your web pages will open you up to receive hundreds of spams per day and will quickly become out of control! Help limit spam by using the form builder instead for your users to contact you or give them a telephone number.