When you are contemplating a new website design it's worth having a checklist to hand to ensure that you don't miss anything important. An experienced website designer will almost certainly include all these major web design elements but it's still worth running your own checklist so that you can be sure you're happy with your final web design.
Page layout
Your pages should be easy to navigate and should have a clear call to action if you want people to contact you as a result of landing on them.
Lots of white (blank) space makes pages easy on the eye and helps to make even long chunks of text less intimidating. Images can also break up the page design and make it look interesting for casual visitors.
The page navigation should be intuitive and should be accessible whether or not users are using a mouse to navigate. Javascript page navigation can look nice but isn't necessarily easy to navigate.
Make sure that your most important information is shown "above the fold", before people have to scroll down to read it.
Browser compatibility
Your website design should look good regardless of the browser your visitor is using. Not just in Internet Explorer!
It should also show nicely on mobile devices, even if you haven't specified a separate mobile-friendly version.
Colour
Whilst this can be a personal choice, certain colour combinations just jar.
As a general rule, dark text on a light background is easier to read than reversed out text (light on dark) so think carefully before specifying non-standard colour combinations.
Images
Flashing or constantly moving images can be distracting and may detract from your main site message so be careful if you decide to include that kind of image. This includes the currently popular slide shows - if you're going to use one, make sure that it doesn't scroll through too fast.
Your website designer should take care of image sizes but it's worth checking that any images used are correctly resized so that they don't take forever to download. This is an important website design consideration even in these days of fast broadband connections.
Multimedia
Don't play an audio or video file as soon as someone lands on your website. Give your site visitors the choice as to whether or not these get played!
Also don't require site visitors to download extra software just to view your video content. Make it available to everyone. Test your website on different computers to make sure that this is the case - extras like Quick Time aren't added by default on all browsers and users are usually wary of any site that asks them to download software just to view the site.
Flash
Don't make your website totally from Flash. Some online web design sites do this but it takes longer to load than a regular web page and isn't properly indexed by Google, lessening your chance of getting visitors to your site.
Don't use frames
It really is that simple. They're almost never necessary, confuse search engines and are generally bad news.
Validate your design
The more "correct" your site's HTML is, the better. There are page validation tools available which will tell you whether your designer's code is correct or not. If it isn't, get them to fix it.
Keep testing
Don't assume that once you've designed your website everything is fine. New versions of web browsers come out on a regular basis. When this happens, check your website design in the new browser to ensure that nothing has broken in the process.
Page layout
Your pages should be easy to navigate and should have a clear call to action if you want people to contact you as a result of landing on them.
Lots of white (blank) space makes pages easy on the eye and helps to make even long chunks of text less intimidating. Images can also break up the page design and make it look interesting for casual visitors.
The page navigation should be intuitive and should be accessible whether or not users are using a mouse to navigate. Javascript page navigation can look nice but isn't necessarily easy to navigate.
Make sure that your most important information is shown "above the fold", before people have to scroll down to read it.
Browser compatibility
Your website design should look good regardless of the browser your visitor is using. Not just in Internet Explorer!
It should also show nicely on mobile devices, even if you haven't specified a separate mobile-friendly version.
Colour
Whilst this can be a personal choice, certain colour combinations just jar.
As a general rule, dark text on a light background is easier to read than reversed out text (light on dark) so think carefully before specifying non-standard colour combinations.
Images
Flashing or constantly moving images can be distracting and may detract from your main site message so be careful if you decide to include that kind of image. This includes the currently popular slide shows - if you're going to use one, make sure that it doesn't scroll through too fast.
Your website designer should take care of image sizes but it's worth checking that any images used are correctly resized so that they don't take forever to download. This is an important website design consideration even in these days of fast broadband connections.
Multimedia
Don't play an audio or video file as soon as someone lands on your website. Give your site visitors the choice as to whether or not these get played!
Also don't require site visitors to download extra software just to view your video content. Make it available to everyone. Test your website on different computers to make sure that this is the case - extras like Quick Time aren't added by default on all browsers and users are usually wary of any site that asks them to download software just to view the site.
Flash
Don't make your website totally from Flash. Some online web design sites do this but it takes longer to load than a regular web page and isn't properly indexed by Google, lessening your chance of getting visitors to your site.
Don't use frames
It really is that simple. They're almost never necessary, confuse search engines and are generally bad news.
Validate your design
The more "correct" your site's HTML is, the better. There are page validation tools available which will tell you whether your designer's code is correct or not. If it isn't, get them to fix it.
Keep testing
Don't assume that once you've designed your website everything is fine. New versions of web browsers come out on a regular basis. When this happens, check your website design in the new browser to ensure that nothing has broken in the process.