When you’re contemplating a new website design, it’s worth keeping a checklist handy to make sure you don’t miss anything important. An experienced website designer will almost certainly include all of these main web design elements, but it’s still worth running your own checklist so you can be sure you’re happy with your final web design.
page design
Your pages should be easy to navigate and have a clear call to action if you want people to contact you as a result of accessing them.
Plenty of white space (blank) makes pages easy on the eyes and helps make even long pieces of text less intimidating. Images can also break up your page layout and make it look interesting to casual visitors.
Page navigation should be intuitive and should be accessible whether or not users use a mouse to navigate. The Javascript page navigation may look nice, but it’s not necessarily easy to navigate.
Make sure your most important information is displayed “on the top half of the page,” 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 display fine on mobile devices, even if you haven’t specified a separate mobile version.
color
While this can be a personal choice, certain color combinations just clash.
As a general rule, dark text on a light background is easier to read than inverted (light on dark) text, so think carefully before specifying non-standard color combinations.
Photos
Flashing or constantly moving images can be distracting and detract from the main message of your site, so be careful if you choose to include that type of image. This includes the currently popular slideshows; if you’re going to use one, make sure it doesn’t scroll too fast.
Your designer should take care of the image sizes, but it’s worth checking that the images used are the correct size so they don’t take forever to download. This is an important consideration in website design 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 option to play them or not!
Also, do not require site visitors to download additional software just to view your video content. Make it available to everyone. Test your website on different computers to make sure this is the case: extras like Quick Time aren’t added by default in all browsers, and users are generally wary of any site that asks them to download software just to view it.
Flash
Don’t make your website entirely from Flash. Some online web design sites do this, but it takes longer to load than a normal web page and Google doesn’t index them properly, which reduces the chance of attracting visitors to your site.
don’t use frames
It’s really that simple. They’re almost never needed, they confuse search engines, and they’re usually bad news.
Validate your design
The more “correct” the HTML on your site, the better. There are page validation tools available that will tell you if your designer’s code is correct or not. If not, ask them to fix it.
keep trying
Don’t assume that once you’ve designed your website all is well. New versions of web browsers come out regularly. When this happens, check your website in the new browser to make sure nothing was broken in the process.