We are always consulted by various clients on effective web designs and web design techniques. While we always try to achieve the best given the circumstances we are often required to change elements in order to ensure that client’s expectations are being met. At times clients keep on asking us what we do as far as design is concerned – after all an effective web design is just not about creating a design screen and it involves a lot of things.

While creating a successful web design these are the following aspects we look at and adhere to, by adhering to these design principles, we not only ensure a great looking qualitative design but also have an advantage over the competition.

1.       Keep it simple.
Despite the complexities in the design and the functional layouts, we recommend and tend to keep the design simple. Clean, uncluttered with too many design elements just tend to confuse the users and is not recommended. This way it proves to be an effective presence for all those users visiting your site.

2.       Fast loading pages.
This is the most important aspect of an effective web design. You could have us design a terrific web page, however if it takes too much of time to load – users would not like it. Consider yourself – do you really wait for more than 2 mins for a website to load? It is the same with others. The key is to have optimized pages that have less computing in terms of programming, optimized graphics and are fast loading.

3.       W3C Validation
Make no mistake, this is not about browser compatibility. If it looks right, its done right! By far this is the most common misconception we have seen with most of the web developers, designers and web development companies. W3C validation is one of the most important processes in building an effective website.

4.       User friendly navigation
Ideally the navigation should be made available to the users effectively on the web pages in such a fashion that the visitors would want to go through all aspects of your website. To ensure this happens – we recommend the navigation on the top because that’s the first place where the visitor looks for links. Alternatively we also recommend an additional navigation element on the footer on every page and either on the left side, so to say the navigation is always available to the users even while they have scrolled down. The idea here is to link as many pages as possible through the single page to ensure effectiveness throughout.

5.       Browser compatibility
What is the point of having a great website if it does not work well with multiple browsers? With an active and ongoing war of browsers between Microsoft and Mozilla – one cannot be too loose about browser compatibility. Apart from these two there are various other browsers such as Google chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and countless others. Now that’s a lot of work to ensure browser compatibility with all of them. What we consider as a base rule is to ensure compatibility with the most popular browsers such as IE7, IE8, FireFox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. These browsers themselves constitute 84.3% of the market share. This gives us a maximum reach towards the users.

6.       All resolutions
With the thrust and advancement of computing on a daily basis – computers these days come with different models and makes of monitors that provide all kinds of resolution. Gone are those days of default 640 by 480 px OR 800 by 600 px. While the upward resolutions keep on getting higher it becomes increasingly difficult to have your design target all the resolutions. The solution here is to ensure that the web page design is created effectively in such a fashion that it targets or tries to target all resolutions. The best way to achieve this is to design the webpage and utilize objects in terms of percentages and not pixels like most of the web designers do. Extensive use of CSS by creating liquid layouts that expand or contract as per monitor resolution is very vital to ensure success through out.

7.       Typography
Every effective design needs to be supplemented by correct and effective usage of fonts. It is advised that the fonts in use should be readable and effective and most importantly web compliant. If the font used in the design is just not available on the visitor then the website will use the default font which makes the design look worse. The idea is to use the most common and professional web compliant fonts use as Arial, verdana, times new roman, Trebuchet MS. We always ensure to use these web compliant fonts to avoid problems as far as the look is concerned.

8.       Minimum usage of Imagery
While some tend to disagree we feel that this is the best way to achieve an effective web design that not just loads up fast but is optimized for various browsers. The logic is to take advantage of CSS for creating buttons, navigation and various other elements where normally images are used.

9.       Minimum usage of tables
We avoid and recommend others to use complex table structures that consume most of the load time. Similar result can be achieved with effective usage of DIV’s and LI – UL pair tags. Tableless designs are pretty fast to load up and are very effective.

10.   Broken links
Have you come to scenario where you went up to a site and clicked on a link just to have a 404 page coming on the screen? Its quite irritating for the visitors to get these. So as a base rule – ensure all links are checked before the site is uploaded. One could easily check those using any editor software. At Agile Technosys we tend to follow this stringently and normally use any of the online tools available such as Net Mechanic or Web CEO to check for broken links on the site.

11.   Sitemap
Very important – often neglected. Its very important to have a sitemap for the site which helps the visitors to find what they need. Also while search engine spiders try to index the site – it is also very vital to have the sitemaps in XML format as a supportive to be uploaded on your root folder.

These are some of the techniques adhered to by Agile Technosys to ensure an effective web design that is graphically enticing, optimized and fast loading which keeps the visitors happy.