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How to Design A Web Page Tips
A Riveting yet Revealing Web
Design Tutorial
aka Web Design for Dummies
These riveting "How to Design a Web
Page Tips" along with our top secret and revealing web design
tutorial (aka Web Design for Dummies) will teach you how to design a
web page that knocks the socks off your visitors.
It's all in how well you K.I.S.S.
That's the secret. . .
It's the simple yet essential key for how to design a web page that
earns top ranking on the search engines.
"Why?", you might ask.
Well, all you need to do is K.I.S.S.
like this. . .
See?
How hard is that?
All of the design a web page tips and tricks you'll find in this
article follow the Golden Rule
of
Website Design: "make reading
or
viewing enjoyable."
The Golden
Rule is easiest to understand by looking at websites that
don't follow it. You've almost certainly stumbled upon websites that
assaulted your eyes or you can't figure out how to navigate to the next
page.
It's as if the layout artist read a website design tutorial without
learning anything about good design. (They should be using the
design a web page tips revealed here along with giving it a good,
hearty K.I.S.S., right?)
For most sites, the best layout you can use
is a web design for
dummies. One that is intuitive, clean and simple so
even a pre-schooler can figure it out.
Let me explain why.
Why "Dummies" Make Better Web Page Designs
The Web is not an art contest, although many website designers kill
themselves treating it that way. Consider the primary purpose of your
website—is it to provide information, sell stuff, attract readers, or
look pretty?
Almost everyone wants sales or readers, yet how many
people spend more time tweaking their design than they do making sales
or writing articles?
This is why this web design tutorial (aka web design for dummies)
reveals the best approach to design a web page that anyone
building a website should consider.
I'll confess that I used to be one of the people who spent dozens or
even hundreds of hours tweaking website designs. I even got the
occasional complement. But then I discovered there are just a few
tricks you need to know to make a good, hard-working website design
that will do its job without taking up all of your time.
In order of importance, the
best design a web page tips and tricks are:
In a web design tutorial you may learn how to use different styles for
different Web browsers and different devices (such as cell phones and
tablets)—but managing multiple styles and designs eats up your time and
keeps you from the primary purpose of your website.
Why do people create different designs for different devices? Mainly
because they have a fancy design.
If you want a design for your website
that will work equally as well on a 30-inch computer monitor and a tiny
cell phone display, you have to keep things simple.
Very simple.
But
that's ok, because as any expert will tell you. . .
It's all in the K.I.S.S.!
(Keep It Short and Simple)
The number one rule of web design for dummies (and pros) is to keep
things as simple as possible.
It's the K.I.S.S. rule of site design.
Truly. It is. There just isn't any better rule or other
design a web page tips that can come close to a simple K.I.S.S.
This isn't just to cut down on work for you—although that's a nice
benefit—but because the Web was initially designed by experts who made
the default settings good for the number one thing most people did on
the Internet before YouTube: read web pages.
If you don't believe me, go into your Web browser settings and turn of
the Cascading Style Sheet -otherwise known as CSS- for this article.
Go
ahead, do it right now.
I bet you'll find the article easy to read.
(Though without the style sheet, the navigation may look a bit funky.)
Hundreds of years of page design experts working on books have
conclusively determined that black text on white background in a
medium-sized font is the easiest to read layout design possible.
Anything more than that may make your website look more attractive—but
it will make reading more difficult.
Remember the purpose of your design: more sales or more readers—a hard
to read website will scare off both groups.
Stop Saving Virtual Trees!
You've spent all night writing a giant blog post for your website, and
now you want the world to know how much work you put into it.
So what
do you do?
You choose a tiny font size that allows readers to see
hundreds of words at a time. But by doing so, you've committed one of
the most common mistakes in
website design.
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Golden
Rule
- Most people on the Web don't want to read long posts,
so showing
them hundreds of words at once will scare them off. They won't read
your article.
- Reading a tiny font size is hard even for those of us
with good
eyesight. Making your article hard to read reduces the number of people
who will read it. (And don't tell me people can just increase the font
size—half the people on the Web don't use that feature, and the other
half either don't know how to use it or know it ruins the designs of
most websites, which is another reason to keep your design simple.)
- Small font sizes mean there's less space for
advertisements on your
website. Although that's not the usual concern mentioned in the typical
web design tutorial, it is an important consideration to most website
owners. My favorite font size is 16 points. Most people think 16
pt is too big
for their website, but anyone who visits someone else's site in 16 pt
will find it's just perfect for reading. If it's great for other
people, it's probably great for you too.
My
Favorite CSS Option
Unfortunately, most text-based websites look horrible on wide screen
computer monitors. The text stretches across the screen from one side
to the next, making paragraphs look like never-ending sentences.
If you've been reading about web design for dummies, you may think you
know the solution—the CSS width option. But specifying a width to fix
pages on wide screen monitors will break them on narrow cell phone
displays.
Luckily, there's a compromise option: max-width.
The CSS width option forces an object or a div to a specific size, but
the max-width option only prevents it from growing any larger than its
specified size.
So, for example, I often specify a max-width of 800
pixels (px) for blocks of text.
On a wide screen monitor, my text block will be 800 pixels wide and no
wider. On a mobile phone, my text block will fill the screen so the
reader doesn't need to scroll back and forth to read a paragraph.
A Short List (but very important) of Reminders of the
Best (and very simple) Design a Web Page Tips:
- Black text on a white background with a
medium-to-large font size
(16 points) is the easiest layout to read. Using anything else will
cost you readers.
- Use the same website design for all
devices—computers, tablets, cell
phones, and printers.
- Write the smallest amount of code on each web page to
ensure that
your site loads quickly, is a cinch to navigate and, above all, easy to
read—any other design a web page tips will be superfluous.
The success of your website can all be measured in the magical powers
of how much and how well you K.I.S.S.
And Don't You Dare Forget about Bits and Bytes!
They always have lots of design a web page tips to share as well as ton
of other secrets that will help you build the most successful and
profitable website
imaginable. . .
Don't miss a thing. . .
 
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