How To Decide An Appropriate Layout For Your Website

Layout is a combination of content and image positioning, selecting colors, fonts and so forth. The print or electronic media, a good layout is crucial to the look and feel of the medium. Blame it on the huge number of promotional activities the consumers are exposed to, it is only human of them to be visually selective about what they see and like. Basically, each and every consumer is more or less guided by the atheistic sense. Hence, they tend to pay attention to those campaigns that are visually appealing. As far as the website layout goes, it is even more challenging to impress visitors as they tend to spend a couple of seconds to judge if the site is worth-visiting from the very first look of it.

Points to consider while designing the website layout

Keep It Simple

Simple website layout is not only user-friendly, but also search engine compatible. Complex navigational links built out of complex scripts or images are not properly viewed in different browsers. Further, search engine crawler finds it tough to crawl your site links if it involves poor navigations. Minimize the bulky images that take for eternity to load. Also, use small icons to attract visitors’ attention.

Read Between The Lines

You should use a standard font size to enable the visitors read the content with ease. If you are using style then you can keep the font size between 11 to 12 pixels. The font face should be professional –Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-serif are some of the most commonly used font faces. However, you should avoid using fancy fonts such as Comic Sans unless the website is personal. Further, ensure that the lines are properly spaced out to avoid clumsiness. Keeping the space around 12 pixels will help.

For Your Eyes Only

Use web-safe colors that are pleasing to eyes. Using loud colors with an outlandish combination ensures the visitors vanish in no time. The choice of colors is crucial and reflects the image of your site. As a webmaster or designer you might go with your own choice; however, it is much wiser to request others for their feedbacks on the same before making your site live.

Size Does Matter

Keep track of the dimension of the webpages. Limit the width and height of the webpages in such a way that the most vital part of the content lies within the top 600 x 600 viewable area without scrolling. If you want to avoid a horizontal scrollbar, set the page layout to expand and shrink with changes in browser window size. This often interferes with the image and text positions relative to each other and throws the layout structure out of sync. Ideally, the best practice is to limit the width by placing a table with a fixed width of 750 or 775 pixels. Make sure the page height is not more than 4 scroll lengths. Try to limit the content of the page; however, if more content is required then move it to the new webpage offering a navigation link to the next page and a link back from the next page. It not only facilitates greater page views but also allows you do add more advertising space.

World Wide Wait!!!

Typically, a webpage is defined by the total size of the text and the number of images and supporting files including java scripts, flash etc. that are downloadable from the server. Page size is critical from the loading standpoint as high volume of website requires high bandwidth net speed to load faster. Research says that most visitors leave sites that take longer than 8seconds to load. It should be ensured that the volume of webpages should be kept to minimum so that they download faster from the server. This is because most people net users around the world use slow modem of 56k to access the internet. Successful websites such as Google and Yahoo! do not have very high volume pages or too many images making their sites load faster. There is a trade-off between making your webpages look nicer by using graphics and making it load faster as well. Ensure that the volume of the cover page is below 35k. However, this may not be feasible for the e-commerce sites as they have to present multiple product images.

Maneet Puri

Web Developer India