How to keep a web design user-friendly?
One of the most important things that you will need to do when you are designing a website is to make sure that it is user friendly. It is remarkable how many site designers fail to do this. If your site is not easy to use you will find that few people do use it. There are a few basic principles that you are going to want to follow to make sure that your site is user friendly.
The most important thing for having a user friendly website is to make sure that it is easy to navigate. This is especially true if you have a large site. If people have a hard time finding what they are looking for on your site they will get frustrated and leave and go to another site. In order to make sure that this doesn't happen you want to make sure that your site is laid out in a logical manner where things are where you would expect to find them. You also want an easy to use menu that includes sub menus if you have a lot of pages. You should also make sure that every page has a way to get back to the main menu and that is easy to find.
It is also important that you make sure that your site is easy to read. This means that you want to have dark text on a light background so there is good contrast. You also want to make sure that the text is not too small or too big. Generally you want to limit the length of paragraphs as well. When people are reading to content of a website they like to skim it rather read every word. You want to make this easy for them by making sure that there is lots of white space and the text is broken up.
It is not generally a good idea to add splash pages, or any thing else for that matter that slows down access to your page. A lot of web designers like to add these features to show off their design skills and because they think it makes the site look better. In reality it just irritates the visitor who in most cases has no interest and finds that it is just something that he has to wait for.
In order to keep your site user friendly for as many people as possible you are going to want to make sure that your site works properly in as many browsers as possible. There are all kinds of sites that look great in one browser but not in others. Doing this is going to severely limit the number of visitors you get since the people with the wrong browsers will not be able to use your site. The best thing to do is to keep your site simple so that it will have the best chance of working properly in as many browsers as possible.