Common Errors Made By The Layout Designers

Layout is very important in website design. Layout should be appealing so that visitors are eager to come back.
Following are the mistakes which makes the website unpopular.

1- Simplicity:

A simple website layout should not be complex meaning that layout should be user friendly. Some time designers create complex

navigational links using complex scripts or images that may not be viewable correctly in different browsers, that is why

search engines are unable to index the site properly. They use the bulky images which takes long to load. They are not using

small icons so their visitors are attracted.



2- Readable font size and face:

Standard font size is of 11 or 12 pixels if using styles so that visitors can read the content easily. But some designers do

not use this type of font size. They use fancy fonts like Comic Sans which suits only on personal website only.



3- Web safe eye pleasing colors:

Designers are encouraged to stick to these 216 "web-safe" colors in their websites; however, 8-bit color displays were much

more common when the 216-color palette was developed than they are now. Every webmaster or designer wants the color

combination that he/she likes best. But these designers do not use eye pleasing colors. Use of web safe colors is very less

in their sites.



4- Webpage Dimensions:
Keeping track of dimensions of a web page is an important aspect of layout. Providing a navigational link to the next page

and a link back from the second page.This will also increase our web site's page views (adding more advertising space).They

neglect this point.

Page height should note be more than 4 scroll lengths; they do not limit the content, if content increases than it should be

moved to new page. Horizontal scrollbar should be avoided but they cannot avoid it. Their content looks clumsy because they

do not use appropriate spacing between lines.



5-Limit File Size:
Webpage size is defined by the total size of text, images and supporting files that is downloaded from the server to view a

webpage. There is a tradeoff between making our webpage look nicer with lots of graphics and making it faster to load. Most

of the population on the internet use a slow 56K modem to access the internet. They cannot understand this trade off. The

rough target for page size should be below 35K for at least the cover page but they do not consider this point .It is usually

observed a visitor will leave the site if the loading time is more than 8 secs.





Common tricks missed by them

They do not reduce the size of individual html pages by extracting javascript code and styles from within the html

page to external .js and .css files by creating the link from each html page to these external files.

When the number of web pages increase, the complexity of keeping them up-to-date also increases tremendously that

is why server side include(SSI) is used for centralizing common content ,but they miss this point.

If we look at media sites like msn.com they use dark background with lighter fonts in order to create suitable

setting. Background should be used which creates a contrast to the font colors and graphics, but they fail to use this

strategy.

Link trading and link checker tools are used to maintain and regularly update the website but some of the web

developers fail to understand this point.