Web Design and Graphics

Website navigation is the most important aspect to consider while designing a website. The primary aim for effective navigation is get your visitors to stay in your site and also for visitors to easily find what they are looking for easily and quickly. Designing effective navigation can also entice your visitors to try out the other things you offer on your site. In this article we will look at some of the basic guidelines you need to follow while designing the navigation of a website.

Effective Navigation Guidelines

While designing the navigation for your site keep the following points in mind:

• Organized Links
  Make sure your links are well organized according to the order of importance. Visitors should be easily able to find what they are looking for under different categories.
  E.g. All our main links are found on the top i.e. our services, products,portfolio, resources etc.Other interesting links are found on the right of the page. These are common and consistent throughout the site.
  Finally if the web page belongs to a guide E.g web design guide you will find the related links below the right menu and also at the bottom of the page.

  Note: Related links are very important as visitors coming to a particular page will probably be interested in more information you have under the same topic.

• Clear and Prominent
  Once you have decided on your navigation links, you need to think of the best place to put them. Navigation should be clear and consistent. Try to design your navigation on the top or on the left as these are the first places our eyes go to. Also locate the primary links high enough on the page so that they are visible without scrolling. Navigation images should be seamlessly integrated into the site design. Avoid putting navigation links at the bottom of the page as visitors will need to scroll right down to see the links. If you like you could put the important links at the top AND bottom of the page just to make sure your visitors don’t miss the link.
• Consistent
  Navigation should be clear and consistent. The important links of your website should be on every page, in the same location, and in the same sequence. Don’t confuse your visitors by putting your navigation links in different places in different pages.
• Easy to understand
  Make your links easy to understand and to the point. Usually you won’t have enough place to have long links so make use of the space wisely. Visitors need to know where they will go on clicking on a particular link, so make sure your links are understandable or nobody is going to click on your links, which will defeat the purpose of designing a good navigation system.
• DHTML Menus
  If you have a large number of links under categories and sub-categories you could use navigation menus to organize your links. There are many cut ‘n’ paste scripts available on the Net that you could use to create great navigation systems.

Keeping these basic points in mind you can go ahead and design an effective navigation system for your site. Take a look at other sites to get some ideas on good navigation techniques! Another good idea would be to use eye-catching visuals and small chunks of information to draw visitors to click on a link.

Instead of designing graphic intensive web sites that take ages to load, you can use HTML tables creatively to get a professional looking web page that loads super fast. This article discusses many useful table tips and tricks on designing a great web page. Live examples and cut ‘n’ paste code are also provided for you to try out some great designs.

Tips on using Tables

• Always give the width for each of the cells in a table. Make sure that the total of the cells in a row adds up to the table width. This will avoid many complications.
• Try not to merge or break apart cells within a table. This again causes all kinds of problems.
• When using widths or heights that are less than 10 pixels insert a shim or a transparent gif (1x 1 pixel). If you use Fireworks you will find a shim in your Fireworks file, or you can just export a 1x 1 transparent image and call it a shim. This trick is mainly for a table to work in a Netscape browser.
• Netscape cannot understand height in percentages, so if you ever need to give a height for your tables, make sure it is in terms of pixels.

Let’s try out some cool designs using only tables

The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load. Try out our tips to build a great looking web site that also loads fast.

1. Minimize the use of images - The key to a fast loading web site is to minimize the use of images. Images do enhance a page but don’t make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Notice the popular sites like Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Amazon etc., they have very few images because the load time is more important. Very often simple designs are the best.
2. Optimize images for the web - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image. You can also use online tools like Gif Wizard to optimize your images or to get a recommendation on how to cut down the size of an image.
3. Use Tables creatively - You can get some great looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like. Check out our homepage and our menus to see how we have used tables in our site.
4. Cut down the use of animated gifs - Don’t use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor’s attention to a particular section of your site.
5. Design simple icons - Instead of using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor.

1. Use background images instead of big images whenever possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small. The code will look like this : <tr background=”/images/header_backgroud.gif” width=”100%”>
2. Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.
   Rollover the text on the right menu to see how we have used CSS Styles to get a simple but nice text effect.
3. Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don’t make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.
4. Design most of your site in HTML - As much as possible try to design your site using HTML. You can create great designs by just using HTML code. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc.
5. Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful. We kept using it to improve our site till we got a report that said good loading time!

We learnt these tips while building our web site. We’ve enjoyed sharing them with you and hope that you found them