Good Web Design Tips

Learn the principles of good design before heading further down the road to creating your site.

Whether you have decided to hire a professional Web designer or use one of the template services mentioned in my

last column to create your site, good design is essential to running a successful business on the Web.

Google the term ''good Web design'' and you'll find myriad websites devoted to the topic with advice on how to create perfect Web pages. Web design is largely subjective. While many experts differ on what really makes good Web design, there are a few fundamentals most can agree on:

• Think before you design -- Create a blueprint of the site you want before you pay that Web designer you've just contracted or begin working with favorite templates you've found online. Sit down, get out a piece of paper and actually sketch what you want your site to look like. How would it function? What would your site's key pages look like? Where will your navigation bar be? What colors will you use? What content areas will be on your site? This is a valuable first step. Your sketch will serve as a road map and quick reference guide as you implement your design.
• Choose content carefully -- Whether your site will be used to sell products or not, the content on it is important. It has to be high-quality and informative, particularly if you are promoting yourself as an expert in a particular field. Don't let misspelled words, shoddy grammar and poor sentence structure be the reason you lose a reader or customer.
• Color your site with care -- People respond to color. Choose soothing earth tones, such as forest green and gray, for your design.
• Name your pages properly -- To optimize your site's pages, be sure to name the URLs for each page correctly. Don't use symbols and numbers, which aren't search-engine friendly. Instead, use the name of the page, which will rank your site much higher in search results. A good example of a properly named page is www.Miami Herald.com/business, which indicates it's the business page of the Miami Herald. A poorly named page would look something like this: www.miami herald.com/?54=27#8=617, which tells you nothing about the page and is hard for search engines to index the site. I'm guilty of this with www.Chick Centric.com, but I'm working to fix it.
  

Most services that allow you to design a site using a template will generate URLs for your pages that have letters and numbers, but a fair number of them allow you to rename your pages.

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