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Design Tips
Guidelines for Effective Web Design

We follow a set of guidelines derived from our experience as designers and users of the Web. Along with the aesthetic value of design, these guidelines make Web Sites more user friendly.


Logical - A Web site is a collection of pages or documents (HTML, ASP, images, applets, etc) linked to each other. If these documents are logically arranged and connected, then a visitor can easily navigate within a site. A poorly planned site structure can quickly turn off potential customers and visitors.

Layout - The layout (formatting and style) must be the best possible way of presenting the content. We design a Web site's layout with the following objectives in mind. Focus the viewers attention on your content and not on the style itself. Make the content easier to relate to. Maintain a sense of continuity throughout your Web site and yet make it look unique and appealing at a mere glance. To achieve these objectives, we use visual relief, meaningful spacing, color contrasts, fonts, and style sheets. top

Brief and Meaningful Text - Text should be kept precise and to the point. Most surfers will quickly skim through a page to find something of interest. Lengthy text that takes longer to read and download can damage your chances of connecting with the viewer. But content should not be eliminated just for brevity. That is why we generally provide links to more detailed explanations deeper into your Web site. top

Graphics - The cliché is true, a picture can often pack the impact of thousand words. The Web has a visually oriented culture and graphics are very popular. They can instantly create an impression in the viewers' mind. That is the reason a good Web site must have professional looking graphics. However for viewers who have turned off images in their browsers or are visually impaired, we use the ALT tag to provide stand-in descriptions of each image. top

Download Time - Limited bandwidths, low connection speeds, and low attention span of the public make download time extremely important. We use our understanding of different image formats to extract the minimum possible size. To help browsers display pages faster, we always include the height and width of images in HTML code. We streamline our HTML and script code to condense the download size of each page. In general, our pages (text, graphics, and code) rarely exceed 40kb. top

Clear Navigation - A clear navigation is the most important feature of all user friendly sites. A common mistake for designers is not to see through the eyes of a potential visitor. A new visitor who is not familiar with a Web site must be given a clear means of reaching its contents. A clear navigation is the best possible means of achieving that. top

Page Length and Scrolling - It is estimated that only 10% of surfers will completely scroll through a page. With a few exceptions, page length should be around 2 screens. For each lengthy page there should be links at the bottom so that viewers do not have to scroll all the way up to navigate to other pages. Even though some vertical scrolling cannot be avoided, we completely eliminate horizontal scrolling from all our page design. top

Screen Size - We design our pages to fit the smallest full screen size of 640 by 400 pixels and make your Web site useful to the widest number of users. top

Use of Technology and Browsers - There are great many browsers in use today which support technology in different ways. When we incorporate the latest technology such as JavaScript, DHTML, and Cascading Style Sheets, we make sure that they work in the majority of browsers in use (Internet Explorer and Netscape 4 and above). Every effect created using latest technology is also designed to 'degrade gracefully' on older browsers so that a page's content is still displayed properly. top

Error Free - We eliminate all errors: dead links, graphics that do not display properly, errors in HTML and scripts. We also remove grammatical and spelling errors from text content by filtering through a word processor and then manually proofreading the material. top