When Enough is Enough

Having a snazzy, busy web site is good. To a point. Beyond that you'll find that several factors come into play that do nothing to support the site, but do detract from it.

Visually, you can get a page to be so full, and so busy, that the reader won't find what they are supposed to find. When your users come along and don't immediately find what they came for ... they click out and go to the next site. People are very impatient.

Too many graphics make the size of the web page large and in turn it will load very slowly. This is a major problem as your user will become bored waiting for the page to load and will do the dreaded "back" click and go on to the next web site. You can lose your visitor before they even see your site!

Beware of animations. You really don't want your page to look like a Christmas tree, blinking on and off, changing constantly, moving around. This may be pretty kewel to your friends when you set up that very first page of yours with huggy bears all over it and hearts and kisses. When you arrive back on terra firma, take another look and get rid of all that blinky, flashy stuff and create a nice looking well balanced page.

Use only graphics and photos that are relevant to your site. Don't use that beautiful sunset photo you have simply because it is beautiful. Use only graphics that relate, to the subject and content of your site. Think back a few pages where we talked of images. I placed a photo of a painting to demonstrate images. That image has absolutely nothing to do with the page at all. If it weren't for the fact that I mentioned that I used a random image, you'd wonder why it was there.

Find a nice midway point where graphics and text balance each other. The blank areas on a page are called "white space". White space is important, it separates sections and thoughts that are on your site and generally gives it a more airy and neat appearance. Too much text and graphics do nothing but clutter the screen. White space is "uncluttered".

Space is used in this eBook between the navigation column at your left and the main body of text, and again on the right. Notice the text doesn't run into, or even up close to, the margins or borders. I'm definitely not a designer that is a field all of it's own, but I have picked up a couple of hints from those who are, and this is one very important one.

Paragraph space is also a good use of white space. It keeps things spread out and easy to look at. I personally like to keep paragraphs short when possible. I think people will finish reading a short paragraph before they'll keep reading a long one. That has been somewhat of a chore in this tutorial. Good point, the design and layout needs to be relevant to the subject matter at hand, and sometimes overrides the desired design and style goals.

Proper English is important too. I like short paragraphs. I tend to break paragraphs where the sometimes probably should not be broken. I do it because a shorter paragraph is easier to read, and I think people read on longer if the content is in little chunks rather than long stretches. Don't let yourself get out of hand though, and really, proper English is important. If you really cannot speak Englsih very well you may have to hire someone to edit your copy.

There is also a bit of a marketing point to be made about this design issue. Web Site Marketing, in it's most basic form, is simply getting people to visit your site and hopefully stay long enough to get your message. If they arrive and your site takes a long time to load onto their screen because of large and/or numerous graphics chances are they will leave before they see it. Too much blinking makes it difficult to read the actual content you have. Too many links and graphics and things to see on a site where you are trying to sell something may preclude your buyers from ever finding what they actually arrived to see and hopefully purchase.

The ages old saying "K.I.S.S." (Keep It Simple Stupid) really applies to web design.

Let me say that again:

The ages old saying "K.I.S.S." (Keep It Simple Stupid) really applies to web design.