Do use a consistent look and feel
Your
site should stand out as a whole. Use the same look and feel for all
the pages at your site. This way your visitors have a sense of
recognition when they visit various pages. Using stylesheets makes it
much easier to maintain the look and feel of numerous pages.
Don't use dark backgrounds
Dark
backgrounds tend to make text less readable. So avoid dark colors or
dark backgroundimages. If you do need them, use a nonserif font for the
text (like Arial, Universe, Helvetica) and be sure to not to use a
small fontsize.
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| Good website design examples |
Do use recurring visual elements
Repeat visual elements (images, colors, fonts etc.) on several pages. This will add to a consistent look and feel.
Don't cram your pages
A
page with text pushed aside against the border of a table - or an image
- looks awful. Don't cram your pages, use colspan and borderspan for
tables and vspan and hspan for applets and images.
Do vertical align the content of table cells
You do you use table cells to get your info on the right position? Then be sure to align the content vertically.
Don't push your table out of the screen
Tables
are very flexible. They're able to get almost anything more or less
visible on a screen. But by putting large elements in a table cell you
might force the cells to become too large. Thus making horizontal
scrolling necessary. So limit the number and size of pictures, long
words (e.g. long links), predefined text etc.
Don't overuse frames
Use only a limited number of frames. Always check if the screen doesn't get crammed if a low resolution screen is used.
Don't mix horizontal aligning
Mixing
centered text and text that's left aligned makes a mess of your page.
If you want to center text do it consistently. Exceptions are centering
text of headers or centered text placed in a border.
