The 5 Rules of Good Website Design

Rule 1: A good web site design should have 2 levels of web pages no more, no less!This simply means that from the Home page of your web site (Level 1), there are 2 lower levels of linked web pages. Level 2 consists of the ‘chapters’, or topics, of your web site, and Level 3 consist of the subtopics of each Level 2 topic. The reason for this is that it has been proven that humans are comfortable navigating down 3 levels on a web site. Any deeper than this they can very easily become ‘lost’, which quickly results in them looking to make their escape! Alternatively, any less than 3 levels, and a web site appears to be too ‘light weight’ to be worth spending much time looking around – end result, the same as when it is too deep!Rule 2:A good web site design has between 5 and 15 level 2 web pages.- Any less than 5 level 2 web pages, and it is difficult for your web site, to ‘get noticed’ by the internet search engines, which also means that human visitors won’t find it either.- Any less than 5 Level 2 pages, it is unlikely that your web site will have sufficient content to encourage human visitors to stick around’, or to revisit in the future. Limited ‘stickability’ will have a detrimental effect on the profitability of your web site!- Any more than 15 Level 2 web pages, and it is unlikely that all of your web pages will ’get noticed’ by internet search engine. In this case, your time will be more profitably spent designing another web site!Any more than 15 Level 2 pages, and many human visitors will simply find your web site to be too big and unwieldy to be bothered looking around – end result, quick escape!Rule 3:A good web site design has between 5 and 15 Level 3 web pages per Level 2 web pages.This tied in with the reasoning behind Rule 2, which in simple term is – too much, or too little, web site content penalizes you in terms of the volume of ‘stickable’ traffic that is attracted to your web site.Rule 4:Easy to Navigate1. Place navigation button for each Level2. Web page down the left-hand side of your Home page3. Place direct links to your Level 3 web pages at the appropriate points within the text of your Level 2 web pages4. On each of your Level 3 web pages place a link back to the Level 2 page that it was accessed from5. On each of your Level 3 web pages place a link back to your Home page6. On each of your Level 2 web pages place a link back to your Home pageRule 5:A good web site design has an attractive “Look and Feel”This means:1. Avoid using lots of bright colors.2. Mainly stick to black writing on a white or pale background3. Avoid cluttering up a web page with too much text or images4. Break your text up into small paragraphs – ideally no more than 3 or 4 short sentences per paragraph.5. If you page contains a lot of text, break it up with headings to allow people to quickly scan it for the bits they are interested in.