This part of Design Tips specialises in what your viewers will see and how to make the site better for them. Because, remember, these are the people who need to like the site, not necessarily you. So make sure you read through this so you know how to keep your viewers happy.

Quick Links

• What and What Not To Have
• Colour Schemes
• Site Navigation

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What and What Not To Have - RETURN TO TOP
This is the most important of what I am going to discuss. There are a few things you should make sure you don't use excessively.

• Filesize - This can be the most annoying thing in a page. Waiting for a introduction to load or a huge banner to appear can really annoy your viewers with slow connections, and fast ones too. To fix this, it's probably a good idea to provide links to skip things like intros and for huge images, either use a small image, if possible, and if not, reuse the same image so it doesn't need to be reloaded.
• Audience - It's important to know your audience before you make your site because you need to make sure that they stay at your site. If your site is specially designed for teenage students to enjoy then it's expected that teenage students will enjoy it. Throughout this section I'll discuss how you can direct your page to a certain audience so your site is appreciated more.
• Spelling - Nothing looks sloppier on a webpage than spelling mistakes and bad grammar. Typing incorrectly can make a page vry hrd 2 undrstnd and it can be very bad if you are trying to get a point across because people may not take you as seriously or as mature as you really could be. They may even decide not to look because they can't be bothered. So when you make your site make sure you spell check you write so people don't get confused.
• Columns - Columns can add a great effect to a website and can space out information nicely although, overusing the effect can make your audience confused and not know when to read, especially when the separated columns are not as obvious to notice. One and two columned sites are usually the best way to do it but in some cases three columns can be used effectively. Four columns is far too busy and will most likely annoy your users as it will be very cluttered, but if you can pull it off, go ahead, and good job!

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Colour Schemes - RETURN TO TOP
The colours in your site are an important thing. You need to make sure your colours don't clash or irritate your audience. This is a big thing to pay attention to because using colours incorrectly can make your content unreadable or difficult to read. It can also depend on age. Younger people are drawn to bright colours more than dull colours while adults prefer greying and 'toned down' colours. Teenagers are somewhere between and since this is who I am creating this site for I'll use the colours between the grey and bright colours.
Colour is a great way to separate parts of the web page and is a good idea in most cases as it makes certain areas more distinguished and can draw your viewers attention using strong contrast. Making the background dark and the content bright, or dark content and bright backgrounds, can draw the attention to the content, making it easier for the viewer to see what is important.
You can also use colour to draw your viewers to things:
I bet this caught your attention!
That is one of many ways to draw attention to certain things. It can be a great effect if it isn't over-used or hard on the eyes.
You need to think about your background image and your content too. If you have black text over a white box and your background is black, you have a problem. If for some reason the white box doesn't show up, this makes your information invisible and your viewer can't see it, since there is black text on a black background. So make sure your information is visible under as many situations as possible., by using a scale of shading. For example, put white text in a grey box on a black background. If the grey box doesn't appear, you could still read the text because the white text is visible on the black background.

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Site Navigation - RETURN TO TOP
It is important to make your site easy to navigate so your audience doesn't get annoyed by levels of information that you get lost in. This makes it important to make a menu. When you make a menu there are a few things to think about first:

• Size - You don't want a menu that takes ages to load because your audience might not want to wait that long. Text menus are a good way to fix this because you don't have to download each pixel like images. The downside of this though is that if your viewer might want to change your font size of your content and doing that will change the size of your menu. This may ruin the layout so I suggest using images, but very small ones that still show what's needed but take up as little space as possible and don't take long to load.
• Layering - Your site may have a lot of information to give but you should make sure your information can all be accessed easily. This means on each page you should have a link back home and sub-categories to make it even easier. For example, this site has a menu up the top on all pages so you can get back home and to all the sub-categories. You should make it a challenge to yourself to get to and from each page in your site without using the back button and as fast as possible. The easier it is to navigate your site, the easier it is for the viewers to get information.
• Position - It's a good idea to make sure your menu is in the same place on each page. If the menu goes from the top to the left and to the bottom over a few pages the people looking at the site might get confused. Also, if the menu stays in the same place it makes the page look neater and you won't need to change the code if you edit the content from one page to another.

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Carry on to the Coder's Advantage part of Design Tips to learn about making coding easier for you.