Simple tables, why you should keep your web design simple

When building a new webpage, it is easy to get carried away with all the tools that are available out there and end up creating a confusing, cluttered website. There are very good reasons why you should keep your website design simple. Here are some of the most important:

Most web users today surf the internet to access information. They are looking to get to the information they’re looking for as fast as they can. A complex navigation system in a website where it can be hard to access information can irritate web users and drive them away from your website.

Not all web users have high speed internet access. Keeping your website simple and quick to load would keep even web users with slower internet speeds interested in your website.

Simpler pages use fewer HTML Tags and so they are smaller and load quickly. Many times, the simpler a page is, the easier it is to update or edit it.

The simpler a website is in design, the easier it is for visitors to navigate. This ensure repeat visits to site and therefore in increased traffic.

Those were some of the benefits of a simple website design. How exactly can you keep your website simple, yet at the same time impressive looking and portraying the image that you want it to. Here are a few tips:

Plan your website. Before you go ahead with actually building your website, you should plan ahead what you want it to look like. Spend time thinking about the logical flow of information on your website, how easy/hard would it be to access important areas of your website? How best can you present information to your visitors? Plan to use graphics effectively, i.e only at places where it is required and supplements the information on your page.

Create simple navigation. You want your visitors to be able to access all parts of your website with ease. This requires you to maintain a consistent navigation system across your website. Navigation can be through simple text links, small graphics buttons, javascript etc. Whatever system it is you wish to choose, make sure it is implemented consistently across all pages and simple to use for your visitors.

Create efficient graphics. Keeping your website simple need not require you to stifle your creativity. It is possible to create fancy graphics for a website and keep it simple at the same time. The key is to optimize your graphics so that they load quickly. A good idea is to implement the same graphics on all your pages, this way web browsers can cache a graphic after it’s been used once, resulting in quicker display time.

In creating a simple website, it is important to work on the main or index page of the website. The index page will more often not be the entry page to your website, it needs to load quickly and present the visitor with an idea of what the website is about. Here, it helps not to have a cluttered page, the index page should have a simple navigation, different sections of the page should be mentioned with appropriate headings. If possible, the use of flash on an index page should be avoided, if flash must be used a direct link to the main page must be provided in the flash intro.

In designing a simple website, you should make the best use of the tools available on hand. HTML allows for various ways in which information on a website can be displayed effectively and attractively. Some of the elements in HTML that can be handy are Tables, Font colors, Header Tags, Forms etc. It is important not to get carried away with any of these tools though, for example, keep the number of colours used in a page to a minimum, use tables only if necessary etc.

In conclusion, we can see that the “Keep it simple” rule applies to website design as well. It is not necessary to build large complex designs to portray one’s creativity, instead simple designs are more effective and appreciated by internet users.