The goal of any web designer is to make sure the end user has a good experience with a website. When people have difficulty navigating a site, viewing its contents, or even getting it to load in their web browser, they are much more likely to leave the site and never come back. Therefore to make sure your website is usable and welcoming, use these best practices on web design and development.

Your website should look and work the same in all web browsers. This can be something of a challenge since there are so many different web browsers in use today. However, you should always view your design in as many browsers as you can and then make the appropriate adjustments to ensure the design is consistent across platforms.

Implementing a menu section with links to all sections of your site including the homepage is necessary. The likelihood of visitors entering your site through an internal page rather than the front page is pretty high considering search engines index websites by their individual pages. You want to ensure your visitor can access other parts of your site easily no matter where they are on it.

Not everyone that comes to your site is going to have perfect 20/20 vision. A good portion of the population is experiencing age related myopia. Try to use eye friendly fonts that have good spacing and don’t go smaller than 12 pixels. Many will use the zoom function on their web browsers to enlarge text on the screen. To facilitate this, you should define your fonts in percentages rather than pixels or points.

A good habit to get into is to use the “Alt” tag on images and the “Title” tag on links. Browsers created for the visually impaired as well as search engine read those labels to understand what the link or image contains. In addition to making your site readable to the blind, you’ll also make your site more search engine friendly.

It’s perfectly okay to place advertisements, like Google Adsense, on your website. However, don’t go overboard and stuff ads into every nook and cranny on the site. Not only does this make your site ugly and hard to navigate, people will think you are nothing more than a spammer and you’ll lose the very visitors you worked so hard to attract.

There are a lot more best practices on web design and development than what is in this articles. However, employing these few tips will get you going in the right direction. If you endeavor to always but your visitor’s needs first, you will always create a site worth visiting.

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