Functional Art Solutions
FAS Help Documents: Design Conventions

Website Design Conventions:

Design DON'Ts

  • Don't use underlines for anything other than links, this only confuses people into thinking it's a link when it's not.
  • Don't use BIGGER bolder text everywhere when a careful layout and a little white space around things will work.
  • Don't use different colored text, especially off color text to distiguish text when a little white space or header text will do.
  • Don't create visual diarrhea, less is more.
  • Don't create really large pages, there is a limit to the size page that can be stored in a database, and who wants to scroll and scroll and scroll on any page.
  • Don't use spaces in uploaded media file names like images, movies, & PDFs, use underlines in place of spaces.
  • Don't provide links to off topic websites this will hurt your search engine ranking.
  • Don't use a whole host of BAD Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, you will get your website banned from the search engines like Google.

 

Design DOs

  • Do strictly adhere to the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
  • Do use the search terms you want a page to be found for in the page title and page body.
  • Do use PDF's for really large documents, rather than storing the content in the page body.
  • Do use Alt text or Alternative text for images, this is very helpful to search engines and visually impared people.
  • Do trade links with on topic websites you like this will help your search engine ranking and your website users.
  • Do use good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.

 

Tips & Tricks

  • Page Layout: the key to a visually affective & pleasing page.
    • Keep it short, less is more. The smaller data size of images the better, the less text required to get your point across the better, short affective titles the better, all these things will keep your website users happier and pages loading faster.
    • Tables although not always necissary, can frequently eliminate a host of layout issues by forcing things to behave the way you want it to from justifying different page elements different ways to aligning content tables are the answer.
      • Nesting tables within an existing table cell can also be very useful
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