Tips For Designing User-Friendly, Search Engine Friendly Websites

In the very early days of television, news programs consisted of someone sitting at a desk reading a newspaper aloud to the viewers. It wasn't exactly riveting. Over time, television news evolved to fit the medium and today's broadcasts are nothing like they were over fifty years ago.

Sadly, too many web designers are making the same mistake. They attend Dreamweaver training then take a design intended for print and try to fit it to a web page, often with dismal results. The web is a unique workspace and creating a great website means understanding its strengths.

Design for Web Browsers

Today everyone surfs the web using Internet Explorer. Except for the people who use Firefox... and Opera... and Safari... and let's not forget vision impaired visitors using page readers. Every one of these browsers will display your site with differences, some slight and some major. To design exclusively for IE is to exclude a growing number of potential visitors, and yet too many people come out of Dreamweaver training thinking they should do just that.

One way to design for the widest range of browsers is to make sure your web page has valid code by using a validator such as http://validator.w3.org. While current versions of Dreamweaver puts out far better code than older versions, dedicated designers may occasionally have to get their hands dirty with the actual HTML code now and then.

Even if you are satisfied with just the IE traffic, is your page going to look good on both a cheap 15-inch CRT at 800 pixels and a 22" LCD widescreen set to 1680? If your page doesn't scale with screen resolution it's either going to get cut off on small monitors or look very empty on large ones.

Formatting with CSS

Cascading style sheets (CSS) were a revolution in the way website were designed when they were introduced several years ago. Despite their power and versatility, many designers seem to ignore that part of their Dreamweaver training, relying on old tricks such as tables to make their pages appear right.

The concept behind CSS is that the content of your web pages should be separate from the appearance of those pages. This allows creation of a standard look to your site whether you have 2 pages or 2,000. Plus it allows you to change the look of your entire site by changing one file rather than laboriously re-coding each page. Additionally, pages designed with CSS tend to rank better in the search engines, because search engine spiders don't need to crawl through hundreds of lines of code to decipher the text and links on the page.

CSS allows sites have user-selected themes. One user wants a stark, simple design while another wants a pink background with curlicue fonts and web links in bold purple rather than underlined blue. By coding the site to feed the same content through two different CSS files, both users can have what they want.

Dreamweaver training goes beyond what students learn in the classroom. Continue the learning by going out and finding sites you love and sites you hate and understanding the design elements that make them what they are.