Neutron2K's Top 10 Web Development Tips

This article with give you an insight into my personal top 10 design tips that you should take into consideration when designing and building your web site. They are, (in no particular order!), as follows:

#1: Choose your Colours!

Choosing and working to a specific colour palette is an absolute must when designing a web site. If your colours are randomly chosen and overly bright and, 'In your face', you may have a hard time pulling off the effect you were aiming for.

I also would advise using pale colours when you can get away with it for a more professional style site, (if that's what your aiming for). Bright colours don't always work well.

#2: Plan your Layout!

This step is essential in most cases. You should always plan your layouts on paper before going ahead and implementing them. It makes the process a lot easier to deal with if you are new to web development. You should also decide on how you will layout your technology wise, e.g. CSS or tables?

#3: Use Templates!

This is another vital part of development if you are going to use a number of pages that use the same layout. If you use a web development suite that has template support, then use it! A lot of new developers have waste days, weeks and even months applying common code changes to all pages when templates could of saved them that time!

You could also build the elements of your web site, such as headers, footers etc in separate files and then in your content pages use Server Side Includes (SSI's) to load those elements into the page. This means when you need to effect the entire site you only need to change one file.

#4: Limit your JavaScript!

On thing that a lot of people new to web development don't realize is that it is quite common for people to view web sites without having javascript enabled, especially the search engine bots. You should use javascript sparingly and provide and alternative for those users who have disabled it.

Also if you use javascript navigation, ensure that it at least uses standard html hyperlinks so that search engine spiders can follow the links. They cannot read javascript.

#5: Conform to W3C!

Another absolute must of making your pages conform with the W3C web standards. They are there for a reason and that reason is to ensure everyone can view your web site as it was intended. More and more developers these days are ignoring the W3C recommendations though and it needs to be stamped on. The longer people ignore them, the longer it will take for the web to stabilize.

#6: Design for Cross Browser Compatibility!

You should test your web sites in a variety of common browsers and ensure that your design works in each. If you use CSS, you will no doubt run into a number a problems with different browsers and their buggy CSS positioning implementations, especially Microsoft's Internet Explorer. You may need to employ CSS hacks to your site in order to achieve this goal but believe me - the benefits are well worth it.

#7: Content is King!

When it comes to the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages), then content is king. These days if you want to rank high up in the SERP's, then you need to write unique and meaningful content, especially with Google. Keywords and Meta tags are still essential for the other search engines, but you should design your site with the user in mind, and never for the search engines.

#8: Use Cascading Style Sheets!

You should always ensure you use the same fonts and colours on all pages of your web sites, and there is no better way to ensure this than by using an External Cascading Style Sheet to control the overall look and feel of your pages.

CSS is a wonderful technology and it allows you to do so much more with your sites, both from an appearance stand point and that of site management.

#9: Link Building

You should try and get as many sites as possible link to your web site as long as they are related. Incoming links are an important factor to the search engines these days, again - especially in the case of google and its Page Ranking System. You should avoid link building schemes though as they could be seen as part of a link farm and your site could be dropped from the search engines index's.

#10: Tell us about your site!

This is probably the most important. If you build a web site be sure to join up to the N2K forums and show it to us so we can give you our thoughts and help you make the best web site possible! It will also be an excuse to get your site linked from the Neutron2K web site as well and drive a bit of traffic your way.

I hope this guide has been of some use to you! There are pleanty of other web development tips i could give you, but there are my top 10 at present!