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Tips for faster and simpler web design

by | Dec 11, 2014 | Website Design, Website Optimization

Internet traffic

In a world where technology is advancing at such a rapid rate, you may find the web design for your business website is not user friendly for customers with older browsers and mobile devices with little available memory. Having a website that is not 100% compatible and user friendly for all could have a drastic effect on the amount of traffic crossing your site and you could be losing the opportunity to make connections with a large portion of your target market.

Effective and efficient websites are a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy and the good news is there are a number of ways you can make your site speedier and easier to use without having to compromise your content and visual quality.

Five tips for creating user friendly websites

  • Fewer requests. The visual assets and icons which make up your user interface should be small and optimised. Ideally they should be embedded Base64 encoded images inside your CSS and you should try and limit your requests to one CSS file, one HTML file and one JavaScript file.
  • Using templates. Templates used to construct HTML should work on the server as well as on the browser client. This will drop your page download time.
  • Load what you need. It is important to remember web browsers will only open a certain number of connections to a host at any one time. This means if you have a long scrolling page where everything is set to download at once, then only some of the content will download. Make sure you load only what needs to be seen.
  • When including photographs and retina images, it is a good idea to scale them down first. This can be done with tools such as Photoshop’s ‘Save for web’ feature. You can resize your images on the browser at a later date and will be left with a high resolution image saved at 70-80% of the original quality.
  • Use software such as Fireworks or ImageOptim to change your colour pallet from 24bit colour to 256bit colour. There will be no discernable loss in the quality of your image and this can help make images up to 50% smaller provided you are using PNGs with alpha transparency.

At WSI OMS, we understand the importance of fast, user friendly web design and we are well equipped with the knowledge and expertise necessary to help you achieve it. To learn what we can do for your business, contact us today.