What makes a good site?

Feel free to reply with your own points.

1. Content. Your site sucks and is a waste of space and bandwidth if it is yet another godawful anime, general computer help, or other useless redundant pointless site.

2. XHTML compliancy. Absolutely never rely on a certain browser, so make your code XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant (http://validator.w3.org/). This means that at this point, it's the browser's fault for not rendering your page right, not yours. Explosively gaining popularity browsers such as Firebird strictly adhere to these specifications. Be CSS compliant as well.

3. Remember that millions of Americans are vision-impared. That means never rely on color to convey a point, use large font sizes, and avoid text in images wherever possible.. ABSOLUTELY NEVER use a light-on-dark color scheme...it's murder to view on some monitors and with some vision impediments.

4. Absolutely never rely on browser extensions or client-side scripting to make your page. That means avoid Flash, Java, and Javascript wherever possible.

I'll have more to post up after tonight, I just wanted to post a quick opinion right now!

For a website to be good, in my opinion, I believe it should be:

1. Accessible: A website has to have an understandable level of navigation, as no one likes to get lost on a troublesome website.
2. Content: If a website doesn't have anything that is worth reading, why should I go there? If a website has an interesting topic that hasn't been done, or something that needs to have a broader amount of information for it, then it should have alot of good, well-written content.
3. Asthetics: The website should not hurt my eyes, or make me want to leave before I have seen it. Some of the NO's of web design are found on this board, and are good reference as to what you should NOT do.
4. Download: If it takes forever for a specific site to download to your browser, it's usually nothing great to wait for. A website should be designed to load decently fast on most connections, although loading time should never hinder the designers ability to prove a point or convey a message.
5. Creativity: The site should be creative and new. If no one has seen it before, it has so much more value. Don't steal peoples templates if you want to Woah! people and other designers. Make something new and creative to show of your skills, and to show what a good designer can really do.
6. Domain Name: Don't have a crappy, long, hard to remember domain name... People hate to type www.thisismywebsiteseeifyoucanrememberthisurl.com to see a website. Good websites have good domain names.
7. Updates: Have a routine for updating content and old data. People enjoy new content and news, so try to stay up to date with it.
8. Keep to one style: Have one style to your website. Don't have a professional website with childish antics or colors, fonts, and images. Same goes with the opposite. Try to keep a good streamline standard for your designs. This helps keep the masses coming back.
   [/list=1] I'll have more further on down the road, I'm fairly new to the website design scene, and I have to work in 20 minutes.
   
   Cheers and good luck to any new designers who have read this!

Your point #6 reminds me of a critical one: don't get a .tk domain. Spend then SEVEN WHOLE DOLLARS to get an actual TLD.

LoL. Also try not to use freehosts like Geocities or Angelfire. EWWW.

TK is pretty garbage. Work for me though! Later Filburt!

hey free hosts arent that bad for youngsters (like moi, although i have a dotcom now) e.g. www.brinkster.com were very good until they put banners on my site >: ( but theyre still pretty good, but i suppose ftp and a dotcom is the who

whoops didnt mean to post twice :S

my point

1. try your very hardest not to get popups, banners are *waggles hand* not so bad but popups are the worst, if too many popups come up people\ will leave your site before they see it - people dont like their comps crashed

On the free hosts note: I'd like to point out it costs less than $25 a year to host a website and domain.

I'll use an example of a plan that costs $15/year (easily found in todays competitive market). It wont be a brilliant host, but very much worth your money. Godaddy costs $7 for domain registration

Total (per year): $22
Total (per month): $1.83
Total (per day) : $0.06

6 cents a day folks... I'd be willing to bet you loose that in your sofa. I'm sorry but the whole "I'd rather spend my money other places" just doesn't work when it's that rediculously cheap. If you're that desperately needing money you wouldn't be on a computer right now.

I'll come back in a few to post my list of what makes a good site.

Another useful thing for a good website to have is a good color scheme. If a site has nice colors that are appealing to most users, then more people will come back, as it will be something nice to look at, and they might even remember how nice the color scheme was!

:classic:

I agree with newfiewebguru! absolutely!
Colours are very important. Never use colors that can irritate, too much yello, red or orange or wite on black etc. If the colors go well with the main idea of a website, it's a big pusl. Just the example:
http://www.1-800-espresso.com/forum.html
Could they choose better color scheme for their coffee site?

Yes, transio, I agree. Yellow and red work fine on these sites. When I said about yellow etc. I meant groundless overuse of these colours

One point that I think should be mentioned is the use of hyperlinks.

In my opinion, you cannot have too many links, and the redundant use of them is a must for a cohesive easily navigate-able website. After all, hyperlinks ARE the underlying principal that makes the Internet a "world wide WEB".

All to often you see sites that mention other parts of the site in their content, but have NO link to the page itself. Just look at yahoo.com, probably 95% of the text on their homepage are links.

1. Never use images where text will suffice, e.g a website with images for each of the navigation items, each reading a different word like "Blog" "about me" etc. Lets say they have 7 nav items. If there is an image for each one, thats 7 images the browser has to load. Now, if you use the same image and use (X)HTML to put the text in, thats only one image. Use the one image as a background for each nav item and them write the text in yourself.

2. Another navigation point, make it clear. Theres no point just having symbols or weird stuff like that (although it can come in handy when you have visitors from all over the world, speaking - and reading - in different languages, if this is a problem check out Babelfish). Have clear navigation and try to split your website into meaningful sections, maybe with a "main site" or "misc." section for all the odds and ends, e.g. link, about, contact, copyright etc...

wow im on a roll

3. Make your site interesting, and try to dedicate it to one soul purpose. E.g. writing, or movies, or music etc. Anything you can think of - and dont worry if it doesnt look like the rest of the websites out there and has got different content - be grateful, most designers strive day and night for that. :thumbsup:

5 rules of web design you need to know

1. Site needs to download quickly
2. Page content must be easy to read
3. Website should be easy to navigate
4. Look for page design consistency
5. Add valuable content

A clean, simple and well organized site will lower customer frustration and promote website traffic.

Bottom line – Poorly designed websites will frustrate people, cause loss of customer loyalty, and end up wasting everyone’s time.

I see both sides of the coin here folks, I have designed a few templates for small businesses in the town I live in and some color schemes (i.e. black background with green text) are good.

I think honestly it depends on what type of audience you want to reach, I agree a webpage shouldnt have too many images unless of course you use a preloader.

Fewer sites seem to be using pure flash and some have even changed back and removed the pre loaders and introductions!

ouch...

i also used .tk domain.. but i think it's good for beginners since they/we are just on the "experiencing" period... hehe..

I use to have a .tk domain.

I now have a .co.uk domain on a paid host.

I don't think there's an end to the "experiencing period" as we are all learning new techniques and developing our skills.

For me, a good site should provide credible and original content in as many forms as possible.

4. Absolutely never rely on browser extensions or client-side scripting to make your page. That means avoid Flash, Java, and Javascript wherever possible.
I think you are still on 1990's !!!.
How can we imagine a site without atleast one of these things ? .