At this point, you’ve registered your domain name and secured hosting. Now it’s time to design your website.
As an artist, pushing the boundaries of creativity with your art is acceptable and even desirable. Your website design, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. Usability is the key to a successful website design.
Stick with convention in your website design
Your website design is not the place for pushing the envelope. Remember that design is simply a platform to display your artwork to potential clients and buyers. A client isn’t going to hire you to paint a book cover because of your website design skills.
Use time-tested navigation menus
If your visitors have to figure out your navigation system, it has failed. Don’t expect visitors to spend any amount of time trying to learn your snazzy, uber-flash navigation menu… they won’t. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t be creative with your website design. Your website design can be as individual as you are, but stick to a solid foundation that visitors are accustomed to.
Graphics-intensive designs
Photoshop is great for designing a website, especially with ImageReady built-in. You can design your site layout, add guides to create slices from, and output a complete html page at the push of a few buttons. But beware! Layouts published from ImageReady/Photoshop are nothing but images. On the internet, speed is key! Images take a long time to download, especially over a dial-up connection. Use images sparingly and never use a graphic where plain text can perform the same function. We’ll talk more about why using text is essential in the next section.
Flash
Avoid flash altogether, especially for navigation. The same is true for Java, JavaScript, dhtml, etc. Stay away from the flashy stuff and any technology that requires a special plug-in to use. Stick to the basics with your website design. Your visitors (and the search engines) will love you for it.
Splash pages
“A splash page of a web site is a sort of pre-home page front page, usually providing no real information besides perhaps a note about browser requirements and sometimes a web counter. Often this page is graphics-intensive and used only for reasons of branding; sometimes it provides a choice of entry points for the site proper, for instance links to Flash and HTML-only versions of the site” is how Wikipedia.org defines a splash page. The day of the splash page is over. Making your visitors “Click to Enter” gives them one more opportunity to leave your site. Instead, offer your visitors real, honest-to-goodness content on the very first page of your site. You can still have a nice big, dramatic graphic on your home page, just make sure links to the rest of your site are easily accessible. When visitors don’t know where to go, they go away.
There are exceptions, of course. Splash pages can be used to good effect for big announcements or events. But use them sparingly if you must.
Navigation
Users should be able to get to the main page of each section of your website from any page in your site. This means creating a ‘global’ navigation menu that is on every page. If someone enters your site from any page other than the home page, make sure there are links to lead them to the rest of your site. Navigation text / buttons should also be easily readable. Using SSI (server side includes) is a perfect solution for this.
