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I love discovering new blogs to read. I recently started reading a great blog for indie designers called “Try This at Home“. It’s a fabulous little blog with designer interviews, advice on how to build an indie business, and various craft tutorials. While exploring the blog, I found this post called “Build a Better Website” in which the blog author, Maddy lists a couple of suggestions on how artists and designers can better design their websites. I love that this is written from the point of view of a typical web surfer. Advice includes:

3. Don’t use blink or marquee tags, or use a large block of h1, h2, or other headline text…

I remember when the web was crawling with this…yetch!

4. Try to keep your typefaces down to three, maximum…

Unfortunately the web is still crawling with this…

6. Sketch out a clear and concise way to organize your information before you get started, and always consider how YOU would use the site if you were just a visitor, not the owner…

Out of this list, the absolute best piece of advice is #6. So many people just jump right into the process of designing their sites with out even figuring out what pages they really need and how they are supposed to connect to each other. This is just like building a house without putting in a sturdy foundation. Everyone knows that if the foundation isn’t right…the rest of your house is screwed up. It’s easier to create a good structure for your website at the beginning than it is for you to fix a messed up one. Why? Two words…”search engines”. Remember that people aren’t the only visitors to your website. Once search engines find your website and list all of the pages of your site in their databases, any change you make in how you name your pages, how you link to them, and what pages you have on your site can cause confusion when your site comes up in search engine results. So one day when you decide to fix a badly structured website any links you may have from search engines or from other websites may disappear if you’re not careful.

So if you’re building a brand new website…get the foundation right the first time…and stay away from that flashing text.

Be sure to read the read of the “Build a Better Website” post at the “Try This At Home” blog.