In the digital age, a user-friendly website is crucial for maintaining visitor engagement and ensuring a positive user experience. This article provides a set of guidelines to help you avoid common pitfalls that can make your website difficult to navigate or read. These tips focus on the use of color and texture in your website design, and how these elements can impact user accessibility and overall site aesthetics.
Use Complementary Background and Text Colors: If you're using a textured background GIF, ensure that you also specify a background color that complements the main color in the GIF. This will prevent your text from becoming unreadable to someone browsing with text-only. For instance, white text on a light background can be difficult to read.
Create Contrast for Readability: If your background texture or color is dark, use light text to create enough contrast to make it easy to read, and vice versa.
Limit Use of Bright Colors: Keep your use of bright colors to a minimum. Fluorescent green or yellow text on a black background, for instance, can be hard on the eyes. If you prefer a black background, use such effects sparingly. Similarly, bright colored backgrounds can also be hard on the eyes and finding a good contrasting text color can be challenging.
Maintain Consistency in Background Texture/Color: Preferably use the same background texture/color on all your pages as it gives a more unified feel and appearance to your site. However, if your chosen colors clash with the colors in an important graphic or photo on one particular page, feel free to change the background for that page.
Keep Link Colors Consistent: If you change the link colors from their default settings because they clash with your chosen color scheme, then keep these link colors consistent throughout your site. This will help visitors identify which links they have visited and which they haven't.
Differentiate Visited and Unvisited Links: Don't specify the same color for visited links as for unvisited ones. This can confuse visitors and make navigation more difficult.
By following these guidelines, you can create a website that is not only visually appealing, but also user-friendly and accessible. For more information on website design, check out resources from W3Schools and Mozilla Developer Network.
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