Hemal Shah^ver2.0

Or perhaps, the best option is to build a website which is user friendly and simple. It is very much a horror to learn that how big a designer be, he will be attracted to a beautiful design no matter how bad its usability is. Designing a website which is artistically brilliant may not necessarily make it a hit with users. It should be user friendly, should have easy navigation, preferably, a bread crumb, and good color scheme. This should make an ideal website for masses.

Along with clear instructions and clean, no flickering layout, a website visitor can become loyal towards a website. People new to web get attracted to the flickering banners and an un-user-friendly layout, but once they get used to it, they will try to avoid it. This will be bad for a website. Hence, it's always advisable that you should have a simple layout that specializes in User Friendliness.

A website interacts with a visitor on behalf of a firm / individual. This interaction has to be smooth to win customers back to back. Better the interaction, better the results. It helps the user get what he wants, and you can sell what the user wants. That's how it should work.

A web designer should know standards. Standards such as the W3C's web site guidelines. Most websites do not follow these standards, which make it difficult for a certain section of visitors though to utilize the information or services. The web is a medium for all, and those who intent to get information from this medium should get the way they intend to see.

There are different browsers available in the market, IE being the most popular since its bundled with Windows, world's most popular operating system. But there are equally good browsers in the name of Opera and Mozilla Fire Fox. However, these browsers will show your website differently unless you follow a standard procedure. IE, shows what you have designed as it is, because most of the times it understands what you intent to show. However, other browsers are not so. They prefer to follow the guidelines and show the websites accordingly. Whoever fails to follow guidelines for websites may loose customers who use other browsers as their default browser.

The institutes who coach aspiring web designers on tools and other languages often ignore the importance of HTML. They do teach HTML, but never, teach it in full. For example, a friend of mine who was doing a course with a prominent institute told me that he topped the whole batch for HTML test. I asked him to give me his score to which he said to be 85%. Now, if some one scores 85% in HTML, I consider him as a master in HTML. Just to tease test him, I asked "What is a DocType?" The answer shocked me. He said "Doc what?"

This is the situation we face where the young and budding web designers are not being trained properly and face problems clearing interviews, and when they work on deploying websites.

Following standards is increasingly gaining importance, thanks to the British Disability against Disability act, and the US Section 508. These acts or orders, which are constituted by respective governments, state a few rules and coding format to be adopted for making the website accessible to those who are disabled and use specific tools to access websites. You can read more about them in the respective article section.