The terms web designer is used interchangeably in the media and advertisements.

Web Design Guidelines:

Web Content - You want the visitor to see you as a knowledgeable information source and/or a reputable business. Poor grammar and spelling will immediately reduce your credibility. Remember that people use the internet to find information.

Cross Browser Compatibility – There are at least a hundred different browsers in use. You must design your website to work properly in the most widely used browsers. To do that you may not be able to use all of the really great special effects that are available because they may not be supported in most browsers. Good web design requires your web pages to work in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera and Safari at a minimum.

Graphics and Photos - Always use the height and width attributes on the picture so the rest of the page can load while the graphic files is downloading. Optimize your photos and other graphic files to have as small a size as possible without sacrificing picture quality.

Background Colors - If you use anything other than white behind text, be sure to specify link colors otherwise the user’s browser defaults will determine what color the links are which can make them unreadable.

Multimedia - Multimedia is composed of flash movies, video clips, audio clips and background music. Make sure the visitor can stop and start multimedia files or in the case of flash introductions, skip them if they want. That way people with slow connections or devices that don’t support multimedia can ignore them.

Site Navigation - Site navigation should be simple and intuitive. Every area of your website should be reachable within three clicks from anywhere else on the site. If you use anything other than simple text links, make sure to test your navigation in all the major browsers.