What is the most important element of website design? Is it the one that best showcases your design prowess? Is it the one that proves what a brilliant graphic designer you are? Or the one that will bring you more design awards? Or maybe your site design exists to establish a platform for you and your visitors to interact with each other unhindered by usability glitches?

Although the perception of good website design changes from person to person, there are some established conventions that you can follow and these conventions can make sure that your website reaches out to all possible people. When you are designing your website, especially these days, you have to be constantly conscious of the fact that there are numerous browsers and numerous devices that people may use to access your website. No longer do people browse the Internet just through their PCs and laptops; there are many handheld devices that can directly connect to the Internet and enable people to browse your website; people can even browse your website using their mobile phones. The days when 99$ of the population used Internet Explorer as their primary browser are far behind us.

What are you showcasing or what is the main focus of your site as this will drive the overall design of your site: will it be just text or images or videos or a mixture of all these? You have to design your website accordingly. If the content of your site will mainly be text, it is often a good idea to minimise the graphical elements and animations so that users are not overly distracted by images video etc and are able to concentrate on the text provided. Similarly a website showcasing your Flash animation expertise will expect lots of Flash work so you needn't worry about making your website textually accessible.

So when you are designing your website you have to take all these parameters into consideration. But does it mean that you're always accommodating browsers and devises and do not focus on your own business, whatever that is? No, I'm not suggesting that. Just take care of the following website design guidelines and you will make sure that 95% people (well, there will always be those odd 5% who can never browse the web easily no matter what they try) surfing the Internet can access your website:

1) Create a lighter design. Where possible do not overuse either Javascripts of Flash that effect the major functionality of your site, including menus. For instance if there is some crucial information on your website and people need to access that information before doing business with you then don't make that information accessible only through a JavaScript on an image file or a Flash animation. It goes without saying that possible you important text should be available as text and not images, if this is not possible then you need to consider image replacement techniques.

2) Don't use colors that cause strain to the eyes. If you want people to come to your website again and again and consume your content or do business with you then you must make their stay over your website as pleasant as possible. No matter how awesome your design looks if the color combinations are strain-full, after a while they will tire of your website and stop coming. Always take care that your background behind the text is far lighter than the text, and vice versa.

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