Learn from Successful Web Sites

These sites are dense and busy, with scads of links, typically organized under 5-10 areas or headings. They generally use dark type on a white background to increase legibility. Each has several areas where a background color is used to set off a group of information. Varying column widths and font sizes are used also to help set off different areas so that the eye can quickly jump from area to area. These sites are not designed for effect but efficiency. 

These pages are a crazy quilt of colors, type sizes and styles. Within the crazy collage, though, one can see a method.  The sites are using variety to help users identify the various groups of information that appear on the page. This allows the user to quickly identify the group of information that they are interested and jump to it.

Faster is better.
These sites all feature home-pages that download very quickly. They understand that surfers will not wait for sites to display; they will click the back button and get on to something else. These ten top sites display in an average time of about 12 seconds. This will vary, of course, on the speed of the internet connection, traffic on the site, and the general level of traffic on the internet. The sites are clearly placing a very high value

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