A well designed and compelling web site is important for a number of reasons such as enhancing or creating your identity, communicating your company’s message and establishing credibility. However, the design must meet the user’s needs in order for a site to achieve its goal.

The following checklist should provide a good starting point to make sure your site is well designed and usable.

Site Links & Navigation

• Are hyperlinks stylized to be easily distinguished from the rest of the site text?
• Do clickable items stylistically indicate that they are clickable, as well as, provide immediate (0.1 seconds) feedback?
• Are text links clearly labeled to provide a clear indication of where they will take the visitor?
• Is your primary navigation clearly and consistently labeled
• Is your site navigation is easy to use for target audience (for example, larger buttons for an older audience)
• Are you providing an alternate navigation method if your primary navigation is images, Flash, or DHTML?
• Is your navigation is structured in an unordered list for accessibility
• Are you providing secondary navigation aids, such as a site map, a skip navigation link, or breadcrumbs
• Have you double checked all your links to insure there are now broken links?
• Is your navigation easy to find and in a consistent location?

Web Site Design & Layout

• Does the design of your site match your brand?
• Is the web site’s design aesthetically appealing?
• Is the design audience appropriate?
• Are the colors used harmonious and logically related?
• Does the site colors provide high enough in contrast to assist colorblind and visually impaired visitors?
• Does the colors and graphics enhances or distracts from the site?
• Are the fonts easily readable and degrade gracefully — standard text size should be readable, for visitors who don’t know how to adjust their browsers?
• Are all the graphics are optimized to increase download speed?
• Does the design of the site clearly indicate its purpose? The purpose must be clear within a few seconds without reading much or no text copy at all.
• Is there a clear call to action on every page?

Web Site Content

• Does you content create a clear Visual Hierarchy
• Is the content on your site readable — type face, font size and color?
• Is the web site copy succinctly written?
• Is the copy written in a style that suits your website’s to ’speak’ to your target audience?
• Is the contrast between body text and the background color sufficient to make it easy to readyreading easy on the eyes?
• Is text broken into small, readable chunks seperated by headings, sub-headings with emphasis on features to assist in scanning the page?

This web design checklist is not the end all of lists. I’m sure there many more items that should be added. Moreover this list should be used a guide and not be seen as a list of must dos on every site.