The information superhighway spans across the globe, people who access your website come from all corners of the word and from various cultural influences.  It is important to consider this when designing your web pages to ensure that the appeal of your objective speaks to the worldwide population and not one specific demographic.

Consider the following; you have no knowledge of how a user was able to access your page or their previous experiences in dealing with your company its products services and affiliations. There is no assurance of the path that the user took to arrive at the page, which links he used to arrive at the website or which search tool he utilized to research your information. These factors are helpful to consider when generating a design that is culturally neutral and is pleasing to all.

There is a chance that the user will connect at lower than ideal speeds. Sometimes users will even have a connection of .5kb for mobile phone access. It’s not just the nominal connection speed that is a modifier in the users transfer rate. A typical consumer on a standard modem will get a 3kb transfer rate but will even get slower as lines become busy. Minimizing the overall schematic of the web design and its size will greatly improve the access experience and speeds up loading time for pages.

Using ideas such as CSS will lower the render time. Building your pages in sequential chunks and avoiding pages wrapped in large tables will also help with loading time. It’s ideal to save imagery for content whenever possible and remember that important content should be CSS based and not image based. These factors which tell users where they are, what the functions are and where the site can direct them need to load first to maximize the user experience.

Computers will always have different fonts that they use. PC’s will have a different font list than a Mac. Some of the fonts that you think are universal might not be available for a lot of people. To be on the safe side, it is a wise option to design your website with a globally utilized font such as Verdana for windows based computers. Sans Serif or Helvetica, Arial are some other options that you can use to set the general body font of your design content. For aspects of your design that do not require mass readability such as headers you can use fixed-pitch fonts like Courier for snippet code.

Take into consideration that some computers will have less capacity in displaying full spectrum color. Some PC’s are so ancient out there that they can only display 256 colors. Remember that the color scheme can be different on a Mac compared to your regular PC. It is a wise practice to use white for background and choose universally present colors found in all color schemes. Use web safe colors for large portions of your content and accept the fact that the coloration will always be compromised for a small percentage of your users; this is a limitation of their machine.

If you plan to use the latest coding then provide links for browsers that can easily be downloaded to maximize the viewing capacity of your users. Some websites post recommendations of which browser will be compatible for the web content. There are numerous freeware browsers that identify and are updated to read and maximize the usage of current programming, it is advisable to provide a download link or mention the platform so that your users can take full advantage of your design.