Principles of Web Design
Conceiving user-friendly and easy to navigate websites is not rocket science. It does not require state-of-the-art multimillion dollar technologies. Most websites don’t fail because of technology but at their conception. I would love to write a long list of website design and development blunders, and back them up with real life examples I have witnessed but instead of wasting your time, I would just simply list some rules of thumb which saved me from committing similar blunders.
1. What is the purpose of your website?
If you cannot describe the purpose of your website in one clear and concise sentence, your website is doomed to fail. Something like “to provide a definitive resource for sports fishers in British Columbia”. If you don’t have a clear focus, your visitors would be confused and when they are confused, they would never recommend your website to their friends. Google and other search engines are remarkably good and figuring out if your website is focused on something. If its not, you won’t get the hits you have been aiming for.
2. Focus on your purpose
All of your content and all your design should focus on your purpose. If you are building a professional website, steer clear of fancy fonts or goofy graphics. Discard all extra and distracting material. I am assuming that you would constantly be adding new content to your website. So be sure to constantly re-evaluate your website to make sure that it still meets your purpose.
3. Reduce the weight
Use only fast loading graphics. If you are using flash, give your users the option to see a flash-free version of you website. You would be surprised to find out that more than 90% of the viewers choose non-flash version when given the choice. The next step after this should of course be to reduce or eliminate the flash. By the way, search engines do not read flash and therefore flash-only websites are not indexed.
4. We live in a global village
Everybody says that most people have high-speed broadband connections by now. No they don’t. And I am saying this in 2007. Most people new to computers, new to Internet and people NOT living in the few pockets around the world where high-speed broadband is still not available affordably use dialup modems. In spite of what everyone says, 28.8kbps is the International standard and it would remain so for a long time.
5. Stay a step behind
Make your life and everyone else’s life simpler. Use proven technologies for whom free and open source tried and tested code snippets are already available; technologies such as PHP, ASP, CSS-2, HTML, etc. Whenever a new technology arrives in the market, it comes with its set of bugs, problem, incompatibilities, etc. Over time, these issues are ironed out or the technology simply disappears. While these issues are addressed, desperate people group up and try to help each other (over blog, for example). If you stay a step behind, you can fix your problems just by reading about them in the blogs.
6. Work with search engines, don’t try to fool them
Ever come across someone who was trying to fool you even though you were only trying to help him. Most probably you stopped helping him or taught him a lesson he couldn’t forget. That is exactly what search engines do when you try to cheat them. Find out how the engines work and how they want you to build and link your website. Follow their guidelines and you would see slow but steady growth in traffic.
7. Don’t frustrate your viewers
Too much flash, music, marquees, pop-ups and other things running around the page are very annoying to almost everyone besides the persons who designed them. An annoyed or frustrated visitor is a lost customer.
8. Use common sense with colors and fonts
Some websites are so difficult to read because of the choice of colors and fonts. How long would you surf a beautiful looking website which is difficult to read? As people grow older, their reading vision deteriorates. So they like to have larger and larger fonts. Think about them.
9. Screen size
This is one of the most debated details of web design. I have long given up on giving my arguments. All I would say is that your website should either resize automatically or be 800 x 600 friendly. You can also make a 770px width website which resizes if the screen is larger.
10. Be consistent
If you change your fonts or navigation details within your website, it should be for a good reason. For example, you have a website for cosmetic, jewelry and clothes. It would be a good idea to have slightly different look and feel for each of the three sections.
11. Make your viewers want to come back
Most websites just focus on search engines to get new traffic and neglect the existing traffic. At least half of your traffic should be regular visitors. There are a million ways to do this and most powerful way to get them to return to your website is by getting them involved in your website. This can be anything ranging from asking them to rate or comment something to allowing them to add or update section for of you website.
12. Be imaginative
There are a million unexplored ideas which would make surfing the Internet a much more pleasant and rewarding experience. Don’t just assume that your idea would never work. Try and see! Ideas based on common sense are usually good ideas.