Designing the Homepage - this is the most important page with the
website as most uses will land on it, relative to other internal pages of your
website. Users should be up to navigate to your most important pages. Use
bullet points to summarise your entire value proposition to convince the user
to stay onsite. Users attention Span is extremely short when visiting
websites. Expectations are high and users are not forgiving for
slow loading pages,
difficult to navigate or confusing on the eye. Make sure your homepage can
load within 3 seconds... don't use too many images or technologies that are
potentially incompatible with some users PCs (not everyone has got what Flash
has got installed for instance).
Navigation - the most important aspect of usability is a clean and
simple navigational structure. Your structure must be consistent across all
pages so users have a clear understanding of how to find their way between
sections and back again. A horizontal menu system at the top of the page
(similar to the way in which this website is laid out) is a widely used an
easy to understand method of navigation. A vertical menu is useful as a sub
menu from the main menu. Make sure that your main menu includes a button or
link to your homepage, contact us and sitemap. To supplement your main menu
you may also use a 'breadcrumb' drill > down > summary is also useful to
highlight the page the user has entered. Use of colours to highlight the menu
item the user has landed on is a simple way of to help the use understand
where they are.
Graphic Design - perhaps the hardiest and most emotive area of web
design is graphic design. It consumes of beginners time and invariably is best
left to the professional graphic designer. Think back to your marketing
objectives.. Is your new web site going to be paid brochure only website,
shopping basket, forum or portal? Ignore your own personal preferences of
regards to the colour and style.. The only thing that matters is the
expectations of your potential buyers. Have they dealt with your company
before? Do you have an existing brand, logo, slogan and colour scheme which
your site must adhere to? If in doubt just keep things simple. Used lots of
white space, neutral colours such as dark blues and dark greens and business
like fonts such as Tahoma or Verdana. A quick and easy solution is to purchase
a website template and there are literally thousands to buy online. Be aware
that one in twelve people are colour blind who find it difficult to
distinguish between red and green.
Sitemaps - a site map is the page to help at your users your list of
every single page on site. In should be a hierarchical and ideally link based.
Other versions of sitemaps that are of less importance to users but of
critical importance to search engines are sitemap.xml, robots.txt and
urllist.txt. These files are one of the first files search bots look before in
order to cash and copy new or updated web pages.
Javascript - try and keep your site easy to load an navigate around.
The use of some scripts and the DHTML sometimes throws up security and
compatibility issues are between browsers.
Search - but a search box on every page to allow a free text query by
user that can retrieve any page on the site. This is more appropriate for very
large sites. Major search engines provide a quick and easy solution of joining
search to your site.
Page Structure - try and suspect the areas of your page up but into a
top border, side border, bottom border and main body. Try and summarise each
page with bullet points near the top and the left of the body area. Have you
need to try and entice users to browse the rest of the page of after the first
few seconds by skimming the bullets.
Screen Resolution Issues - different users still use a but screen
resolutions depending upon they're operating system default setting, preferred
setting, browser type and whether or not they have poor eyesight. Able to
create a website design that caters for all screen resolutions by specifying
everything inside the table set to 100%. This means for larger screen
resolutions your website will automatically reduce and be squeezed together.
Bear this in mind when choosing font sizes, and creating of the top
navigational menu (if you limit the menu width to 800 pixels you will cater
for users width the largest 800 x 600 resolution). IOn 2008 the
following resolutions are being used worldwide:-
|
|
1024 x 768 |
56.15% |
|
|
1280 x 1024 |
15.79% |
|
|
800 x 600 |
12.04% |
|
|
1280 x 800 |
4.09% |
|
|
1152 x 864 |
3.90% |
Internal links - from a usability perspective, always use absolute
URL's as opposed to relative URLs. This will ensure simpler page updating when
creating files that are not in the root directory.
Accessibility - the Internet is developing standards such as WC3 for
browser accessibility. If you're using CSS style, be careful your
implementation is forwardly compatible with these standards. You can test your
website design through a HTML validator like
w3.org
Images and video - question the use of every image to convey the
message Of Of each page. Images slowdown what page loading time. Always
optimize each image before you upload it to make sure it condenses to the
right width and height and is designed for web browsing. Always add an ALT
text (this is an HTML script that allows alternative text when non-textual
elements such as images). Typically used to show a short description of
an image when hovering the curser over it.to the images source to help searchbots understand what the image is
showing.
Frames - avoid losing frames whenever possible because there are
difficult to navigate, difficult to design, stop searchbots from caching (a
search engine crawls and ranks URLs using algorithms and places them in a
database hierarchically),
important pages and confusing for users trying to bookmark a particular page .
Writing Text (Things to Avoid):-
-
Long sentences without excessive use
of flowery language;
-
Centre text as it makes it more
difficult to read the page;
-
A range of colours and sizes in your
text (instead try and stick to one colour and font size)
-
Italic or underline too much as is
confusing on the eye;
-
Only capital letters what To make up
words of paragraphs of importance
Guide to Website Design
