10 USABILITY PRINCIPLES FOR WEB DESIGN

1. Motivate – Design your website to meet specific user goals.

2. User Taskflow – What are your users tasks and online environment? For a site to be usable, page flow must match workflow.

3. Architecture – Build an efficient navigational structure. Remember if it can’t be found in 3 clicks; they’re gone.

4. Affordance makes obvious – Make controls understandable, avoiding confusion between emblems, banners, and buttons.

5. Replicate – and use consistent color, themes, and navigation throughout your web site.

6. Usability – Test users with prototypes early in the design. Don’t wait until the end when it’s too late.

7. Know technological limits – identify and optimize for target browsers and user hardware; test HTML, JavaScripts, etc. for compatibility.

8. Know user tolerances – they tend to be impatient. Design for a 2-10 second maximum download. Reuse graphics so they can be loaded from cache. Avoid excessive scrolling.

9. Multimedia – good animation attracts attention to specific information, then stops. Too much movement distracts reading and slows comprehension.

10. Use Stats – Monitor traffic through your site. Which pages pique user interest? Which pages make users leave? Adjust the site accordingly.

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What Makes a Website Effective?

3 things that make a website effective:

1. Keep it Simple

Use easy to understand English, instead of the nerd-jargon or inside lingo that is often seen and only understood by those most close to the subject. Provide a message that kids as young as 10 and retired persons in their 80's can understand and really know what you are trying to say and sell.

2. And Practical

Leverage your many years of experience to help filter out all but most essential parts of your message. Use graphics that are understandable and are on-point with respect to the products or services that you are promoting. Don’t overwhelm your audience and the internet with volumes of information that take time to be displayed.

3. And Concise

The shortest distance between to points is a straight line - draw that straight line for your website! By steering clear of long-winded discussions and useless nerd-theory and yammering, you have a much better chance of getting your message across.

People’s attention span is relatively short. If you don’t follow these basic steps, you will not get your message to your website viewers and thus your website will be mostly ineffective.

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A PICTURE IS WORTH 1,000 WORDS

This statement refers to the idea that complex stories can be described with just a single still image, or that an image may be more influential than a substantial amount of text. It also aptly characterizes the goals of visualization where large amounts of data must be absorbed quickly.
I completely agree with this principle and encourage clients to utilize graphics and photos in their websites. They are both visually eye-catching as well as informative.

However, one has to be careful that the beneficial use of graphics and photos do not pose the detrimental side effect of slowing down page rendering. Slow page rendering can be very frustrating and will surely drive Internet visitors away from a website.

Thus, care must be taken to ensure that images used on a website load quickly. To do this a number of considerations must be made. Image files should be as small as possible without dostorting/loosing resolution and clarity. There are a number of tools available that can be used to adjust images to provide very reasonable clarity and color and at the same time maintain a reasonable small size. Other tricks, where many images on a page are available are to pre-load the most importatnt images, e.g. headers, logos, etc., so that a viewer knows very quickly what he/will be looking at.

The truth remains that “a picture is worth 1,000 words” and even more so on the Internet where viewers are looking for as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time. When designing a website, one just has to apply a few techniques to ensure that the pictures show up on the screen in a timely manner.

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Build It and They Will Come... Almost!

If you are in business in this day and age, you must have a website to describe your products and services. You can be sure that your major competition is already using the Internet to promote their business.

The cost of developing websites is continuingly rising. Businesses are paying from $3,000 to $5000, to $10,000 to have their websites build today, depending on complexity and functionality.

However, even with a website, you still have to market your website. You have to have mechanisms that draw or send people to your website.

One such method is Search Engine Optimization, more commonly referred to as SEO. SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. SEO will be the subject of future bolgs.

Another, surprisingly often overlooked method is done by including ones website address in their advertising, brochures and signage, stationary; any where that their business name is displayed. People then will know where to go to find out more about you, your business, and examples and testimonials of your work. It is amazing how people will spend time and money for the development of their website and completely forget that they have to let other people know that it exists and how to get to it.

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SPRING CLEANING YOUR WEBSITE

Here are some things to consider relative to spring cleaning a website:

• Give your website, especially your home page, a facelift. Redo your banner/header, replace old graphics with new ones, change colors if and where appropriate, and write a new introduction.
  
  
• Update your content: messages, keywords, products, services, pricing, locations, contacts, etc. Remember, like cash, “Content is King.”
  
  
• Clean-up dead links, outdated information, etc. People get annoyed and frustrated when encountering out-of-date information and more especially, broken links.
  
  
• Consider adding new features/content to your website; such as:
  
  • What’s New page
    
  • Resources Page
    
  • FAQ and/or Tips Page
  
  
  
• Also, if you are in the business of selling products or services, consider offering a printable discount coupon as an incentive for your website viewers.

Remember, Spring is a time of renewal and it is a good time to clean up your website as well as your house. A stale and outdated website turns off views. So take this opportunity to refresh and renew your site. This will send the message to viewers that you are very much alive and well!

Happy cleaning…

Picking A Good Domain Name Is Important!

You can't underestimate how important choosing a good domain name is. Let’s take a look at what makes a good domain name:

1. It is short – Until people bookmark your site name, the fewer keystrokes, the more likely it will be that a potential visitor will land on your site the first and every time.

2. It is easy to remember – People will not waste time trying to think of what your website name is.

3. It is easy to spell – Watch out for the spelling impaired and fat-fingered typists (like me).

4. It is descriptive or brandable – A name that goes without saying!

5. If possible avoid hyphens and numbers. Though there may be instances where these may be appropriate; e.g. Flight93memorialproject.org or chick-fil-a.com.

6. It has a .com extension if at all possible for a commercial business. However, organizations should consider the .org extension and with the continuous growth of the number of sites in the world wide web, in some cases commercial operations may have to consider either the .net or .biz extensions.

6-Step Website Development Process

6-Step Website Development Process

There are a number of steps in the website design and development process. The number will vary slightly from designer to designer, but basically the process can be summarized by the following six steps:
1. Information Gathering
2. Planning
3. Design
4. Development
5. Testing and Delivery
6. Maintenance

Phase 1: Information GatheringThe first step in designing a successful website is to gather information. Many things need to be taken into consideration when the look and feel of a website is created. This first step is actually the most important in that involves a solid understanding of the company or organization that the website is being created for. It is important that a web designer start off by asking lots of questions to help them understand the target business and needs in a website.

Things to consider in this step include:
• Purpose - What is the purpose of the site? Should the site provide information, promote a service, sell a product… ?
• Goals - What is expected to be accomplished by building the website? Two of the more common goals are either to make money or share information.
• Target Audience – Who are the specific people that will help you reach your goals? It is helpful to picture the “ideal” person trageted to visit the website. Consider the demographics: age, sex or interests - this will later help determine the best design style for the website.
• Content - What kind of information will the target audience be looking for? Are they looking for specific information, a particular product or service, online ordering…?

Phase 2: Planning
Using the information collected from the first phase, the next step is to put together a plan for the website. At this point a site map is developed. The site map is a list of all main topic areas of the site, as well as sub-topics, where applicable. This serves as a guide as to what content and structure will be on the site, and is essential to developing a consistent, easy to understand navigational system. The end-user of the website - aka your customer - must be kept in mind when designing the site, after all, these people who will be buying your products or learning about your services. A good user interface creates an easy to navigate website

Phase 3: Design
With the information gathered up to this point, it’s time to determine the look and feel of the site. A web designer may create one or more prototype designs for the website. This can be accomplished using graphic (bmp or jpg) images of what the final design will look like or developing prototype pages that can be viewed by access to a non-public area of the website. This latter approach also facilitates review of work in progress.

Either way, the designer should allow previewing of the website project throughout the design and development stages. The most important reason for this is that it gives you the opportunity to express your likes and dislikes on the site design. In this phase, communication between both you and your designer is crucial to ensure that the final website will match your needs and taste. It is important to work closely together, exchanging ideas, until you arrive at the final design for your website.

Phase 4: Development
The developmental stage is the point where the website itself is created. At this time, a web designer will take all of the individual graphic elements from the prototype and use them to create the actual, functional site. This is typically done by first developing the home page, followed by a “shell” for the interior pages. The shell serves as a template for the content pages of your site, as it contains the main navigational structure for the web site. Once the shell has been created, the designer will take your content and distribute it throughout the site, in the appropriate areas.

This entire time, a designer should continue to make your in-progress website available to you for previewing, so that you can suggest any additional changes or corrections you would like to have done.

Phase 5: Testing & Delivery
At this point, web designers will attend to the final details and test the website. They will test things such as the complete functionality of forms or other scripts, as well last testing for last minute compatibility issues (viewing differences between different web browsers), ensuring that your website is optimized to be viewed properly in the most recent browser versions.

Once you give your web designer final approval, it is time to ‘Launch’ the site where the website is either uploaded to the hosting server, or the website is moved from a non-public area to the public area on the hosting server. Most web designers offer domain name registration and web hosting services as well. Once these accounts have been setup, and your website uploaded to the server, the site should be put through one last run-through. This is just precautionary, to confirm that all files have been uploaded correctly, and that the site continues to be fully functional.
This marks the official launch of your site, as it is now viewable to the public.

Phase 6: Maintenance
The development of a website is not necessarily over, though. One way to bring repeat visitors to your site is to offer new content or products on a regular basis. Most web designers will be more than happy to continue working together with you, to update the information on your website. Many designers offer maintenance packages at reduced rates, based on how often you anticipate making changes or additions to your website.

Other maintenance type items include SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SES (Search Engine Submission). This is the optimization of you web site with elements such as title, description and keyword tags which help your web site achieve higher rankings in the search engines. The previously mentioned code validation is something that plays a vital role in SEO, as well.
There are a lot of details involved in optimizing and submitting your website to the search engines - enough to warrant it’s own post. This is a very important step, because even though you now have a web site, you need to make sure that people can find it!

The Bottom Line
All in all, your web designer should work closely with you on a very similar process to this one. A good working relationship with your designer, including an open line of communication, is important to ensure they are creating a successful web site that will help your business grow.