Design Matters

Design

Design Matters

1.	Keep It Simple
	Cause Time is Money
	Studies have shown that most people will wait an average of 15 seconds for a website to become clear before going somewhere else. This means you have 15 seconds to capture the attention of a new visitor to your website. If your website takes too long to load, is confusing, is crammed with too much information, is too busy, is too annoying, or is just plain ugly, the visitor will give up on your site and probably never return. For that reason, advertisements, pop-ups, animated and flashy images, high contrast or otherwise obnoxious colour choices, automatic music, crammed pages, long pages, and too much information on each page should be avoided if possible. The key is FOCUS. Don’t waste people’s time with big files that take forever to load, or ads that they have to wait for in order to get where they are going. Don’t distract from the focus of your site or page with garish colour choices, music they can’t turn off, or animated gifs. Your site needs to be well planned so that each page has a clear and obvious focus and sticks to it. The information should be balanced by enough “white space” (empty space), so that it doesn’t overwhelm the reader. If the site is cluttered by pop-ups, advertisements, too many different ideas and busy backgrounds, the reader will spend a lot of their time just trying to get past it all and could easily miss the entire message of the site. You have your reader’s undivided attention for at least 15 seconds. You do not need to be flashy and garish to get your point across – understatement and simplicity actually works very well on websites. Most people are often already overwhelmed, put off, and possibly even frustrated by the time they land on your site. Give them a break. Keep it simple.
2.	Beginners Mind
	Zen is the Art but Content is King
	Besides general clutter, there is nothing worse than a website without adequate information. Not having enough information about who you are and what you offer, or having that information badly organized is almost as annoying as popups. A lot of small businesses, artists and even large corporations know that they should have a website but don’t really know what to fill it up with. Planning content therefore, should be one of your first steps and shouldn’t be rushed through. In the end websites aren’t really about flashy design – websites are about the content – good design is just the way in which we can assure that people get to the content they want, when they want it, and without a lot of hassle. So, in the end, if you have no content, no amount of design tools and pretty images will make your website good and effective. Think about your customers, your readers, your clients. Who are they? Why are they coming to your site? What might they want to know about you? If you were looking for the information or products or experience you offer what would you need to know? Try to step back from everything you know about yourself and your business and approach it from the point of view of a beginner. Then write down all the things you would want to know from your website – if you absolutely knew nothing to begin with. After this initial brainstorming you can start grouping areas of information into categories and mapping your site effectively. Although this is a step a lot of people want to avoid, you simply cannot. It is important to take the time to creating meaningful content if you want an effective website.
3.	Location, Location, Location
	Web Estate
	People are often under the impression, that in the land of websites, there are no bad addresses. True, there aren’t any physical addresses at all. However, when it comes to websites, bad location is often built right into the code. There are ways to build websites that make it standout more on the massive highways of search engines and there are ways of making websites more obscure. This may not be an issue for you if your website is intended to be small and you are not worried about traffic. However, if you are interested in maximizing traffic, you must discuss your goals with your designer at the beginning of development because these goals must be built into the code. If you are going the D.I.Y route, do some research on Search Engine Optimization before you start building your site. Spending a lot of time, energy and money building a beautiful masterpiece of a website can seem fairly tragic if no one ever visits. Of course traffic goals have to be reasonable. Small websites are small websites and will be ranked so by large search engines. And a small website is never going to have Wikipedia type numbers no matter how visible it is. However, putting up a few signs on the highway can at least ensure that you are easy to find when people go looking for you.
4.	Don't Be Rude
	How to Be a Gracious guest on Someone's Screen
	Telling someone who has just visited your website that they need to adapt their system or preferences by downloading complicated programs, changing browsers, listening to things they don’t want to listen to, or waiting for ads they don’t want to see in order to have the honor of viewing your website is rude. If you are offering something so unbelievably great and unique that you think you can afford these tactics, then maybe you can get away with such behaviour. However, if you actually want your customers to have a pleasant time on your site you need to build your website to accommodate as many systems and needs as possible. This means testing and more testing. Testing other browsers, old browsers, various system preferences and giving your customers options. There may be very good reasons why your customer blocks all pop-ups or doesn’t download images, or doesn’t want to sit through a flash intro. Let them be in control. It is, in fact, their environment. You, through your website, are a temporary guest on their screen and in their space. Make sure you behave graciously.
5.	Link, Link and Double Link
	Put the "Web" in Website
	A good navigation system should be like the arteries in a body. It should reach every cell as directly as possible. Your navigation should be consistent and redundant to achieve this. It should stick to it’s own rules and offer many ways of getting to all the pages. People are different, they operate differently, they learn differently and will respond differently to the navigation cues you give them. Therefore you need to offer as many options as possible and keep the options consistent throughout the site. People shouldn’t have to learn a new way of navigating every time they land on a new page, so don’t change the rules on them mid-ride. If possible make sure that every page can be reached from every page or be, at the most, 3 clicks away. Even if it seems redundant to you to repeat links in different areas of each page – it gives your visitors control over how they read and use your site. The “3 click rule” is important – you should be able to get to any information and any page, without having to click more than 3 times. And in the end, the more internal links you have, like all links, the better you look to search engines anyway.
6.	Beauty Matters
	The Aesthetic of Feedback
	Many of us live in an overwhelming, distracting and often ugly urban environment. Creating a little beauty lets people relax, slow down and take a breath when they visit. Taste is subjective, of course so it’s important to run your design by as many people as possible to get a wide variety of opinions. This is not about personal taste, (unless the website is about your personality). This is not like picking a colour for your bedroom. This is about making the website as appealing as possible to your target audience, and this often requires testing and research. Do not let your personal love of bright orange on black get in the way of your baby clothes website. Don’t let your love of animated, sparkly, blinking bunny rabbits override all other concerns for your website about your legal counseling service. If people are telling you that your website is ugly. Take it seriously and bring some beauty into the world.