Website Design

The success of your website can be ensured provided you make it attractive and allow people the benefits of loitering around as they like. A good website design is required to ensure all this. What constitutes a good website design? Let abcdesigning explain.

In some ways a website is like a departmental store. In a departmental store you have the freedom to go around looking at the products, look at the prices tags and decide whether you want to buy the item at the stated price. Now imagine a departmental store that has an automatic door to allow entry into the store. You stand in front of the door waiting for it to open. After you have waited for five full minutes, you find the door is yet to open. You find a number of other departmental stores in the same street, apparently offering the same goods and service. What would you do? I’ll bet you’ll move to the next store that you can find and get into it. No matter how good the first store is inside.

Once you get inside the store let’s say that items are arranged in a haphazard manner making it difficult for a visitor to go around on his or her own and find things. Say, for example, there are no signboards to inform the visitor where to find things, and there is no logical grouping of items. Your reaction is simple – you walk out. Just imagine all these things happening in a well publicized store that many people throng, only to find that they cannot get in or having entered are unable to find what they want. The owner of the store has not only thrown a lot of money in getting the people to the store, but has also paid for bad publicity!

These things seem obvious when we are talking about a store. Unfortunately, very often people fail to see that the same principles are at work in a website also, resulting in faulty website design. Websites that take ages to load, do not allow easy navigation and does not logically group information is sure drive away a number of potential visitors. Taking a number of well thought out steps to attract traffic to sites at great cost is of no use if you cannot satisfy the visitors, and that needs the following:

• Your website design should be such that the site loads fast: That’s like saying that you need fast transport to reach office. What if you have only a bicycle? Even if you have a car to travel in, what about the traffic on the road? The plain fact is that there are too many variables that affect the speed with which your site loads, and you cannot set an absolute standard for the speed at which it will load, and incorporate that into the website design. However, you can and should know how long would be long enough for your visitors to call off their attempt. Generally, this should not exceed a few seconds. But then this depends on the type of connection that your visitor has, and you have to provide for slow connections also. To take care of all these possibilities, you may have to do the following:

• Measure the speed of loading regularly with different types of connection. Doing this once, when you first do the website design may not be enough, and you may have to repeat this procedure regularly.

• Your website design should provide for meaningful and friendly messages that will reassure your visitors in case it takes a long time to load. Provide for alternatives, if the site doesn’t load within a stipulated time.

• Remember that many of your visitors may not be having a high-speed connection. The website design should be done keeping a low speed connection in mind.

• Cut out unnecessary overheads like too much animation, and keep the homepage simple in your website design.

• Your site should be attractively laid out: It should not have too many frills. Don’t overdo the effects. That can be very irritating. Choose colors that are sober and easy on the eyes. Make sure that the fonts are easily readably and font colors offer sufficient contrast to the background. You can find a number of sites that do not take care of these. Make sure that your website design takes into account all these issues.

• The website design should ensure that it is easy to navigate in your site: Make sure that your visitors can go from page to page using either keyboard or mouse. Make the descriptions clear and self-explanatory. Wherever relevant and possible the website design should provide for bubble/Tool tip help that displays details of a particular choice when the visitor to your site moves her mouse over a particular item.

In short, make sure that your website design is such that it is a pleasure for a visitor to visit and move around. Think of your website as a departmental store, even if you don’t sell anything, and check whether your wares are attractively and neatly laid out and are easy to find. Keep visiting your own site often and check whether these criteria are being fulfilled, and make sure that they are included in your website design.