Successful Web Design
There is more to creating a successful web site than just
throwing some information on the web. This is a guide designed
for those who are not professional web designers.
#1 Identify Your Goals It is extremely difficult
to design your site if you don't know what you're
designing. It was said that the great sculptor Michelangelo
would look at a block of marble he was about to sculpt and
"see" his finished statue already contained within it. He
characterized the process of sculpting as simply chipping
away the excess from the encased statue. The same foresight
that Michelangelo had is also crucial to designing a
successful web site. You don't have to have every word
worked out before hand, but you should at least know what
pages you would like to start with, how they should be
organized, and what each page will contain. Having this
structure before you start will save hours of rewriting and
headaches later.
If you only have a few pages, identifying your purpose,
structure and content should be fairly easy. In fact, you
can probably do it in your head. But as the size of your
site grows, so does the need for planning. With larger sites
you will need to write down your site's structure and content
so you can refer to it later.
Remember to keep the end user in mind as you design your
site. It doesn't matter if
you know where something
is, what matters is whether the
user who
visits your site can find it. It is usually sufficient to
simply look your site over and make sure nothing is obscure
or hard to find and understand. However, if your site is
large or complicated, it might be a good idea to ask someone
who has not already seen your site to try it out while you
watch. Ask them to find things or perform tasks in the same
way that regular users would. Don't tell them how to do
anything, just watch and note any trouble spots they run
into. These are usually the same trouble spots where real users
will have problems.
#2 Create Clear Organization Unless your site has
has only one page, you will have to worry about
organization. Organizing your content is very important. A
clear organization lets visitors find what they are looking
for quickly and easily, where as poor organization
frustrates visitors and discourages them from using your
site.
The first rule of good organization is to use short,
informative titles. Titles that are long, or don't reflect
their content, are confusing. "Our Full Line of High Quality
Lawn Mower Parts" might make a good link, but as a title it
is much too long. Titles are usually in large fonts and will take up
too much space if you are not careful. Long titles also
create extra work for the visitor because it is hard to scan
them easily. A much better version of the title above would
be "Lawn Mower Parts" or just "Mower Parts."
Excessively short or obscure titles should also be
avoided. "Lawn" or "Section Three" are both bad replacements
for the title above. "Lawn" provides some hint of what the
page contains (lawn mower parts), but it does not give the
user a good idea of what they might find. "Section Three" is
a bad choice because it provides no hint about the page's
contents. Users will often simply skip such pages because
they do not want to take the time to find out what is in
them.
In addition to titling, sites with more than just a few pages
need to deal with categories, and/or sub-pages. Categories
are pages that exist simply to group other pages into
meaningful sets. If, for example, you have many different
services that your company offers, you might want to give
each service its own page. It would be unwieldy to make all
of these services main pages. It would be much better to
simply create one main page called "Services" which
contained general information, and then place the individual
service pages as sub-pages under the main page. When you
arrange pages like this, placing sub-pages under more general
parent pages, you end up with a hierarchy, or tree, of
pages. This is very common on the web, and people
understand this kind of organization very well. The key to
hierarchal organization is choosing intuitive groups that
people will understand. If, in the example above, we had placed
our service pages under the "About Us" page, people
would have a hard time finding them because they would not
expect to find service pages under the "About Us" page.
#3 Make Your Content Interesting and Informative
You want to make your site enjoyable and productive for
your visitors. People usually come to your site looking for
a certain bit of information, or trying to accomplish a
specific task. Make sure that your site allows them to
easily do what they came for. In other words, make it
practical. If you don't, people will not stay at, or return to,
your site.
But on the other hand, don't bore them out their
minds. Looking at raw, uninteresting data doesn't appeal to
anyone for very long. Don't make people rush out of your
site just because the landscape is so dreary. Do your best
to add life to your pages--it will go a long way toward
making your vistors feel welcome.
One way to hold interest is to have nice looking pages. iWeb
Composer has many quality templates that can give your
site a professional feel, but you still need to consider
carefully each page's layout. If a page seems flat or
uninteresting, try adding some pictures to the text. Even
pictures that are not directly related the content can
help liven up your page. Finding the right
picture can sometimes be difficult, but there are many
services on the web, free and otherwise, that are designed
to help you find appropriate images.
Another way to add interest to your site is through the text
content of your pages. A friendly phrase here and there can
make your visitors feel at home. Obviously you should
avoid abusive or crude language, as this can be offensive
to many of your visitors, and usually gains you
nothing. In fact, iWeb Designs refuses to host immoral or
hateful web sites.
#4 Be Aware of Technical Limitations As with any
other medium of communication, the web has its
limitations. Most of these (such as browser differences,
layout, etc.) have been taken care of for you by iWeb
Composer, but there are a few things you must take into
account. One is the disk space and bandwidth of the
server. When a visitor accesses your site, data has to be
sent from the server. Usually this is insignificant and you
won't need to worry about it. But if your site receives
thousands and thousands of hits then you should be prepared
to upgrade your hosting when all of your available bandwidth
is used up. Disk space is also an issue. The several megabytes
provided with the basic iWeb Composer hosting package can
hold hundreds of text documents very easily, but if you
begin placing large photos on your site you may use up disk
space quickly.
Another limitation involves time. People connect to the
internet at different speeds, some faster than others. Many
of your users will be using a slower dial-up connection, so you
should be careful to not load your page with too many large
images. People are likely to leave your site if they cannot
load it in a reasonable amount of time.
One last detail you should be aware of is that not all
browser windows are the same size. Make sure that when you
create your pages you allow some room for differing
sizes. iWeb Composer takes care of most of this for you, but
remember that some visitors may have to scroll down in order
to see content placed lower on your pages. Also, placing too
many top-level pages on your site may cause your links to
not lay out neatly for users with smaller windows.
With iWeb Composer, creating a web site is easy, but in order
to create a successful site you should remember to always
keep the goals of your site in mind as you design it.
