Have you ever wondered over the striking similarities among some of the tremendously functional sites of our time? I’m talking about sites like Dell, Amazon, Marshall, Cisco, etc.? Take some time to look through them again and the answer will not elude you.
They are plain and simple. Friendly and functional. No cosmetics. No facelifts. No fuss.
As in other spheres of life, simplicity matters in web design also.
Web design is not a medium to show off your technical prowess. Nor, you are supposed to demonstrate your superb graphic acumen. These are necessary but only in moderation; do not let them dominate over your site friendliness and usability.
Here are some useful and rather important tips that will help you-- turn on the right track--to establishing a site professional in appearance, and advacned in quality and usability.
Word your mission statement and understand your target audience
A mission statement or statement of direction on where the company intends to go in the foreseeable future is critical for any business. It will definitely provide some stability from which the website can springboard forward. To excel on the web, you have to pursue explicit goals. You must be pretty clear on the counts like :
- What's the purpose of the site?
- Who is the site's audience?
- How will success be measured?
- How will you gather feedback and involve your audience in your design?
Mere elevated intentions and a cool design aren't going to sustain your development and production processes if you are missing out a concrete statement of your goals and ways to achieve them. In its sheer absence, a website cannot deliver a consistent, steady message to customers. Therefore, such absence can hardly be a platform for quality.
Give a good thought to your layout and navigation
A clean layout and neat navigation that employs a lot of white space enhances your site's look and appeal. Focus on your content. You may even use dreamweaver templates for your site, where all pages or a group of pages have one basic design and only the content varies. This will be taken note of - hopefully with an appreciative eye.
- Make it sure load time on the site is optimal.
- For making load time low on your site, you can choose from the following options.
- Minimize graphics, flash and scripts, because they occupy too much space ans slow down the loading.
- Optimize your HTML & script code: see to it that your site doesn't have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
- Use server side include (SSI) files: SSI files once called from the web server remain in its cache, and they load faster on subsequent requests.
- While designing, take into account all screen resolutions.
An easy-to-use site always encourages visitors to stay on and read your content. If your site doesn't seem to look good for a particular resolution it is likely that the visitor will close the browser window feeling that the web page doesn’t meet their standards. Therefore, designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution will ensure a visually appealing and professional site.
Make your site interactive and rich in content
To make your website stickier you can add a few simple interactive applications like site polls, surveys, a guest book, an event calendar, newsletter sign-up, etc. Just choose wisely the best fitted application among so many ones on the net.
Macromedia Flash is another way to add interactivity to your site. 95% of the world's browsers have the Flash Player plug-in, so you need to think about compatibility as long as your movie can be played by lower versions of the Flash Player. You may well try having an HTML and Flash Sections "Entry (Splash) Page" if you have a heavy movie to accommodate users on slow connections.
Make your site scalable and cross browser compatible
Making your code and design scalable pays you off well. This is crucial simply because as technology advances and configuration of computers and their monitors keeps increasing and varying, it becomes impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and platforms.
Also, check your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Opera 7.0 and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the world's browsers.
Incorporate consistency all over your website
Consistency is critical not only because it gives your site a more professional look and feel, but also because it makes way for easy navigation. For consistency to pervade throughout your website, try using database templates to create a common look and feel for your site.
Although database template is not always the answer for every web site, especially for smaller sites, it is a big help for all pages in your site to share some common elements. This reflects a high degree of page-to-page consistency. Database templates make it easier to create your site and make it consistent regardless of changes in personnel. Database templates also facilitates to making changes to your site and help you change certain elements without recreating the entire page from scratch
Conclusion: The dividends of simplicity can not be ignored and put at stake.
While designing a website it is important to make sure the site is attractive, fast-loading, user friendly, focuses on your content and has a high stickiness factor to it. This is probably what it takes to be professional in appearance, high in quality, and value added in functionality. Any deviation from the cardinal principles of simplicity may well backfire, and efforts so spent can go down the drain. If you miss out on the finer points of simplicity, stay tuned to face the music.
