Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Website Layout and Design

By Stephen Grisham Sr.

Visitors will find it difficult to make a purchase or even find the information they are searching for on sites with poor navigation or bad functionality. On a poorly designed site, it can be difficult to know what to do next, once you've found what you're looking for. If you want your visitors to take any sort of 'action', you need to give them some clues as to what that may be.

It will be difficult to sell your product if your buy-it page link is hard to find. One of the most important issues in web design is ease of functionality, and clear buttons and links will make your site much easier for visitors to read and navigate.

Users are less likely to take action if their attention is distracted by something on the page. The number of pages users must navigate between the point of entry and the point of sale should be as few as possible.

Navigating the site and using the hyperlinks ought to be user-friendly. The navigation section ought to be plainly delineated from the page's primary content. In addition, anyone browsing your site should be able to locate the information they need in three clicks or less. Ask a group of individuals to proceed through your site with assigned tasks, and observe if they experience any issues. Also ask them for a report on how user-friendly they found it to be. Next, perform any modifications according to what they observed and reported.

Another issue that pops up with some websites is the issue of presentation vs. substance. One example of this would be the use of Flash. If too much Flash is used, pages can take too much time to load, leading to boredom for your visitors. Even more important, too many distractions on the page can take away from your intended message. Style should be subordinate to the content, not the other way around. Extras like animation, graphics and video, among others, have a place to be used on your site, but be sure these 'extras' don't crowd out or distract from your central message.

A different issue happens if you construct an attractive and instructive site, and then neglect it. The information becomes stale in just a few months. Countless outdated online sites exist, and anyone visiting one of these outdated websites is bound to feel let down and will rarely make a return trip to that site.

Confirm or validate your website. In the event your site won't 'validate', then you have to rely to a degree on the browser's 'guess' on how the site should render; understand certain browsers are more accommodating with this than others. If you haven't tried out your website with each of the typical browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox), you won't know for sure how it looks on the monitors for your intended audience.

Ease of Access. Make your content easy to understand for a large number of users. Place links to your main content immediately below your site's header image so that those using screen readers can jump straight to what they're looking for without having to listen to the navigation on every page. Don't forget to test your site to ensure that colorblind people can easily use it.

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