Important W ebsite Design Information - Print Design is Not W ebsite Design !
Websites need a strategy and implementation plan, and website owners should know there is a big difference between a graphic designer "who makes websites" and a real website master or website agency. A website is a multi dimensional interactive experience and it is significantly different than the thought process that goes into making a flat design for printing. In 2010 and beyond, website owners need to make smart moves, and hiring the right website design company will save a ton of money and time. Below are some quick website tips and guidance about website design before you start your project: 1. Do not hire a print graphic designer who "also does websites, sometimes." You will be calling ATAK Interactive or an agency like ours in a few months. Print designers are great...at print design. The strategy of website design is completely different. This also applies to home network engineers who "do websites sometimes." Businesses need a web development team who knows how to think "web" and understand user experience planning. 2. Does your site have a landing page, or a flash intro? If it does, start over. If your website requires the home page to load and then launches in a pop up (mostly a flash site issue), start over. Get your message to your users within a couple of seconds and they will stay. It is hard to keep people watching the "show" whether audio or video or both for too long. Web sites DO NOT need to load in a pop up window and do not need 20 second sequences to get the message across. 3. Your website content is just as important as your website design. Search engines love KEYWORD RICH TEXT. Make sure your home page has a welcome message with keywords users will use to find your service or goods. The website design agency you hire should provide you with some recommendations or a quote to do this for you. 4. Don't hide what you do. People want to understand your business and figure your site out fast. Hit users with a strong message and guide the user types to the sections
you want each to see. Segment your site by allocating clear sections to important/featured pieces you want users to see and let them dig deeper by clicking on prominent call to action buttons. Make it clear for users to get to where they need to go. 5. Make your buttons easy to understand. Redesign your buttons or place them more prominently if your users cannot tell where your website buttons will take them. 6. Follow navigation standards and best practices. People are used to common standards where the navigation is across the top or on the left hand side. User tend to be annoyed and lost in your site if you over design and get inefficiently creative. Websites with inefficiencies quickly lose their interest. Also make sure to have a contact us page and a site map because they are essential for search and the conversion of traffic to $$$$. Study competitors too, and beat them. 7. Users will leave immediately if your website is designed for broadband users only. Many people still have slow mobile networks and home networks...believe it. Make your home page, especially, as fast loading as possible. Use large file types and high resolution graphics files on inner website pages, when and only if users are specifically requesting it. 8. If you have a search feature, make sure it is necessary and useful. A 7 page website does not need a search field. Sites should be easy enough to navigate without them. If you have a ton of products for your ecommerce website, search could very well be needed. Sometimes advanced search works even better. Make sure your search tool works! 9. If you put audio or video with audio on your website, let users turn it off. People browse at work, on a bus, at the mall...everywhere. Embarrass them and they will resent you. ATAK Interactive recommends you make the default setting for any home page music as off, and let users click on the on button if they want to hear your site music. 10. When you have a landing page that says "would you like to visit our high resolution site or our low resolution site" you are really asking your potential customer, "would you like to go to my ugly store, or my pretty one?" You have a poor website design if your website asks users if they would like to open a low or high bandwidth website. The same principal applies. The problem with high bandwidth sites is that they are "supposedly" the better store, but in reality they take forever to load. Think about the user experience and who ATAK Interactive likes to call the "lowest common denominator" (design and program so that the system allows for the simplest minds to understand) and keep it simple, clean, fast, and seo friendly.
11. Text navigations are better than images but this is not a huge deal. We are just saying that, if you can, use text with clever CSS. Again, images and flash are great when used in a smart fashion, but keyword rich text and clean code is really king. 12. Do not, in any way, let your website use any code that forces the user's browser window to resize, reconfigure, whatever. This trick is mostly used in spam websites and people negatively associate that feature automatically. 13. New technology is cool, but it does not mean you need to have it. This happened with some of the more colorful and visual programming languages flash, java, and ajax. Only use these tools when they improve the user experience, not for the sake of technology. Consider your goals. 14. Your website must work in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and should even look good in Opera and on mobile devices if your users require. Welcome to 2010 ladies and gents! Make sure your website designers can do this before you start your new website design project. You cannot afford to lose market share thanks to oversights like this. Some web developers offer these services, but do not include them as standard. Please make sure you ask what systems your website will display on perfectly. 15. Drop down menus are good as compliments but you should always try to get all of your important page titles into your navigations logically (top and left). Make your sites easy to navigate and quickly find information. 16. Deliver your video in an embedded player. Flash video is good and is cross platform and cross browser compatible. This is not necessarily true in the mobile website world yet and mobile website owners need to move with caution right now. Flash is wonderful for animation, interfaces, adding functionality, and more but this DOES NOT mean your entire website needs to be flash. All flash sites set you at a disadvantage in web marketing against smarter competition. You can embed pieces of flash into your smartly coded website. There are exceptions in the cases of companies that have such great brand recognition and outside marketing, that Search traffic is not their primary concern. In those cases the image and quality of brand become the primary focus. Keep these website rules in mind for 2010 and beyond. Your website is your 24/7 business front. Think user experience first, search engines second, browser compatibility third, competitors to beat fourth, and don't forget to hire a website or ecommerce website design company that has a good track record and success stories. Good websites are always changing and improving. Update your website frequently and monitor competition so you make sure to beat them.