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As you may have noticed by now – the future is on the internet.
Imagine a time when you googled a particular service or product. You probably clicked on the first couple of links, and then you were done. Think about the fact that there may be businesses out there that could provide a better service, but they simply do not have a website yielding them virtually invisible to the online community.
This could be happening to you!
We’ve got a fully equipped staff ready to build your companies website from the ground up. Check out our available packages and contact us to work in specifics. Virtually everything can be accomplished online these days so it is only natural to conclude that one of the most important tools to have as a business is an appealing website.
What exactly makes an appealing website?
The answers fall under 2 main categories: – Functionality – Usability Your website must serve a purpose. Whether it be purely for advertising, e-commerce, or whatever. Unfortunately, the average user has an attention span of about 7 seconds. They need to be able to use your website for it’s intended purpose quickly and effectively and then get out alive. This idea ties a bit into the second main category, usability. Usability is key! What is it? It is important to realize that usability is not a single, one-dimensional property of a user interface. Usability is a combination of factors including:
- Ease of learning – How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it sufficiently well to accomplish basic tasks?
- Efficiency of use – Once an experienced user has learned to use the system, how fast can he or she accomplish tasks?
- Memorability – If a user has used the system before, can he or she remember enough to use it effectively the next time or does the user have to start over again learning everything?
- Error frequency and severity – How often do users make errors while using the system, how serious are these errors, and how do users recover from these errors?
- Subjective satisfaction – How much does the user like using the system?
Tying this information into the production of websites
Navigation: The website needs to have simple and clean navigation. The user should never get confused when traveling through your website. This means that your should have 1 or 2 navigation menus for the user to understand. When you start to have too many menus the user will indefinitely find themselves navigating in a loop. There should not be 15 different ways to get to 1 page.
No Flash : We do not support the usage of flash for a couple of reasons. For starters, not all web browsers support flash, so if your main content is flash-based then you are shielding your entire website from valuable traffic which is never good. Granted it may “look awesome”, there are other more professional ways to create said awesomeness using Javascript and such. Another problem with flash is that search engine’s have trouble viewing your website as well. Taking Google for example, when their spiders roam around looking for content to bring up it will only see the flash file that is playing, but not the content. Without flash the spider can easily view the text on the website and ultimately increase the number of users on your website through search engine traffic. Our third issue with flash is that it does nothing for our users with disabilities. The blind community uses a popular piece of software called Jaws that reads the source code of a webpage aloud so that they can still get the content. When you use flash the software is not able to read the flash file because flash is basically a clickable movie. How do you expect their software you read a movie? However, when you use Javascript, and CSS the user will be able you read your content just fine.
Simplicity This ties in a lot with navigation. We talked about how the proper use of menus is very important, but it does not stop there. Blinking, sliding text, or random links around the page should be avoided at all times. We do not need things that will distract the user from their task at hand. You may be wondering, “if it is really important, we NEED the text to blink or make noise”, but that is not true. Rather your site should be designed in a way that the user should get that information without it having to blink at your face.
Color Scheming : It is important to stick with a color scheme that the user will be able to use throughout the website. Color schemes are important because it lets the user know that they are on the same site, and that navigation has not thrown them somewhere else. It just provides a simple commonality between all of your pages. Also you want to make sure that you do not have 5 different colors for links. The user will not know what is what, and they will leave your page. There are several other factors that one could address to ensure outstanding usability, however I feel that we’ve covered the basics. Now feel free to contact us about a web design project that you make have in mind, and we’ll get started!
