Sound Strategy
Ten Tips for Better Web Site Design
- Clearly and consistently identify your site and slogan on all pages.
A natural approach is to use the same logo in the same location on all pages.
It's useful to include a pithy slogan or catch phrase that encapsulates
what you're about as an agency.
- Include a directory of the site's most important sections on the home
page. About 20% of users are link-dominant and like to browse their way
through sites. Make the link descriptions clear and obvious.
- Provide site search capability on every page on your Web site. About
half Web users are search-dominant and find their way through Web sites
primarily by doing searches. Provide site search capability on every page
on your Web site.
- Include announcements about changes, new products and services, press
coverage, and so on on your home page You may want to devote a particular
part of the home page to "news" and refresh it at least monthly.
- Avoid splashy home page screens, especially those that display the virtuosity
of your Webmaster, but because they supply so little information are really
nothing more than a door the visitor must open to find out whether you've
got what they want.
- When viewing each page on your site, your visitor wants to know:
Where am I? - so provide your site name, general section, and page
name on each page
Where have I been? - ideally, show the path they took to get there
Where can I go? - pages below this one but also how to get back to
the home page and related pages on this same level
- Design your site around a structure or skeleton that makes sense to your
visitor and their concerns. It should represent how they view your business
from their needs point of view rather than how you view your business. A
site without a good architecture invites chaos and creates frustrated visitors
- Make use of Web conventions. Unlike software in Windows, where Microsoft
has established de facto standards, Web conventions develop, evolve, and
disappear in a free-flowing marketplace of ideas. Users have become conditioned
to some common patterns of site design and navigation. Make use of the most
common and best. Don't try to be creative, unless you've got a really good
reason.
- Make it easy for users to retrace their navigation and start again without
bumbling down the same pathways. In the software world the application controls
the user. In the Web world, the user is in charge and will certainly do
what to you makes no sense whatever. They'll click the first link that looks
promising. They won't read your carefully edited text. Look at each page
from the point of view of someone who got there by mistake. Studies show
that users are almost always on the wrong page.
- Don't provide links to unfinished parts of your site, providing an "under
construction" message when the visitor gets there. The visitor doesn't want
to know about what you intend to do sometime in the future. They're in your
site right now. They want to know what you have right now and how to find
it.
Digested from Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Site Usability
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