Site Design
The design of your
site depends on multiple factors, including your business, your product,
marketing angle, etc. Probably what I can do here is outline in general
what is important in most sites and you will have to fill in the
details.
Don't Reinvent the Wheel
Probably the first
thing you want to do is to visit some of your competitor's sites. It
will give you an idea of what your site could look like, what features
you want for your own site and serve as a starting point for the design
of your site.
Ease of Navigation
In many cases, you
don't read a web site like you would a novel. You don't start from page
1, continue to page 2, and so on.
You would probably
"read" a site like you would a reference book. Maybe you will read the
introduction to get an idea of what the book is about, and then you will
skip to the table of contents to look for the location of the
information that you need. In some cases, you may turn to the index at
the back of the book to see what pages of the book the information you
want is referred to.
Notice the
navigation aids - the table of contents and the index. The first will be
found at the beginning while the second, if available, at the end of the
book. This is a standard observed by all books.
Your site should be as easy to navigate:
Main Menu.
You should have a menu, located either at the top, left or right, that
directs users to the various sections of your site. This menu should be
available from every page of your site, and at the same location.
Site Map.
If your
site is relatively large, and you feel that users may have a problem
locating the information they want even with a main menu, consider
including a site map. Site maps give much more detail than the main menu
and users will have an easier time locating the information they want.
Search Engine.
If your
site is a very large site, including a search engine is a good idea.
Fast Loading Pages
Many webmasters
will have broadband or cable connections and they tend to forget about
the poor souls still struggling with dialup.
It is best that
you keep the size of your pages as small as possible to accommodate the
users with slow connections. A general guideline is to keep the size of
your pages below 100k.
Graphics
Pretty graphics
are nice to look at. But unless your site is about graphics, it's
probably best to keep it to a minimum. It distracts the users from your
site, and increases the load time for your pages.
Don't forget to
optimize the graphics that you use. The jpeg graphic format is a
compressed format. You can choose to compress it as much or as little as
you want. The more you compress it, the smaller it becomes, but the
image is of a lower quality.
To optimize your
jpegs, start with a jpeg of acceptable quality. Save the jpeg with
more compression and view it. If the quality is acceptable, save it
again with even more compression. Do it until you get an image with
unacceptable quality. The image before that will be your optimized
image.
Note that you
cannot go from a low quality image back to a high quality image. So
remember to save your high quality images into a separate directory
before trying any optimization.
Consistency
We discussed
consistency regarding the location of your main menu. This consistency
should extend to all areas of your site. In other words, your fonts,
color scheme, buttons, etc, should be the same for all pages of your
site.
Testing
The computer on
your desk is called a PC, or personal computer. Whenever I am asked why
a particular computer behaves in a strange way, I will remark that the
computer is called a "personal computer", and thus will exhibit its own
personality. :)
Similarly, surfers
viewing your site will also have their own personal computer, with their
own particular combination of software and hardware. Therefore, it is
best to test your site under as many different types and versions of
hardware and software as possible.
Browsers.
Although IE is the dominant browser, someof your users may be
running other browsers like Netscape or Firefox. Test your site in
as many different browsers as you can. Also, don't forget to test it
under different versions of the same browser.
Screen Resolutions.
Don't
forget to test your site under different screen resolutions.
Java
and ActiveX.
Many
sites depend on Java or ActiveX to display properly. If your site
needs a Java enabled browser, try it with Java disabled and see how
it looks. If possible, it is best that your site will function
correctly even if the users have Java or ActiveX disabled.
