I recently gained a number of web clients. Most of my day to day work is maintenance and add-on information to the sties. But some of the sites need an overhaul. So not being one to think I know everything, I decided to research and research. I want to make sure I keep in mind the most important things about web design while I work on these new designs. I can boil my research down to some common sense rules as well as a number of commandments. The rules are things you can break from time to time if necessary. If you don’t follow the commandments, however, you will lose visitors.
Rule 1
Keep it simple. Create a web site that has a well defined purpose. Don’t be afraid to break pages up to ensure that each page has a singular focus. Don’t be afraid of white space in your design. And don’t be afraid of simple navigation.
Rule 2
Every page is a home page, treat it that way. With the way search engines catalog sites, potentially every page can be the first page a visitor sees. You need to make sure that the purpose of the site is well communicated on every page.
Rule 3
Make the site appropriate for your audience. This means don’t use too many colors or design something just because you think it’s cool. The site has to stand on it’s own with out you trying to explain why you went a certain design direction. The same goes with the use of cool fonts. I like using cool fonts as well as the next person, but don’t use it unless appropriate, and don’t expect your visitors to have the same fonts loaded on their system. There’s a reasons there is a standard set of fonts.
Rule 4
If you are designing for a customer, make sure all of your source files are available for someone else to take over the site. I know that this goes against everything you have been taught about protecting your work. But face it, there is nothing you can create that someone else can’t re-create or improve on. So make it easy for you and your customer to make changes to the site. I have a directory on the server where I put all of my source files. You never know if you are going to suddenly have to stop supporting a site due to illness or injury. It also gives you the perfect place to keep your files so they aren’t wasting space on your hard disk.
Rule 5
Make the site accessible. This means don’t use the latest plugins. Design for the web browser and machine you used at least a year ago. Not everyone is going to have the latest and greatest hardware or the desire to upgrade plugins just ot view a page. Also don’t expect everyone to have a large screen or have the exact browser you have. So test your design on smaller screens and older browser versions.
Rule 6
Make your site printable. People do want to print pages. This doesn’t mean that every page has to be directly printable. You can create a special style sheet for printing tasks if your pages aren’t directly printable. Either way, people do print pages, don’t make it difficult to print.
Commandment 1
Pages must load fast, fast, fast. Do every thing you can to optimize your pages without sacrificing quality. Slow loading pages is the #1 way of losing visitors. This means you need to optimize your images, break up content into multiple pages, and don’t make media the only focus on a page. If the visitor wants to see/hear the media (video, flash animation or music) let them choose to start it when they are ready.
Commandment 2
Content is king. If you don’t have content, don’t post an “under construction” place holder page. The Internet by its very nature is always under construction. Telling someone that the page isn’t there isn’t necessary. The site is about content, not wishful thinking. This doesn’t mean that you can’t announce the direction of your site and the features it will have in the future.
Commandment 3
Respect your visitors and the search engines at the same time. You can design a site for both. Learn how. Doing both is a necessity in the web design world.
Commandment 4
Easy navigation is your responsibility. Visitors shouldn’t have to try to figure out how to get from page to page. It should be obvious where the visitor needs to click to go to another page. Also you should use standard names for common pages on your site. There are words people looking for to go to certain pages, don’t be cute. Cute in navigation is confusing and will just make you lose visitors.
Commandment 5
The most important part of your page goes in the upper left corner. That’s the most visible portion of the page when it first loads. Don’t make your visitors hunt. Really, the design of the page is very important. Squeeze your browser window down from time to time to make sure the most important information on your page can be easily seen.
Commandment 6
Proofread and spell check. And when you are done with that proofread and spell check. Then get someone else to proofread and spell check. Then you do it again. One thing that helps me is to read everything out loud. I find more misused words that way.
And finally I like to leave you with what I consider the single most important commandment of web design:
Commandment 0
Your reputation is the most important tool you have. Protect it above all else. Once you have a bad reputation, you can never get it back to good. People talk and word of mouth is the way you get customers. A web designer with a good reputation will have more customers than they can handle.
