Building Good Web
Sites
The key components of a good web
site are:
Before you start to build your site
you should know who your audience is and what your goals for the site are.
It helps to
put this down on paper. Think about what
your user is interested in and tantalize her on the home page. (Your user is probably not interested
in details about you or your organization.)
Once you know that it is time to map
out an overall organization for your site.
Does it
have several major pieces? What are
they? How are they organized? Will the sections matter to the users? (For example, at Amazon it matters to the
user whether they are in the books section or the music section; for a high
school senior considering
Related
information should be kept together, again, so as t make it easier for the
user.
It should be easy for a user to get
around your site.
Every page
should have a link back to the home page.
If the site
is divided into sections, every page should have a link to the beginning of its
section, or links to the beginnings of all the sections.
If you
expect a lot of complicated surfing at your site, you need more navigational
aids, so that users don’t have to click too many times to get to what they
want.
Keep you
navigation consistent and always in the same place on all the pages (e.g. left
or top).
Have a consistent “look and feel”
which is appropriate for your intended audience.
Users are
comforted by knowing they haven’t left the site.
For a large
site there may be some subtle differences between major sections of the site. Once you have identified your audience and
site goals, and organized the site, choose colors, type of images, if any.
Keep you design simple
While
professional graphic designers may be able to carry off a complex design, the
rest of us are usually better off keeping things simple.
Our eyes
(usually) appreciate simple proportions such as 1:1, 1:2, 1:3 etc. If you design with tables try using those
proportions (e.g. by specifying column widths in percents or by choosing pixels
in appropriate ratios.)
Background
and text colors should be chosen so as to make the site readable.
Of course,
use browser-safe colors.
Keep your writing concise and
grammatically correct
In general
people have a harder time reading text on-line than in print. So it is acceptable to make both your
sentences and your paragraphs shorter on-line than you would in print.
Of course,
you must pay attention to grammar and spelling.
Page size and organization
Users have an easier time scrolling up and down than left and right.
Try to make
your pages no more than 1 screen full, unless there is a very good reason to do
otherwise.
As long as
there are still a lot of people of dial-up, try to keep your page size below
50k (add up the size of all your images.)
Respect your users
Unless
there is a good reason to do so, leave links in the standard color.
Do not
underline text which isn’t linked. It
confuses people.
Do not say
“click here.”
Do not give
them a totally useless home page just so you can show off your selection of
images or tout yourself. Users’ time is
valuable.
Check your
page against the sites for color blind users.
Use alt in your image tags – it allows your
user to move on quickly while images load and it helps search engines to find
your page.
For commercial and organizational
sites
Make it
easy for users to contact you if that is appropriate (e.g. for a store or
organization). Include a “mailto” or
phone number.
If you are
designing a site for a political or advocacy organization be
sure to include an “About Us” section to build credibility.