Ever heard the phrase “function over design”? As a website developer its an unwritten law that I try to abide by in all sites I create, meaning when developing a website don’t get lost in the design phase and forget the function of the website – it’s all to easy to ‘over design’ a website, using excessive amounts of images, flash and videos to make the site look pretty. This is often a bad thing for a number of reasons…
- An overly cluttered site can be hard to navigate
- To many images or to much flash content can make the site slow
- To much flash content can sometimes crash website browsers
- Mobile devices (such as the iphone) do not display flash content on websites
- There is a lot to distract the visitor and they may forget why they are visiting your site in the first place
- To much content can put people off
You should always have the function of your site at the forefront of your mind when building a website, and at the design stage this is very important as you want your visitors to have a good experience when viewing your site. If your site is to slow due to to many images or flash elements the likely hood is they will leave before the site is fully loaded (Internet users can be very impatient, if they don’t get what they want instantly they will look elsewhere).
Areas you should focus on
The following are areas of your site you need to focus on when designing the site:
Navigation
Remember that people visiting your website should be able to navigate through the content easily and quickly, your should provide clear navigation areas in your site that allow a visitor to jump from one section to another quickly.
Providing a horizontal navigation at the top of all pages is often the solution of choice, this navigation can be links to individual pages or can contain a drop-down menu that shows sub-pages under main navigational menus, allowing a visitor to move around the site effectively.
An example of a horizontal drop-down navigation
Using text menus is advised as these menus will be viewable in the highest majority of browsers, are easy to implement and are easy to update as you add new content areas to your site. Using images is a pain to implement, can be slow and can be annoying when it comes to update your site.
Text effects can be applies using CSS to ensure the navigation looks nice. You should also highlight the area of the site that a visitor is currently viewing so they know where they are.
Page content
The majority of your content will consist mainly of text (there are obviously exceptions to this but from a business perspective 99% of all sites I create consist of large amounts of text with images and videos embeded amound this text).
Try not to have large chunks of text contained in one paragraph, if possible use new lines where you can. If you look at buys websites, such as the BBC’s News Site, you will notice that they spit every sentence onto a new line, this is done for a reason. If a website consists of lots of large paragraphs it can be very daunting for a visitor, big blocks of text can be off-putting. As an example I have made this paragraph very long compared to the rest of the content on this page, if all the paragraphs on this page were list length then a visitor would see a lot of content, all in large paragraph blocks and may think “there’s to much to read there, I can’t be bothered to read all of that”. Hence I like to split up large paragraphs into smaller, more manageable chunks. With large blocks of text it is also easy to loose your place, especially if the text spans the width of the page, this is why the majority of sites use columns for their text content – reading from left to right across the entire width of the page is not recommended.
Now look at the above paragraph, looks a bit daunting doesn’t it. Would you read this page if it was just 3 paragraphs long?
The fewer big blocks of text a site contains the easier it is to read.
Remember to use headers where applicable
Many visitors tent to speed read through large pages of content, so by having headings to split the page up will make it easier for a visitor to find a part of the page they find most relevant to them.
Format the text well
Make good use of white space, use line spacing, use an easy to read font and use a font site of at least 12px so people don’t have to strain to read your content.
Don’t use images where you can use text
Embedding text into images can be an easy way to format parts of your website, however you should’t do this unless to really need to. If you really need to do this consider using this technique http://stopdesign.com/archive/2003/03/07/replace-text.html
Have a clear call to action!!
You should make it easy (and obvious) for a visitor to move on to the next part of your website, buying a product for example. The page should have a big obvious BUY NOW button – there’s nothing more annoying then wanting to make that next move on a site but being unable to find the link you need to do so.
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