Important Questions to Answer Before Designing a Website
1. Why are we building the website?
2. Who is our target audience?
3. What do they want from us?
If your site is for a business or nonprofit,
you've got to make sure visitors have every opportunity to spend
money at
your site. There you have to take extra care in designing your
site so it looks professional, is easy to navigate, and
gets marketed properly.
If your home page fails to entice because
the images are too large, you're using sound files for no reason,
the page
takes forever to download, there's offensive material, the text
isn't readable, and so on - then your visitors will hit the
Back button faster than a politician changes position on the issues.
Navigation of a site is consider to be one of the
most importance aspect of a site. You DO NOT want visitors to
get lost in your site.
There are three things a home page should convey to the visitor:
1. The site's purpose - the who, what, when,
where, and why
2. What kind of content is contained in the site
3. How to find that content (Navigation or search)
When designing a navigation system on a website, you need to consider the following factors:
1. The first screen
2. Navigation tools - graphics, text, frames, sitemaps
3. Consistency
The First Screen
The first screen your visitor sees is the
first impression they will have of your site. Therefore it is
good to put the
most informative elements into the first screen and should be
relatively fast to download.
CONTENT!
If your website does not have the right content for your targeted audience, why would they stay on your site?
Content is everything when it comes down
to a website, it would be the main reason why anyone would come
into
your site. But the real trick is, how to get people to come back
the second, third and fourth time etc.
What kind of content can you use to lure visitors into your site?
1. Frequently updated information
2. Contests and sweeptakes
3. Demonstrations
4. Free offers
5. Questions and answers
6. History
7. Linking to other sites
GRAPHICS ARE TOO BIG!
Be careful on the size of your graphics
on each page, the average person on the internet probably would
only have a
28.8k modem connection over the internet. This is again, depends
on your targeted audience.
Real color images should be saved in jpg
format, web pallete colors should be in gifs, and large animated
gifs
shouldn't be on a page at ALL! Keep animated gifs small.
Keep the total size of your graphics below
35k per page. It take approxiamately 31 secs to download over
a 14.4k
modem.
I remember telling an college working in
the same company, to reduce the size of the company title image,
it took
over 1.5 minutes just to download the company title over a 28.8k
modem connection! Ridiculas, dont you agree?
