THE BALANCE: Design & Functionality

Today at WebWise we will examine balancing design with functionality and some of the trade offs you must consider when designing your website. Consider what components would clearly define a website as "professionally" done? Simply spending thousands of dollars on web design won’t guarantee success. Never underestimate the importance of simply making sure it loads quickly and employs a straightforward navigation system. Your visitors must also feel that the time spent at your site worth their while, there is nothing that accomplishes this better then content. All this is easily said, however; establishing it in a website could be a challenge. This article will help you determine the required balance and ways that it can be achieved.

DESIGN
Your visitor's first impression will be the determination of whether or not you're going to make a sale. A professional website should be visually appealing, well organized, easy to navigate and load quickly. How can that be done?

The one mistake commonly made is the "busy" web design factor. Which means including things that have flashy appeal or a novelty value as in Marquis, status bars, blinking, spinning, animated gifs, and cartoons in an attempt to replace structured content. These are memory intensive and will increase you page loading time. Instead of going in for the "busy" design features, make your site attractive and user-friendly by combining strong content, with a good layout.

Strong content, must include the use of effective sales copy. Your words are the entire foundation of your business. Most business failures are the result of ineffective copy. Whether it is your website, sales letters or advertisements, your words play a major role in determining your success. When writing your website copy, try using the following formula:
A -Attention - Use a powerful headline that demands attentionI -Interest - Intrigue interest and create curiosityD -Detail - Provide details about your product or serviceA -Action - Call for action

Good layout means considering how each of your pages will flow. How will you maintain a balance between links, graphics, fonts and text. Only use graphics that express what your site is about and compliment your text. Use fonts, which are compatible across the many computing platforms. It is recommended that you use these standard fonts Arial, Courier, Terminal, Comic Sans and Times New Roman. Using stylized fonts can replace graphics or create a great title. Although pictures say a thousand words they can’t replace well-written copy. Graphics and pictures should only compliment your site. Graphic and picture intensive sites usually load slowly and the customer has left the site before they even see the content.
When choosing colours, graphics, tables and banners remember that many monitors can only accommodate a resolution of either 640x480 or 800x600 pixels. Exceeding these factors horizontally will require that users scroll to the right. Scrolling is both inconvenient and distracting.

FUNCTIONALITY
Organize web pages so that users can quickly scan pages and get a feel for content. Your users don't want to read the entire page to find what they are looking for. Keep it clear and simple. When you can, use bulleted lists and menus instead of burying useful information in text.
Create pages that are a suitable length. For the most part, more than 3 scrolling screens, is too long. Similarly, links that lead to a new page containing only a sentence or two of text frustrate users. Try to aim somewhere between a few paragraphs and a few screens. When considering how to break up information, factor in the issue of printing. Is the document something users may want to print out?

Think carefully about your hypertext links. Put yourself in the user's shoes and imagine where you would want to go next from any given idea in your pages - then link up with those places. Try to integrate links into your text, rather than breaking up the flow of ideas. For example, avoid writing "for information about dogs, click here". Instead make dogs the hypertext link. Also, avoid excessive linking. Too many links on a page will distract the user. Make sure that your links are contextually appropriate and don't link to a URL more than once on the same page.

Have your site designed with multiple platforms and multiple browsers in mind. A page that looks great in Netscape may not look so great in Internet Explorer. Similarly, Netscape for the Macintosh renders pages differently than Netscape for the PC. Finally, remember that some browse the Web in a text-only environment and cannot view graphics or tables.
Do your best to accommodate all users and check your web pages on the several different browsers and platforms. Specifically, check your pages on a Macintosh, a PC running Windows 95/98/NT and a PC running Windows 3.1. This is the minimum compatibility requirement.
Lastly but importantly, check your pages regularly to be sure that all information is current. Be very conscientious about looking for "broken links". Remember that web sites move and disappear every minute, and users will tire quickly if your web site points to outdated links or contains dated content.

For further information or assistance with website design and functionality email Sherry or call 344-6889.