Web Development Articles

What Will My Site Do?

This is the first of eight articles about website design. Our discussion will deal with some of the issues which need to be considered when developing a new online presence. You may have already thought of some of these, but perhaps there are may be things which you haven’t yet considered.

The Company

The Great American Widget Company is a manufacturer of widgets, that common household item that many find indispensable. Until now, however, Great American has been a ‘brick and mortar’ business. With the founder’s son just out of college, he is looking forward to expanding the company’s business on the Internet.

What is the new website expected to do?

Before doing anything else, before you even consider finding a hosting company, or a designer, or even before you register a domain name, or before putting pen to paper to begin writing content, take time to consider what the site will be about. Is your new site to be an eCommerce site, or will it be an online ‘image’ site that displays the image of your business?

This is a very perfunctory look at the website code HTML, for those who never did any kind of Computer Studies at school and have never had the need or opportunity to look ‘under the skirt’ of your average website. There’s nothing that an experienced webmaster will find here that’s not very basic, but for those who have just begun to discover the ‘website’ and especially those venturing into… maybe starting one of their own, here’s a basic understanding to pique the interest and possibly kick-start the learning process.

If you don’t even know what I’m talking about when I say HTML, as a means to follow what we’re talking about as we go, then just go to this page - Home Based Business & Affiliate Center and click on the ‘View’ option at the top of your browser and select ‘Source’ or ‘Page Source’ (depending on your browser type) from the drop-down menu. You will be confronted by a Notepad document with silly looking symbols, letters and numbers on it. Well, that is HTML code. It’s the coded ‘blueprint’ for the web PAGE (not the whole website) that you’re looking at. Keep the Notepad document open to refer to as we discuss each part.

Creating an appealing, functional, and effective Web site is much harder than it looks. It’s not simply a matter of taking a company brochure or catalog, converting the text to HTML, and throwing in a few pictures (although many sites seem to have been created using this technique!).

A Web site is a 24-hour a day advertisement for your company and should be treated as such. You wouldn’t turn over the design of your next direct mail piece, newspaper ad, or TV commercial to an amateur, and the same should hold true for your Web site. Actually, more care should be given to your Web site considering the potential number of online viewers is much greater than the audience for any other communication medium.

We’ve redesigned Web sites for large companies that initially thought they’d save time and money by hiring a college student to design their site. They wound up with a site that looked like it had been designed by a college student, did not incorporate effective online marketing tools to draw traffic to the site, and the college student graduated and moved on, leaving them without ongoing support.

While few companies can boast as we do that our first ten clients are still with us today, many companies often change Web design firms to get a new perspective on how their Web presence could look and perform. The following paragraphs serve as a Buyer’s Guide to use when shopping for a new Web design company.

First, determine what exactly you’re shopping for. Is your Web site down a lot? Do you frequently have email problems? This may or may not be your Web site designer’s problem. Many design firms outsource their Web site hosting operations and if that’s the case, you may just need a new Web host. While most companies prefer to work with a Web site design company that also hosts their Web site because there are great cost savings to be realized in this type on environment, this isn’t always the case and is a question that needs to be asked.

In addition, does the firm you’re evaluating perform all of their services in-house or are they outsourcing development to India? This has become more of a common practice due to the extremely low labor costs, but if your site is changing frequently, this can present a lot of problems in delayed response, delayed postings, and other issues associated with working with such a time difference.

The internet is filled with sites and they are good and bad. Some have been known for a long time and some still struggle to get the respect and fame they think they deserve.

Although not all your visitors are web design professional they still can put their finger on a good site and sense the ones that are not that ok. But how can you convince people your site deserves to be known and respected? How can you make them feel your site is better than other thousands they could find on the same subject?

Elegant design

You need a nice looking site. Don’t overdo this either, but try to offer your site a unique and nice feeling. Branding is also important. Try to come up with a nice logo.

Create a nice layout, try to have a consistent colour theme and use nice fonts. Don’t use templates unless they are unique and you have got the only copy. There’s nothing worse for your “respected” site than a theme people have seen for 50 times before.

Avoid animated gifs, annoying backgrounds and music.

Good and interesting content

A question we frequently get asked is, "how do we know when it is time to redesign our Web site?" The answer undoubtedly varies.

The first thing to analyze is your existing Web presence. What kind of traffic are you receiving? Are you getting a lot of calls from Web site users? When you navigate the site, is it easy to find what you are looking for? Is the data still current or do you still list products that have been discontinued since 1999? Make a list of the things you like and don’t like about your existing site. This will give you a good starting point.

The next thing to do is to talk to a few of your customers and ask them what they think of your site, if they use it often, etc.. This will provide you with outside feedback and will hopefully generate ideas for your next step, which is to generate a wish list. This list should contain features or functionality that you’d like to see incorporated into your site. While some of the items may be cost prohibitive, it benefits you to know that and us to know the direction you’re looking to go. On the flip side, something you think might be too expensive may in fact, cost less than you think.

There are many ways to add fancy bells and whistles to your website, but most of them are not going to do you any good. In fact they will slow down the time it takes to load your website and take up valuable space that you are paying for. Besides that, people with older computers will not even be able to see some of these fancy additions you are using.

For example Flash intro pages may be fancy and exciting to look at, but search engine robots and spiders do not read flash pages and you may actually be hurting your standings in the search engines by using Flash pages.

Other things like music that plays when you open up a web page can be distracting and downright annoying! Too much movement on the screen will also get on your nerves pretty quickly, so think before you start adding all those bells and whistles.

Our advice is Keep It Simple.

What’s In A Name?

Why pay for your own domain name anyway? You can launch a website without your own name for free. Sure you can - but if you want to make it in today’s business world, then you had better come up with your own domain name that will be easily identifiable with your business!

The most important person that you need to please when you design your site is your potential customer. I can not stress that enough.

I have clients who have told me “I don’t like this design or that one or I like these colours”, etc. I want to please my customers so I try to create a design for them that they will be happy with, of course.

But my clients don’t often think of their site visitors or their own potential customers when they ask me to design their site. Sadly most are thinking primarily of one thing - how to make money from their website. And because their focus is on making money rather than pleasing their customers, more often than not, the website won’t sell. And as much as I try to advise them on how they can improve the quality of the site, they stick to their own ideas of what the site should look like. Then they email me later on and ask me what are they doing wrong. Oh brother!

If you want to have a successful website you must think of your visitors first. Before you hire a designer or design a site yourself, you must define:

Website Design Usability Tips

1. Getting to know about audience members

You want a site that has personality and quality content based on your audience taste. You have to understand their color preferences, technical skills and any prevalence of special needs.

2. Make the interface simple and obvious

The more obvious the interface is, the less frustration the site visitor has to guess about how your site works. You want the audience to concentrate on the content, not the interface.

3. Readability

Make paragraph easy to read. Don’t use small text for font size.

4. Make your page fast loading

Reduce the waiting time is a must if your page over 20KB.

5. Avoid hidden (rollover to reveal) navigation

It makes for a very clean design if all your navigation is hidden, but it may also mean that people won’t know where to click to go somewhere.

6. Get user feedback

Find out what works and what doesn’t.

7. Study site visitor performance

How long does it take to performance a given task? The time it takes to do thing has got to be reasonable. If it’s not reasonable, improve user interaction wherever possible.

If you’d like to create/maintain a website, having some HTML knowledge is necessary in order to create a standard page on the web. Learning the HTML basics is easy and should take less than an hour.

First you’ll need some type of software/editor to create your html pages. Here’s a few to try out (or not) and see which you feel most comfortable with.

Editors for Hand Coding:

(http://www.notepad.org) Notepad - This easy-to-use HTML editor is FREE (for Windows version 2.0 and above). If you are interested in learning how to code by hand then this editor is highly recommended. It is not cluttered with tons of features and is handy for all scripting languages, html, perl, php, etc.

Advanced Source Code Editors:

These editors are similar to Notepad by allowing you to create your webpage via hand coding, but they help to speed up the process of coding by hand with features such as syntax highlighting, spell checking, global find/replace, code libraries, code snippets, file explorers, page previews, and much more. Ideal for all scripting languages.