When you start out as a designer, you may decide to adopt a ‘make it up as you go’ approach. This can work for people whom have a very clear visualization of the site outcome and can work ‘on-the-fly’. Though, it is not recommended as you may end up with a site design that did not quite fit your intentions.
So, plan the plan, that’s the first bit of advice.
Here are 10 points to bear in mind when designing the pages from the initial idea stage to the final touches.
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Research First: Before going down the domain name route, draw up a flowchart that shows the pages that you plan to design. This will give you and your team, if you work with a team, a clear overview of the navigational flow and how to approach the content. This is called Information Architecture and you will be glad to have done it first.
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Domain and Hosting: Choose a domain name that contains keywords likely to be picked up by search engines. A very business focused site with a frivolous name may not work for your audience. Does the server need to cater for a very busy site? Usually a shared hosting plan as with Hostgator will suffice.
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Folders and Names: Now you have planned the flow, create the folders sensibly. You want to be able to find a folder quickly and not wonder later why you created it. Use obvious names like ‘Images’.
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Flash Design and Image files: A balance is needed between flash and HTML or even no flash is the best route. Unless your site needs a very visual appeal to tie in with the theme, you don’t need flash used on every page. Usually, mainly corporate sites, a flash header movie displaying the site benefits in slides works. Watch the size of your image files; optimize them to load quickly using Photoshop or other tools. Last but not least, avoid cluttering the page with media – informative succinctly written content is what drives visitors to come back.
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Menu Navigation: make the menus items stand out and easy to understand whether it’s a top horizontal menu, or a top menu and side vertical bar. Have the main categories in the top menu and secondary categories down the left. Semantics dictate that we are more comfortable reading left to right. It should be easy to locate your USPs (Unique Selling Points), who you are and why the business is of benefit to the visitor – make credentials like certifications in your industry stand out.
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Keyword Research: When you did this for your domain name, you should have a list of keywords used on Google to find sites like yours. Use Wordtracker to find the least competitive phrases such as long tail keyphrases e.g. how to make red wine. Choose a keyphrase for each page of your site that pertains to the content on that page, keyphrases should vary. Include the keyphrases 4 or 5 times per 700 words per page. This is an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) task that helps get your site in the top 10 Google listings.
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Fresh Content: Keep your site updated with the latest niche content. If you do, you will be seen as an expert in your niche and will retain visitors.
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Composition: Images and text should not look bunched up in the page. If you are not a designer, find one whom understands CSS so that you have good consistent spacing on pages with margins, between text and image elements. Use narrow widths on text columns, don’t let people have to scroll left to right. Up and down is fine as this is what people are accustomed to doing as when reading magazines.
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What are your stats: Use tools at Google webmaster to keep track of your site visitors and daily hits. Use the Google Analytics to be able to analyze how well your pages are doing in attracting and retaining visitors.
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Test….Test…Test..: Read every page, test your forms, and test in different browsers (this is a good site to test this at browsershots.org), and check the text for grammar or spelling mistakes. Ok, once done, check again. Be professional – if there’s a mistake, be the first to spot it.
Hope this helps your design process, best of luck with your web site project.
I think you forgot about the reasons why people might want to visit the site. Otherwise, all that good work and you may have a site that no-one is interested in.
I suggest that you:
- put “Users first” (before research) and
- change ‘latest niche content’ to ‘content that people really want to read’
- add usability testing in to your test phase.
Then you’ll have a set of tips that looks at all aspects: technical, planning, and creating something that people want to use.
hi. that was mentioned though this is an overview, you are talking about relevancy in content and what is important to the user, the benefits gained from visiting. ‘Latest niche content’ will be content relevant to the user group and therefore worth reading. delving into it any deeper is outside the scope of the article which was covering the design aspects as a focus. the article is generalizing a bit, though ‘users first’ needs is part of the first step. perhaps a broader article can shed light by looking at a) what users are looking for, b) identify products that solve a problem or c) offer something different within the scope of the interest group. This could be in reference to a practical example such as ‘Weight Loss’ or big topics like ‘Beating The Recession’.