Blog

Posted by dani cass on September 4th, 2009

Navigation: When Hansel and Grethel got lost in the forest, the clever little people had left behind a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way back to where they wanted to be.

Like Hansel and Grethel, visitors need to be able to easily find their way through your website to get to the products or information they need.

Good navigation means that your visitors should never be more than three clicks away from the information they require. Make sure your website has clear navigation on all pages. 

Flash Intros: Flash intros can look very pretty but often have very little relevance to the website.

The majority of people actually find flash intros very annoying. When you remember that you only have 8 seconds to make an impression with your website and it often takes longer than this for the flash intro to load the chances are your visitors will have always clicked back before its even started playing!

Its not only humans that dislike flash intros either. Search Engines love content. Even if you have a relevant flash intro full of juicy information about your company and/or products, search engines are unable to read it so it will have no bearing on your rankings.

Music: You may love a certain songs but not everybody will share your taste in music! Most of my colleagues will tell you my taste in music could be better! Our marketing manager describes my music as sounding like ‘RAH RAH RAH angry angry angry’. Now imagine I add this music to my website, I may think it completes my website and shows my unique style but in reality how long would the average person stay on my website before clicking back to the search engine?!

Another thing to consider when adding music to your website is the growing number of SKYPE users. SKYPE is an application which allows you to make telephone calls over the internet. A Twitter user commented recently that they were using SKYPE whilst browsing the web. The first site they clicked on had quite unpleasant music on autoplay, obviously something you want to avoid whilst making a phone call! Without even looking at the website she clicked the back button and did not return to the site. 

Attractive Design: When you think of attractive design you probably think of a website with fancy artsy graphics and pretty colours, these are only part of what makes a well designed website.

You should also consider things like:

• Easy to read text: make sure the text is a reasonable size and in a colour that is easy to see. Obviously if you have a coloured background you will need to choose a colour that is clearly visible.
  Another thing you may wish to consider (depending on your product/company) is a text only version of your website with variable font sizes for visually impaired visitors – I saw this recently on a website and thought it was an awesome idea.
• Alt tags: when you hover over pictures, you should have a text description of what the picture is. Alt tags are good things to have for two reasons. Firstly, search engines will find these words and add them to search results. Secondly, if for any reason your images don’t load, your visitors will have a text description instead – much better than an empty space!
• Limit the amount of images: images take time to load, if you have lots of images on your page it can take a long time to load the page, remember the 8 second rule, would you wait for the page to load if you were visiting a website? 

Browser Compatibility:Different people use different browsers to view the internet, they also use different versions of these browsers. Make sure that your website is compatible with the main browsers, and that as new versions are released, the website is updated to include the new versions.

If the website is not compatible, your pages may appear ‘broken’ with missing images, missing functionality, format problems, etc.

Dani
Studio 2 Online
Web Design East Midlands