Website Development Overview Article

HOW DO PEOPLE REACT TO YOUR WEBSITE? Is their experience a positive one? Is the navigation easy to understand? Is the presentation clean, or overly busy? There are many different kinds of websites, which serve many different kinds of content to the public, so there is no one formula that will work as a cookie-cutter example. However, there are some very important aspects of good site design that offer a rewarding experience to the visitor. A website should offer as much value as possible as related to the subject of your business.

GOOD WEB DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Primary characteristics for a professional site include a strong identity, an attractive color scheme, easy to read text, valuable content, smooth navigation links, and visual interest in the page layouts. It is interesting that there are only two things one can do on a website, type into a form, or click links, and clicking is what people do 90 percent of the time to travel across the vastness of the evolving World-Wide-Web. If your site does not offer free information or entertainment, they will leave, nor will they hang if the site is slow loading, or difficult to navigate. Large corporations invest substantially in their sites, setting a high quality standard for smaller businesses, so one must be diligent in order to compete on a professional level.

SCOPE OF A WEB DESIGN PROJECT
The essential objective of a website is to provide information swiftly. This activity might be named Information Design, setting an order and the volume of information presented at any given time. Building a site requires a Visual Designer, an Information Manager, often a Programmer, and a Photographer. Do not mistake a Program Designer for a Graphic Designer, or the inverse. In order to begin the process of web-design, a complete text document that outlines the structure, capability, and content is required. Doing the work piecemeal costs at least twice as much as it does with a map.

NAVIGATION MENU SYSTEM
Main navigation menus reflect the major aspects of a business under which secondary and tertiary content will be organized, just like a filing cabinet containing file folders. Only one navigation set is required. To duplicate links in other menus is confusing to the visitor. It is often a good idea to add pure-text-links in the footer that do not use images, or program-dependent scripts, which will offer suggestions for the next destination. There appears to be a trend to make big bulky headers that eat at least twenty-five percent of vertical screen space, which might include; a logo/brand, a header animation and navigation bar. This approach might work well in some cases, but it is inferior to a vertical menu, which allows more room for a complete presentation without forcing the visitor to scroll the page.

THE CHALLENGE OF A WEAK HTML STANDARD
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee in 1980 and who later wrote the first server and browser software in 1990. Unfortunately, it was not intended to be used as a commercial tool, but accepted as the standard for the public form of the Internet nonetheless. What was needed is DMMML - Dynamic Multi Media Markup Language to handle images, audio, and video, in addition to text. SInce HTML is an international standard, programmers and software companies have been creating ways to supplement HTML pages with better bells and whistles that have no relation to html, and usually require the latest browser to work. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have been a great help, but it too, was never flushed out to manage all the most typical capabilities in use and desired. In the end this uncoordinated free-for-all has been wasteful and made web design expensive because of the work-hours involved in the details. The next generation of web technologies is reported to promise major changes and improvements to the process, but until then we must move forward with deliberate efficiency.

WHAT ABOUT LOADING SPEED?
Slow loading sites are a pain, particularly in comparison to the majority of sites that load quickly, and there is an inherent desire to add more visual interest per page, which increases load times. Those of us living in major metropolitan areas have been accustomed to moderately good download speeds, but we should not forget that many people across the country have slower connections, which is a significant design consideration. Telecommunications services outside the United States offer much better speeds in general, as much as 60 mbs, but it will take time before we have adequate capacity to run smooth video and animation at a decent scale. Flash Sites are sexy and desirable for their entertainment value, however, sacrificing speed for beauty is not advantageous. It is better to add flash elements to headers or pages than it is to build an entire site with flash.

DESIGN OBJECTIVES

• The our highest goal is to create a unique web design that will inspire visitors to bookmark it by offering useful things in a pleasing presentation.

• Compose quality content and unique points for optimum search-engine placement - SEO.

• Clearly display the focus of your business, it products, services, and how it solves visitors' problems.

• Plan to achieve sales with motivational offers.

• The next priority is to provide easy purchase path, and/or accessible contact information to sales and support.

• Website design should be consistent with your marketing plans in, brand, style and feel.

HIRE A PROFESSIONAL WEB DESIGNER
Simplicity is the key to a successful website. It pays to hire a professional designer because they will understand how surfers think and act. They understand how to implement your brand so that it is a reflection of the service or products you offer, how make your site user friendly, an effective tool for your business, and they know that a clean layout is easy to read and interact with. Web design is not about fitting into some nebulous idea of what acceptable parameters are, but about standing out from your competition with a style that has personality and value.

– – Mark Smollin