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Design

Design is an important part of a web site. The design involves choices of visual aspects such as fonts, colours, graphics, layout and so on. It also involves issues such as navigation around the site and how that will be presented to the visitor. Design may also involve choices behind the scenes about underlying technologies that will be used to create and or present the pages.

Successful design uses these components to allow visitors to find and access the information that the visitor wants, in the way that they want. All too often, web sites are built to work in the way that the site owner likes which may be at odds with the visitors wishes.

For instance, many sites have an introductory Flash movie. These usually have a “Skip Intro” link on them somewhere which is indicative of the fact that no one wants to sit through them twice and many people would rather have the choice about seeing them at all.

Sites also have a habit of pushing the company’s “latest thing” but make it very hard for the visitor to find information on other things.

Many large corporations still make these sorts of mistakes because they are used to buying broadcast media where they put on the show and the viewer has no choices. The web is a different media where the people who use it do so because they can control where they go and what they see.

Design should therefore strike a balance between your desire to guide the visitor to the information that you want them to see without hindering their exploration into the parts of your site that they are interested in.

Many people forget that there are many different kinds of computer out on the internet and many more kinds of web browsers. Not all browsers will show information in the same way. These differences may be small due to availability of fonts or very large differences such as auditory browsers which read the text of page out loud for sight impaired users rather than displaying it as a picture.

Some web sites fight variations by using more graphics or Flash and become more rigid. This approach can often reduce accessibility and can make sites slower to load because it takes longer to display the graphics on slow connections. Again the site is dictating to the visitor.

A design should be light and flexible. It should look good but also degrade gracefully (when unusual configurations are encountered) so that it looses only its pretty trim while still allowing the visitor to get the information. Web standards are helping to make this sort of design possible.

Let us work with you to produce a design that will look fantastic and will be highly usable and communicative.

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