Monthly Archives: January 2008

Small Business, Usability, Website Design

How Design Affects Your Website Visitors

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The design of your website will greatly how visitors use your website. Confusion will cause your visitors to leave resulting in lost engagement or lost sales.

You have a golden opportunity with every visitor that comes to your website. To capitalize on each and every opportunity take a critical look at your website and ask yourself some key questions.

Is it easy for visitors to navigate your site? The navigation on your site should clearly indicate to your visitors where they are, what they can do and where they can go.

If you are registering users or taking online orders is your process smooth and logical? Gather only the most needed information. This should only be the information needed to complete the transaction. For example, don’t ask for my birthday just so you have it. Reduce ‘friction points’ – the fewer the better.

Is critical information not being seen by your visitors? Jacob Nielsen is a leading authority on website usability and recently reported that visitors are conditioned to overlook information that looks too much like banner advertising. Over-designing the textual information on your website will cause visitors to ignore it. Be considerate about how you’re designing your information.

Does your site speak in jargon and buzzwords? Visitors do not have the time or desire to learn your business lingo. Make it a point to write in terms your visitors are familiar with. The language should be simple to understand.

Are you consistent throughout the site? Consistency is important to eliminate user confusion. The terminology being used to describe a process, for example, should remain the same throughout the site. When linking to a page make sure the link and the title of the page being linked to match. The same color and style should be used for all text links.

Does your site design provide clarity? While the design of your website is important it shouldn’t get in the way of completing a task. Keep your site clean and reduce the amount of visual clutter. Make use of white space to break up information and provide your visitors with visual resting places.

By thoroughly looking at your website and asking critical questions you can greatly affect your visitors experience with your website.

Small Business, Website Design

Design Your Website to Attract Customers

A critical component of any website is the “look and feel.” Too many sites fail to put enough focus on the design of their website.

Why All the Fuss

You may be asking yourself, why should so much focus be placed on the design of my site? This is a valid question – one that needs to be understood if you want your site to be competitive.

Think about the design of your site as you would think about the design of your storefront. Would you want your store to look like it was designed in a weekend? Mismatching furnishings, streaking paint, poor lighting and flooring that is uneven causing your visitors to trip and fall? Probably not. The design of your store (your showroom) is a reflection business, your products and most importantly your brand. Your website is your 24 hour, always open, always ready to impress showroom.

The look of your website should be consistent with the overall look of your brand, your storefront and other marketing and collateral materials

Tell Me a Story

Challenge yourself or your designer to create a story for your site. Visually communicate the story of your company, your services, or the products you sell. Visual stories will set you apart from your competition by wrapping the information your users are seeking in an engaging user experience. Stories are a core component in communication, tapping into this can give you an advantage.

An important consideration when designing your site is the use of color, photos and typography. When designing your site, realize that everything you put onto the page has an effect on the users’ perception of your company.

The biggest challenge when designing a website is to create a story while at the same time creating a simple and easy to use site. A clean and simple site will enable users to find their information quickly and make understanding information easier.

Rely on the foundation that you have already in established to help create an easy means of navigation.

An important point to remember is that you may have the most beautifully designed site that weaves a brilliant story but if a user cannot find what it is they are looking for they will leave your and find the information elsewhere.

Conclusion

Your website is one of the best investments your business can make. For the success of your site it will need to have a solid design that is capable of telling your story, a look consistent with your overall brand strategy and most importantly an easy means of navigation.

If you are not confident in your ability to carry out these tasks yourself it would be in your best interest to hire a web site designer to create the look and feel of your site.

You owe it to your business to create a professional looking website.

Small Business, User Experience, Website Design

Organizing Your Website’s Navigation

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Outlining your web site’s structure early in the design process will help facilitate a good navigational structure allowing the visitors to your web site an easy easy to find they are looking for. A consistent complaint coming from website visitors is how difficult it is to find the information they want. By thinking through your navigation and structure upfront you will gain a benefit when trying to update your site in the future.

Understanding your content

Look at the content you have available to use on your website. This may sound obvious but it is surprisingly overlooked. If you have a site currently, start there. Also take a look through your marketing materials, brochures, articles, product descriptions, etc. Once you have an understanding of the information you have available start creating logical buckets, or groupings of the information.

You may find it necessary to create buckets within buckets (sub-directories) in order to organize your content appropriately. For example a photography site may have a bucket that contains examples of all the types of photography the company does. A grouping like this would work but it would quickly become very large and overwhelming. But what if the photography bucket was broken down into smaller groupings such as portrait, black and white, wedding, baby, pets, etc.? By creating smaller groupings the user can quickly and easily narrow down the scope of photography and identify the type that pertains most to what they were looking for.

Once the content has been identified and grouped appropriately you should now be able to label each of the buckets (including any sub-bucket that was created).This will serve as your primary and possible secondary navigation.

Placement of Primary Navigation

Now that the content has been identified, grouped and labeled in a way that logically makes sense to the end user it is important to think about how and where the site navigation will be placed.

By-and-large there are two primary locations for website navigation; across the top or down the left side of the page. Large sites, such as e-commerce sites, use a combination of the two. As the size of your website grows so should your navigation system.

Some sites (this one included) run navigation down the right. This by no means is wrong it just isn’t as common as across the top or down the left. Interesting to note however, is with the proliferation of blogging navigation appearing on the right is becoming more popular.

As with everything there are going to be trade-offs with each type of navigation structure. Listed below are some of the basics of each.

  • Tabs Across the Top
    Located near the top of the page visitors are quickly able to view the most important buckets (primary navigation) of your site. The biggest downside of using tabs is limited amount of space available. The size of the labels combined with the size of the tabs themselves will limit the number of tabs that you will be able to fit without causing horizontal scrolling, a usability faux paux.

    Focus on the main buckets as doorways into your site.

  • Left Rail
    This navigation runs down the left side of your site. Left navigation allows you to show more options than what top navigation does. Showing the main buckets as well as sub-buckets will help users orient themselves with your site and the breadth of offerings.

    E-commerce sites are good examples of sites that use left navigation well. Since there is typically a lot of different types of products available using the left navigation to better organize them helps users quickly to locate what they are after.

Other navigational systems should be considered when your site begins growing larger than a handful of pages (usually 15 pages or more).

  • On-Site Search
    Providing an on-site search is a good way to supplement your primary navigation system. With a few exceptions on-site searches should never be used as a primary navigational system. Again, e-commerce sites tend to do on-site search well.
  • Footer Links
    Footer links, as indicated by the name, run in the footer of your site and provide an additional means for users to navigate your site. As with an on-site search footer links should never be used as a primary navigational system.

    An added benefit of providing footer links is from SEO standpoint. Most likely footer links are text based (not always the case with tabs) allowing search engine spiders to easily read and follow these links.

  • Site Maps
    Site maps provide the overall website structure. Think of the site map as an outline for the information contained within your site.

    Site maps again provide an SEO benefit by bubbling up links to all the pages of your website.

Conclusion

When designing or re-designing your website it is extremely important to lay the foundation upon which your site can be built. This foundation will help guide you in determining your navigational system and your primary and secondary buckets.

Finally, by having a well organized and well structured site you will ease your users’ frustrations and create a user friendly site that helps them find what they are looking for.