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PREVIOUS PAGE • SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER • CLIENT LOGIN Web site design 'gotchas'It's easy to go overboard when you're designing a Web site, particularly if your background is in graphic design. Temptations abound and giving in to them can make the site difficult for visitors to use. Text is king, queen, and heir apparentWhile much of the Web's growth can be credited to the ability to communicate with graphics, it's essential to remember that graphics make your site slower. Use as few as you can. Communicate with text whenever possible. The site will be faster, easier to use, and compatible even with older browsers. Down with the frame upIf you have a good reason for using frames, use them. Most Web users have browsers that support frames, but search engines can point to pages that are supposed to appear inside a frame. The visitor who pulls up such a page will probably have no navigation tools and may not be able to figure out how to use your site. Keep the low-tech visitors in mindJust because you have a 500 MHz Pentium III computer, a 3D graphics card with 128MB of memory, and a T1 connection direct to the Internet backbone doesn't mean everyone does. The Web site that pops up in 0.001 second on your computer might take 2 minutes to creep onto the screen of the visitor who has a 25 MHz 486 and a 14.4 Kbps modem. Well, actually, the site won't take that long to creep onto the screen of the person with the slow connection. After staring at a blank screen for 30 seconds, the visitor will be annoyed. After 45 seconds, the visitor will be gone. Tell visitors where to goSpend some time thinking about how people will find their way around your site and then provide ways for them to move from one place to another without having to backtrack all the way to the main page. The easier your site is to use, the more it will be used. Hide the search engineIf you do a good job when you create your site's road map, most visitors will never need the search engine. Yes, you should provide one, but put it in the corner and place an attractive potted plant in front of it. No matter how good the search engine is, it will turn up some misleading hits. The Web is not a televisionNot yet, anyway. Probably never. There simply isn't enough bandwidth to shove full-screen video onto visitors' screens. If the information you're presenting is sufficiently interesting, you don't need gee-gaws and gingerbread. Use 'ALT' tags on every imageBecause some visitors want the fastest possible response from your Web site, they tell their browser not to display images. If the image is essential to your message, they can miss an important point unless you use an ALT tag. Most browsers display these special tags while the graphic is loading, in place of the graphic if images are turned off, and (with most browsers) when the visitor hovers the mouse over the graphic. This is a good general rule: Never put a graphic on your Web site without adding an ALT tag. Keep it simple and consistentThe more 'stuff' you give visitors to look at, the less likely they will be to go away with a coherent message. A 3-ring circus may be exciting, but you don't take much meaning with you when you go home. Part of simplicity is consistency. Headlines and text should be the same style, size, and color from page to page within a site. Anything less is a disservice to your visitors. Pick a typeface that's easy to readYou don't have much choice, really, because the typeface you choose must be on the visitor's computer -- and you can't count on any particular typeface being there. This will change over the next few years, but for now you have three choices: Serif, sans serif, and typewriter. Avoid typewriter text on the Web. Except for special uses, it looks goofy. Friend Ray Jutkins (http://www.rayjutkins.com/) and I disagree about whether serif or sans is better for the Web. While we both agree that there's no question about the greater legibility of serif faces on paper, I maintain that sans works better on screen. I think this is because the low resolution of screens makes the little 'feet' of serif faces fuzzy. There's not been enough research on this issue to provide a definitive answer, so you'll find a serif face on Ray's site and sans on mine. We both agree that the type should be large enough that visitors don't have to tinker with their browsers just to be able to see the words. Ray's site was redesigned in December 2003. We kept the serif typefaces, but did away with a lot of graphic clutter. |
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