Since I’m relocating all my goodies to my blog, I thought I should include some of my rants and raves about my own industry, web design and development, not to mention the whole eCommerce and eMarketing thing. As you can imagine, after nearly fifteen years in the industry, I have quite a few notions and ideas about what works and what doesn’t. So here goes…
In my experience, every web site goes through four evolutionary stages during the course of its life cycle. These stages are:
- Planning
- Development
- Media Blitz, and
- Care & Feeding.
Each of these stages is far too complex and involved to cover them all in a single article, so I will address each one in a separate article over the next couple of weeks. If necessary, I may even have to break individual stages into more than one article.
So, on with the show…
As I said before, the first evolutionary stage of your website will be planning. Ideally, this should be the stage that takes the greatest amount of time. Unfortunately, planning is typically given short shrift as people blithely contract someone like me to build web sites for them without having a single, solitary clue as to how much work and effort is involved in making a robust website come to life. Contrary to popular belief, web sites do not appear by magic. A decently designed and implemented, commercial quality website will take hundreds of hours of labor before it is completed. That time is required to create the graphics, text, programming, databases, and other fiddly-bits necessary to make your website come alive.
Like I said, it’s not magic. It involves a lot of  W O R K.
Planning is hugely important because that is where you make all of your decisions defining what the web site is about, who you are trying to reach, and how you intend to deliver the kinds of information your target audience is interested in receiving. Let me give you an example.
If I’m designing a web site for, let’s say, engineers, I need to include the types of content that engineers desire. That means gory details, exploded diagrams, specifications, factoids, and data, data, data. Not only that, but I need to include design elements that will appeal to the aesthetics and mindset of the typical engineer. One way that this can be done would be to include graphics or design elements that are reminiscent in some way of blueprints. Another way would be to use sans serif fonts for the textual content. And let us not forget to include a complex, hierarchical structure to the site overall. (Engineers aren’t happy if it isn’t difficult to figure out. Sorry guys. I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em.)
If, on the other hand, I’m designing a website whose target audience is children, my entire approach to the content, the interface, and the delivery has to be totally and completely different than it would be for my engineering audience. The bottom line is that my personal preferences are secondary to those of the audience that I am trying to reach. I may think that something is cool, and neat, and fun to play with, but if my target audience is confused or put off by that same thing I have failed in my mission to reach them effectively.
Here’s a short list of things to consider when identifying your target audience for any web design a project:
- Age group
- Gender
- Income bracket
- Level of education
- Ethnicity
- Familiarity and/or comfort level in dealing with computers
(This is far more important than you realize!)
The purpose of identifying these factors is simple. You need to identify the likes and dislikes of your target audience, not to mention any biases or prejudices they may have, be they positive or negative. Clearly identifying your target audience will also be helpful when it comes to deciding what kinds of technologies you may or may not want to include in the web development aspect of your site. For example, if the typical visitor to your website is not familiar with computers you want to avoid making them download anything. Their lack of understanding about computers and how they work will cause them to be fearful of downloads, and their fear is your downfall.
You need to make sure that anyone who visits your site can find what they are looking for quickly, and easily. Anything in your page layout or navigation that requires the end user to expend effort is bad, plain and simple. Likewise, if your site organization or navigation is confusing, they’ll get frustrated and leave your website, never to return. Like it or not, the web surfing population is fickle and short tempered. Once you scare them away it is very difficult to get them back.
I know this seems obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many intelligent web designers forget these simple rules all the time. A classic example of this can be found in the Macromedia website. Macromedia, which was recently assimilated by Adobe, has developed a suite of tools that have become an industry standard for web developers around the world, but in a recent upgrade to their website they went to an almost entirely Flash-driven content management system. Visitors to the Macromedia Exchange will find that everything they need to access has been embedded in an interface filled with scroll bars that make me feel like I’m trapped in frames-hell. And the scary thing is that I know exactly why they went with this interface.
Because they could.
The site design for the Macromedia Exchange takes advantage of all the bleeding edge technologies and whiz-bang features that the Macromedia suite has to offer. But what was lost in the process of implementing all of those cool toys was usability. Frankly, a good, usable web site design is far more important than showing off how clever you are.
See you next time!
B.
P.S. In case you are looking for some good references for effective web design, here are a couple to get you started. Enjoy!
 Don’t Make Me Think |
 Head First Design Patterns |