This article offers ten tips that you can use to make your Web site more effective. As an Internet user, you may find these design tips intuitive. But when it comes to your own site, you may fail to recognize design problems that seem so obvious when you view other sites. Use these design guidelines to overcome your blind spots and objectively evaluate your site.
1: It’s not about you.1
If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this: you need to stop thinking that visitors to your site care about the things you think are important.
People often pass quickly through dozens of sites. Rarely do they stop to consider the owner’s needs and goals for those sites.
People use Google to search because it consistently provides the best search results. If you created a new search engine, people might visit it to see if they would get better results. They would be unlikely to use the search engine because you needed a high visitor count to satisfy your venture capitalists.
2: Design each page to solve the visitor’s problem.1
This is the corollary to Tip 1. It’s not about you, it’s about your visitor. You may own the Web site, but if you want visitors, you had better design it for them.
Go through your site now. Look at every page and ask yourself, "What problems does this page solve for my target audience?" Get rid of anything that fails to provide some value to the visitor.
3: Understand what your visitors want.
I’ve seen various ways of grouping the reasons why people visit Web sites, but this is my favorite. People visit a site to get:
- Information
- Products
- Entertainment
Understand why people come to your site. If they come for information, then don’t act like an entertainment company by starting each visit with a long Flash intro.
4: Write in terms of benefits to the visitor.
When you use Tip 2 to clean up your site, you may be able to save some content by rewriting it to address your targeted visitor. For example:
Bad: We are the largest pickle jar vendor in the state.
Good: We can deliver 30,000 pickle jars in 24 hours to any location in the state.
5: If you want the visitor to do something, make it easy.
It’s almost embarrassing to write this tip—it seems so obvious.
Do you have something you want people to do when they visit your Web site—something really important to the success of the site? Then don’t make them:
- Hunt for the task in small print
- Install and configure additional software.
- Reveal personal information not relevant to the task
- Wander through a maze of pages to reach your goal
- Create yet another log on
- Read a twenty-step procedure
To guard against this error, review each page on your site and decide which tasks you want your visitors to perform. Document the steps needed to accomplish these tasks. Then try to reduce the number of steps—the shorter the list, the greater the odds of achieving your goals.
6: One main action per page
As an addition to Tip 5, you’ll also improve the odds of getting people to take a specific action if you avoid distracting them with other tasks. When possible, focus each page on a single task.
The home page can be a problem since it sometimes serves multiple masters. Consider narrowing its goal to providing crystal-clear navigation.
7: People don’t read, they scan.
When you started reading this page, it’s likely that you first scanned the title and then the headings. If you found something new or interesting, you might then have read the accompanying text. If your scan revealed a lot of useful information, you may have gone back to read or skim the items you skipped on your first pass.
This is typical Web-reading behavior. As a Web site owner, you need to take this reading style into account when writing your content. Be sure to highlight key points and keep content short. It’s not easy, but it’s well worth the effort.
8: Avoid distracting the visitor with motion.
If you have ever been in a restaurant or bar where a television is playing, you know how difficult it is to keep your eyes off of it, even when you don’t want to watch. This "orienting response", first described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927, is an instinctive reaction to any sudden or novel visual or auditory stimulus.2
If our eyes are drawn to a motion on a Web page, then they are not scanning content. If the motion exists for a short time, visitors will delay reading your content until it stops. If the motion persists, each major movement will draw their eye away from the content.
Flash animations seem to be a fad these days3. Companies that should know better seem to feel that animation is a requirement, particularly on their home page—this includes a lot of Web design companies. Often, the animation has zero benefit for the visitor (remember Tip 1).
Animation isn’t necessarily bad—in certain situations (YouTube anyone?), it is essential. Here are my recommendations for its proper use:
- Avoid motion on pages that have important content.
- Animate only one item at a time.
- Let the user initiate the animation.
I wouldn’t mind all those silly Flash presentations if I could turn them on only when I wanted to. Actually, I use the Flashblock extension in Firefox, so I do have a choice.
By the way, of all the useless animations, the Flash intro page wins top honors (again, see Tip 1). An article on what people hate most about Web sites said that the “skip intro” button is the most used button on the Internet4.
9: Avoid automatically playing sound.
Everything said about animations applies more strongly to sound. We've probably all had one embarrassing moment at work when a Web site unexpectedly started blaring music, immediately bringing you unwanted attention.
The key to good use of audio is simple: always let the user enable it.
10: You can sometimes break the rules.
Not that it’s a good idea, but you can have a successful site and still get away with breaking the rules. All you need is a product or service that no one else offers and is in high demand...say, first class tickets from New York to London for $10. Or the formula for turning lead into gold using only common household chemicals and tools.
The majority of us will never be in this position. We have plenty of competition and on the Web, the competition is just a click away.
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