Elements for a good Site Design

This is not a top ten list, a set-in-stone rule book, or an all-inclusive guide to what makes a web site’s design a good one. What it is, is a list of elements that High Aspirations feels are vital to a good site.

• Give them what they came for. Someone came to your site for a reason, whether that’s for information on the service you provide or the goods you sell. Don’t make it hard for that person to find what they are looking for. Your site’s home page should clearly say what you do or what you sell. If you make it hard for them to find or figure out, they will move on, quickly.
• Navigation. Whatever method of navigation your site has (text links, buttons, drop-down menus, etc.), it should be clear that these elements are for clicking and when clicked they go to what they said they would. Don’t make your visitors jump through hoops or click through gateway or full-page ads to get to where they wanted to go.
• Contact Information. Every single page or section of your site should have contact information, even if that is just a link to a contact page that includes all your information. You should include your address, phone numbers, fax number, email address, and any other method of contact that you allow. Don’t ever make a visitor search for how to contact you, if you do, they’ll move on to another site that makes it easier for them.
• Who are you? We always recommend that our clients include an “about us” page or section. This is your opportunity to tell your site’s visitors any number of things. You can include who you are, what you are about, why you have this business or site, why they should do business with you, etc. The “about us” page or section is your chance to make it personal, prove that there is a real person (or group of people) behind your site, and develop trust between you and your clients.
• Color. The colors you use on your site should be a reflection of your business or your site’s purpose. Conservative colors for an accountant or doctor. Ocean colors for your fish keeping hobby site. Match your company colors if you have any, but always keep your audience in mind: blue and yellow are great company colors, but yellow text on a blue background and your visitor will have a free-site flashback and leave as fast as possible.
• Sitemap. A sitemap provides a list of every page of your site and a link to it and the larger your site, the more important a sitemap is. It helps visitors find what they are looking for quickly and easily and search engines tend to love them too.
• Load time. Pages that load slowly are closed. It’s as simple as that, especially in today’s world of high speed access. We do our best to limit load time using various techniques, but sometimes it is beyond our control depending upon the content of the page. As a client, keep your content in mind, the more media (images, graphics, animations, etc.) you add to a page, the longer it will take to load.
• Moving things distract. If you are a professional, you want your site to reflect that. Avoid animated graphics. It won’t take long for your visitor to want to leave your site just to get away from the animation that is now giving them a headache. Animated graphics have their place, but if you want someone to sit on your site or one of it’s pages and read, then keep those elements away. Save animation for links pages where a banner ad is expected or on pages where you don’t expect your visitors to stick around for long, like an index page, photo gallery, etc.
• Music and Videos with sound. Most of the time we recommend that a professional web site avoid adding background music but it is appropriate for some businesses. However, we recommend that the site loads with the music off and give the visitor the option to turn it on. A lot of people surf sites at work and if one loads music without a warning, most employees will leave quickly so they don’t disturb their fellow workers or get busted by the boss. The same goes for embedded videos, let your visitor click play when they are ready.
• Selling something? While buy now buttons powered by PayPal and the like are fine for one or two items, if you are selling a number of products, you might want to invest in a shopping cart. You definitely want to avoid just listing what you sell and telling your visitors to email you to order.

Now I’m sure that I’ve missed some. It really is hard to sit down and write all this stuff into a list as each site designed is a different case and, therefore, some elements will apply and some won’t. But, the list above is a pretty good one I think and will certainly be enough to get you started in your plans for your site and help you work better with your web designers.