Why web design matters Part 2

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Why web design matters Part 2

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Think just for a second about any day to day task such as
turning on the hot water tap or finding you the way out of a busy room. What happens?
What decisions does your brain take and how aware are you that you’re making
those decisions? A great example of this is actually in the bottom right
hand corner of this monitor as I’m writing this now:

Now I know that if my monitor was replaced tomorrow with a new model that I’d
never seen in my life before, it would not take me long to navigate the
monitor, spot this symbol, PUSH it and hey presto it would turn on!

The design symbol used makes this product intuitive to
use.

If I had purchased a new monitor from a company who’s design
team had either thought a little too far out of the box or simply just didn’t
think and had not place this symbol on the power button. I’d have probably
spent maybe 2-3 minutes working out how to turn on the monitor. Not an issue
really. But if I’d still not found it after 3 minutes I might start to get
slightly annoyed. Eventually I may even curse THE DAM MONITOR!

What would have
just happened is that I’d have had a negative experience with the usability of
this product.

Well get this your customers
takes just 6 seconds to get annoyed when viewing a website and if it’s not
intuitive that majority of them will leave!

Filed under: Web Design Theory by Adam Casey
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Why web design matters

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Why web design matters

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Welcome to my blog Design Matters.

Over the coming weeks I’m going to explain the methodology and reasoning behind
what decisions designers make before drawing a single line, painting a single colour or places their text on their canvas. I hope to show you just how important those actions are in the process of conveying the overall message.

I’ll be bringing you strong, fact based reasoning behind the rules that govern
these design decisions and where necessary advising you why; on some occasions
you shouldn’t always follow them!

If you have a website, do yourself a favour ask someone, (preferably a room
full of people, and definitely no family or friends!) who has never experienced your website
before to sit down at a pc and navigate through your site and then ask them to give you their honest
opinion about the experience.

Now ask yourself why they didn’t navigate it the way that you’d have expected
them to?

The reason is that our brains interpret what we see in
different ways.

That said there are ways to train the brain into not thinking at all.

Confused? I’ll explain in my next post…

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SEO Explained Part One

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A few years ago this meant nothing to me either, I didn’t understand how crucial it was; now it’s everything. Every page of content I write or scrutinise, I also “scan” with tools to check its keyword density. OK most SEO experts will agree that one page with poorly written content from this point of view wont damage your site, however, consistently writing with it in mind will definitely help considerably.

Think of each word or phrase you want to appear in search results for… Let’s say “Website Design”. Google and the other search engines intention is to place the most relevant webpage to the search in front of the user. So how does it know how relevant each page is to that search? There are millions of pages competing for the phrase “Website Design”, which is they have the phrase used on them. But how often and in what context is how they are initially rated as relevant. So if a page has 5 repeats of the phrase, out of 200 words then;

10 words x 100% = 5%
200 words

So for the keyword “Website Design”, that page would have a keyword density of 5%. The intention is to get this number to between 3% and 4%. This is harder than it sounds, that is a lot of repeats. What makes it harder, is that those repeats must make sense in the text of the page otherwise it can be seen as a trick.

There is obviously more to this, far more, however I hope that it gives you an insight.

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How Design is Influenced by Purpose

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In my last post I described what a website is and how I came to that conclusion. So how does that help a designer? Well for a start, a designer who knows nothing about marketing isn’t going to make as much of a success of their sites, as a designer who does know about marketing. As a website is a tool, it should be built for that purpose. Don’t build a hammer out of leather; it should be metal so that it can hammer a nail. In the same way, don’t build a website purely to have bells and whistles, build it to have what is necessary to bring in business for the client.

At this point I would like to emphasise the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to a designer. It is far easier to build a site designed to be well optimised than it is to optimise one as an after thought. SEO techniques should dictate every thought of a design, it is as important as its visual appeal. Luckily if you understand a few basic principles, getting it right is not that tough.

SEO falls into two categories, Keyword Density and Page Rank. These are very different concepts which when brought together can make all the difference. I will go into each one in depth in later posts; however, Keyword Density is a measure of how many times and in what context a word is used on each page. It has important tags like titles and can be achieved through good, well thought out content. Page Rank is tougher, in essence the more pages you have within the domain, the higher your potential Page Rank. The largest influencing factor, however, is the number and quality of links to your website from elsewhere.

Both of these concepts will be covered in greater detail in subsequent posts.

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What is a Website

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What is a website?

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So what is a website? Not as simple a question as you might think. As a designer my ideas about this evolved as my experience grew and I thought it would be prudent to start by telling you what I have learned. When I first started out, like most designers I had nothing but Dreamweaver, Google and a thirst to learn. Like many I focussed on design and appearance, but like some found that I was a far better programmer than designer. This is the point at which I started getting work commercially, if i am honest – I got the work far easier than I could complete it and struggled to get it right. A website was a challenge, it was a collection of graphics and text placed together by HTML tags.

After a couple of years of the odd scraping and a lot of “playing”, I was able to bring those skills into play at work, I built a simple knowledge base system for a support company I was working at using classic asp. I believe its still in use today, but I was lucky that I gained enough confidence from this job to be happy with classic asp. I also found out enough about ASP.NET to consider giving it a go. Sufficed to say there is a huge jump up to .NET programming from classic asp, however, it intrigued me. A website was a dynamic collection of pages using a templated design.

A year later I secured a job at The Property Association as the Web Development Manager. It was a huge step for me and I was a tad nervous, however, my programming experience was a big leap for them, as such I had the time and backing to really boost my skills, however, the skills that I found were most important were not bells and whistles, it was getting people on the website. A website was a job!

I had some experience with SEO, however, didn’t put too much stock in it, I knew of the tricks and traps and avoided them, however, I put in hours of research into the topic and came to realise what I now know and preach. A website is a marketing tool, it should be more than a collection of graphics text and tags. It should be a well planned, proportioned designed interface that allows customers to find you by obeying the rules of SEO.

So that’s it, know you know what a website is. In my next post I will describe how to design the architecture of a site using the principles I have found out over the years. Hope you learned something.

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