About building a web site right - layout

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Define The Design of Your Website
by Steven Boaze ©Copyright 2004

The single most important step before you begin designing your
website is defining the structure and purpose of your site. Once
you have your structure planned out, you can unleash your
creative genius.

What kind of navigation buttons do you want? Would animations,
photos or diagrams help get your message across? What sort of
layout do you prefer? How will customers navigate through your
site? While keeping in mind a few basic guidelines for
attractive design, feel free to experiment and be creative with
the look and feel of your site. It may help to draw your ideas
on paper first. Decide which colors you want to use. Do you
already have an attractive logo on your advertising, letterhead
or business cards? Use it. Try to visualize any graphics you
want to liven up your content. You may be able to find suitable
images in an off-the-shelf clip art collection or on the web at
one of the clip art repositories. Depending on the size of your
company or business and your priorities, you may also want to
consider paying a design professional to create the graphics for
your site. Alternatively, you could invest some time and money
buying and learning to use one of the many commercially available
image editing programs.

Most websites utilize some variations of the same two or three
layouts. The most common is a left navigation setup, in which
you place logos and graphics along the top of the page, include
links and navigation buttons along the left hand side, and place
content below to the right. This layout draws attention to your
logo while keeping navigation in a set position. Another common
layout places both graphics and navigation links along the top
of the page. Focusing activity and attention at the top and
creating more room for content below.

Before you get carried away with your newly found design
freedom, however, remember that there are a few widely accepted
design rules to keep in mind:

* Make your site easy on the eyes. Use high contrast colors, dark
text on a light background is easier to read. Patterned
background designs, though an old popular one, are usually more
distracting than appealing. You don't want your customers to
skip reading about your big sale just because they can't stomach
the dancing teddy bears behind the text.

* Make your site easy to navigate. Place your links or buttons in
a prominent place and keep them in the same place on every page.
Your design should help users access the information you want
them to see. To this end, keep your colors, layout and buttons
consistent. Label every page so customers always know where they
are. Every page should provide links back to the homepage.

* Make your site professional and appropriate for your company or
business. Your design, no less than your content, should
support, complement and promote your business and it's products
or services. Keep the design clean and simple. Remember, when
it comes to design, white space is beautiful and less is more,
unless you have a very unique product or service that is well
served by something more avant-garde.

* Check out the other guys. When it comes to design, you'll find
that a little time spent looking at what other companies are
doing will pay off handsomely. You'll discover for yourself what
works and what doesn't. There are, unfortunately millions of
poorly designed web sites on the internet - look for them and
learn from their mistakes.

* Write your content. Only after you've defined your goals and
fully planned out your site should you actually begin to create
your content. Avoid the temptation to just sit down and start
creating web pages. If you hold off until you've got a good plan
in place, you'll save yourself a huge amount of time and effort
in the long run.

Use your site plan or diagram to identify every page that will
be on your website. You can number them, name them or find
another way of listing them that works for you. You should
already know generally what each page will contain (contact
information, list of services, FAQ, products, photos, etc...).
Now you need to decide exactly what you want on each page. Write
all the text that should go on each page. Indicate where you
want graphics or photos located. Create captions and sidebars.
Organize each page around your navigation scheme, and plug in
content where it fits.

* Make it short and sweet. Studies have repeatedly shown that
internet users have a short attention span for text on the web.
Few things on the internet are more intimidating and less
inviting than a long page of text scrolling down into the
distance. With few exceptions (articles, white papers or other
publications), avoid long, uninterrupted word masses. Break up
your content with visuals and decorations. Better yet, be
concise. Customers aren't looking for dissertations on your
products and services, they just need enough information to make
an intelligent decision.

* Avoid scrollbars. Sometimes you'll need to make your visitors
scroll down the page a bit in order to see all your content.
But, if you have to scroll down more than an extra page height,
it's a good indication that you have enough to split between
several pages. This will give your visitors manageable chunks of
text and keep them interacting with your site.

* Check, double check and triple check. Few things are more
unprofessional than poorly written or misspelled text on your
business website. And, inaccurate information is even worse.
Nothing will destroy your credibility more quickly than
misstating the facts. Read through everything you create, have
someone else proofread, and run the text through a spell
checker. Because not every web editing program includes one, you
might want to create your content in a word processor and then
copy your finished text into your web pages.

* Gather the site's components. After creating your content,
gather all of your site's files together. If you've identified
logos, buttons, photos or other graphics that you want to
include, either create or collect the specific files you want to
use and store them in a folder on your PC. Save the text you've
written in the same folder. Keeping your content in one place
will save you time and frustration when you are actually
building your site.

* Create the pages. You're finally ready to make some web pages.
You will most likely be creating your entire website in
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), so picking up an elementary
understanding of the technology behind your site wouldn't hurt.
Basically, HTML is a programming language that gives
instructions to an internet browser, telling it how to display
text and images. You've already created that text and collected
those images; all you have left to do is arrange them on each
page and define their appearance.

When creating your pages, follow two crucial rules of smart
technology implementation:

1. Products should drive technology, not vice versa. When
creating your web pages keep both your audience and your
business objective in mind. The features you include and the
technology you utilize should be appropriate to target your
audience. Don't waste time and energy on bells and whistles that
your customers won't appreciate or can't take advantage of. If
you sell old fashioned widgets to a non-technical customer base,
your visitors probably aren't interested in your prowess at
creating cute scrolling messages on-screen. They just want to
know if you sell the best widgets at the lowest price. At the
same time, however, you should be prepared to take advantage of
whatever technical enhancements suit your business needs. If
you sell services that could benefit from the creation of
collaborative and interactive community areas for your site
with discussion boards, mailing lists and online customer
surveys, then use them.

2. Speed is everything. Make a conscious effort to limit file
sizes and keep download times to a minimum. Most web editing
programs will estimate page load times, and you can test them
yourself (use dial up connection to test) once you've posted
each page to the web on your personal host server. Everyone
who has surfed the internet has experienced the frustration of
sitting around waiting for a site to load. Don't be that site.
Optimize all of your images on your site for web delivery,
reuse navigation buttons and logos wherever possible (this will
improve page speed because the files have already been loaded
once), and keep each page small enough to load quickly.

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Steven Boaze, Chairman, is The Owner of Boaze.com Corporate Web
Solutions which houses Web Development services. Steven is also
the author of two successful Books along with numerous articles
on Marketing and Advertising published by Boaze Publishing.
http://www.boazepublishing.biz Copyright © 1998-2004 Boaze.com
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