Services > Website Design > Best Practices
Best Practices
Below is a list of website design "best practices" we've found to be
helpful, particularly for small to medium sized businesses (our target
customers). We hope you'll find this list useful when it's time to design
and build your next
website!
Best Practices for Website Design
- Keep Design Simple
- Purpose of website should be clear. Design your website with a top-down
approach. Home page should include a compelling summary of who you are, and what
you can do for your customers. This should be at the highest level, and the
first thing visible on your homepage (potential customers can drill down into
detailed information later, but you can't force them to). Your have only 20 to
30 seconds to "make your case" before the user moves on to the next website!
- Purpose of each page on website should be clear. Each page should be an
important component of the overall message communicated by the website as a
whole. The idea concept for any given page should be summarizable into an easily
understandable "sound bite" of 1 sentence or less. All information on the page
should either directly support this concept, or be collected and moved to
another page supporting a different idea concept.
- Keep User Navigation habits in mind. Research has shown when users visit
a website, they tend to visually scan the top of the page (left to right), then
left side (top to bottom). Critical first elements of the "conversion
funnel" should be placed on both top of page (left to right), and left
side (top to bottom) in order of importance. The goal is to attract your most
likely potential customers, and present with information they want, so they can
easily retrieve information and/or make purchases from your website.
- Avoid Crowded Pages. For a professional look, websites should allow for a
reasonable amount of white space. What is white space? White space is the space
between design components (such as graphics, margins, gutters, columns, lines of
type or figures and objects). Reducing white space (within an area) helps
combine similar information together; Increasing white space (between areas)
allows for visual separation between them. In summary, appropriate use of white
space allows users to more quickly scan a website and locate useful information,
making for an improved user experience.
- Avoid Gimmicks. Ever clicked on a website from a search engine, and
discovered the site has disabled the "back" button? This is but one annoying
example of cheap website gimmicks. Moves such as this are generally
counterproductive, and rarely result in sales. Some tricks (such as those
designed to increase SEO page rank under false pretense), can result in complete
"black listing" on major search engines!
- Promote Products and Services
- Gather reviews for your products and services.
Make sure there are as many reviews as possible for your products and services.
Product reviews are high value content, tending to increase both SEO page rank, as well
as sales for the specific products involved. Most people don’t want to be the first to
try a product or service; Reviews full of positive information from previous buyers will
simplify their buying decision.
Encourage your existing customers to provide reviews for your products or services.
New users will tend to trust positive reviews by those already using the products and
services you’re selling.
- Showcase your very best products. Do some analysis to determine which of
your products generate the most customer interest and sales volume. Add a special
product category (Most Popular or Top 20) for these products.
New Arrivals should also have a special category, allowing your customers to immediately
see what’s new, without having to search through existing product lists. More time can
be spent on detailed product introductions in the new arrivals section. It's also a
great place to offer special promotions and / or discounts to encourage your customers
to try some of these new items.
- Organize product lists by category. Spend some time getting to know how your
customers think of your products. Generate easily understood product categories.
Make them easy to navigate, allowing even the most novice users to buy from you.
Provide icons or small images to select on, as your customers navigate through
these product categories.
Where appropriate, try to keep product categories as non-technical as possible.
Don’t forget, different customers may think of the same product in different ways,
therefore add multi-use products into multiple categories where needed.
- Provide free demo or trial period. Another great way to promote your
products is to offer a free trial period for some products and/or services. If you have
physical products, offer a limited money back guarantee (less shipping, possibly adding
re-stocking or other fees as needed.). If you provide services, offer a free consult;
The consult should not give away too many services you want to sell, just enough to
provide some value, hopefully selling additional products and/or services to
the potential client.
- Provide guides and/or instructional materials. If you sell less common
and/or more complicated products or services, the use of instructional videos can be
very helpful. Videos can be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of such products,
making the potential customer more comfortable with
his or her buying decisions.
For the more detail-oriented customer, include a PDF copy of the product manual available
for download. In a addition to providing detailed information, it may reduce sales calls,
and/or customer support calls from existing customers who have lost their product manual.
- Provide Content Users Want to See
- Make it Simple and Informative. How many times have you visited a
website looking for a specific product or piece of information, only to be
frustrated by a confusing array of unrelated options, and crowded pages which
seem to take forever to load? Unfortunately, this can be all too common...
We view quality, clarity, and accessibility of information as three of the most
important important attributes of a website. On the web, you have mere seconds
to capture the attention of your potential audience. In our opinion, it's best
to spend your time and resources laying a great foundation to quickly and easily
provide your viewers what they're looking for. If you do this, you can always
add more content, and will be far more likely to build a loyal following.
- Streamline the Registration Process. We’ve all been there... you’ve
nearly completed the long application process required by (for example)
a company you’re interested in working for. Suddenly, there’s either
a validation error on the form, or session timeout, and you’re
again presented with the original blank form!
Login and/or registration processes should be streamlined as much as
possible, keeping required fields to a minimum. Session state should
also be maintained throughout form entry and validation of input data;
Users should only be required to re-enter invalid data (not the entire
form) when errors are encountered.
- Don’t forget the Social Media. Links to common social networking
sites such as FaceBook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are now considered essential.
Most people now visit these sites, and you’ll also need to participate to
properly establish your brand identity. This is also your chance to spy on
the competition, to see what you’re up against... make sure you have
something better!
Social Media presents a unique opportunity to hear
feedback from your customers, and provides an opportunity for you to
respond in a constructive way.
- Focus on SEO. SEO is the process of improving a website's visibility to search engines, by making improvements which target known algorithms of the search engine. This method is also referred to as the
"organic" method of achieving search results. The earlier (and more frequently) a website appears in a search results list, the more visitors it receives from the search engine.
There's a great deal of overlap between what's needed to build a great website
customers want to see, and one which will do well from an SEO point of view.
After all, the primary goal of the search engines is to provide high quality
content to their customers (which allows them to sell related advertising).
First, research your proposed product to determine interest for what you have to
offer. If you know you have information and/or products people want to see, try to organize it
into subject areas, putting related information together (research appropriate
keywords for each of these areas). Sprinkle specific keywords you're targeting
as much as is reasonably possible within the text of your content. Keywords
referred to correctly within page titles, meta tags, headings, and content will
help increase your page rank within a given subject area.
Secondly, "get the word out" about your website by registering your
website with the major search engines, and by getting other websites to
link back to yours. Links from credible websites within a given subject area
help increase the credibility of your site to the search engines (one-way links
have higher value than mutual links). Product reviews may be a great starting
point.
Finally, make sure your website is also built for speed. Neither users or search
engines like websites where pages take a long time to load. In the case of
users, they will quickly abandon your site in favor of another. In the case of
search engines, slow sites will be heavily penalized in terms of page rank,
decreasing the likelihood potential customers will find you.
- Make it reliable, safe, and secure
- Web Browser Compatibility. If you’re a successful Webmaster,
you already know web design bears little resemblance to creation of word
processing documents on the desktop. Web pages can be accessed using a
variety of hardware, web browsers (and web browser versions). Therefore,
you won’t be able to control absolute positioning or appearance on a page,
or whether the browser accessing your page has even the required tools to
properly view your page.
Fortunately, there are a number of tools to the rescue. Most Webmasters
consider Mozilla Firefox, (along with FireFly and Web Developer plug-ins)
to be indispensable for debugging browser compatibility; these tools allow
you to make and test web page changes on the fly. Additionally, many cool
new features are enabled through the use of jQuery libraries (a rich set
of libraries created by a group of open source web developers). Using
jQuery (instead of individual JavaScript routines) can take away a great
deal of the drudgery related to cross-browser compatibility.
- Use Software Versioning, and test thoroughly. As we've previously mentioned, seemingly
minor changes to software can cause major problems if due diligence has not been
performed. Problems can and will occur,
occasionally bringing down the website of even a very large Minnesota company.
Risk management, along with attention to quality and detail are very important in this business!
We strongly believe in versioning of software, and separating larger projects
into smaller "Phases", to spread out the risk of a large implementation. Source
code libraries can be organized by version/revision level; Major changes require
a new high-level version number, and smaller changes are supplied as revisions
within a major version. Major changes should be introduced slowly: If any
problems are discovered later, you have the ability to restore to the last fully
functioning version of the software.
- Listen to Customer Feedback. Provide clearly defined places on the
website where customers can contact you with individual requests (for example,
"Contact Us" area), and another area where they can contact you for general site
improvement (for example, "FAQ" area). When you are contacted with requests
and/or constructive criticism, respond quickly.
- Server Uptime. Reliability
should be the most important factor in choosing a web hosting provider, because potential customers
are unlikely
to return to an offline site. When a site is offline, your search engine
rankings also suffer, as spiders visiting the site find it unavailable. A
website is your 24 hour salesperson, and you want to keep it "on the job" at all
times!
Many small Minnesota companies use "shared hosting"
providers. When you're hosting with such a provider, it's important to know what
your options are when the site goes down. Does the provider have an accessible
phone number, where you can speak to a real person? How well do they respond to their
support tickets when there's a problem? It's best to know both what you need,
(also what you can reasonably expect from your potential hosting company) BEFORE
you have problems.
Many hosting companies claim high uptime statistics, however you may want to do
your own research. Netcraft (an Internet services company based in Bath,
England) provides web server and web hosting market-share analysis, including
web server and operating system detection. Depending on the operating system of
the hosting company, their service maintains uptime statistics for many hosting
providers on the internet.
Even after you've selected a hosting company, it's a good idea to have
another company monitor your website uptime. Think about it, if your hosting company
is having issues, what is their motivation to report the problems to you, unless you're
already aware of the problem? Fortunately, there are many free services out
there which will check your website every 30 minutes (much more often, for a
small fee), and send you an email whenever your site is not functioning
properly.
- Secure Encryption. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is a protocol
developed by Netscape, for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL
uses an encryption system which has two keys; There's a public key, and also a private (secret) key
known only to the message recipient. All major browsers support
SSL. Many Web sites use SSL to obtain confidential information, such as credit
card numbers.
URLs requirURLs requiring an SSL connection start with https: instead of http:
As a practical matter, if you are operating an ecommerce website, you will need
to buy and install an SSL certificate from a widely known Certificate Authority
(CA), otherwise web browsers will not automatically "trust" your website for
secure transactions. Commercial CAs charge to issue certificates which are
automatically trusted by most web browsers. Prices for these certificates have been
coming down in recent years; It is now possible to buy a certificate with a
reasonable amount of security for $20 or less per year.
- Keep it as interactive as possible
- Use a variety of tools. Tools such as galleries, testimonials, and chat
applications make the website more interactive, and can be used to provide a
higher level of customer service. When direct communication channels are provided
to customers, they receive help with their issues right away, allowing them to
feel more comfortable with the site.
- Fix problems quickly. Serious technical issues reported by customers should be communicated immediately
to technical personnel, for prompt resolution.
- Provide relevant images and animations. Potential customers will not
have patience to search through many pages on a website to find what they want.
Make your pages interesting and interactive, by supporting them with images and
animations. Apply only those images and animations which contribute to the message
the web page is intended to convey; This allows readers to quickly understand your
message.
- Blog Communication. The goal of a good website isn't just to attract
visitors, the goal is to attract repeat visitors. When people surf the web, they
usually aren't
looking for new sites. They're usually browsing the same set of web sites (sometimes
repeatedly), mostly looking for new content. You want your website to be
included in this daily rotation; One of the best ways to do this is to start a blog,
where you can easily post new content to your site every day.
From a technical standpoint, you'll need to choose whether you want a customized
or a hosted blog. For a customized blog, you and your web developer design and
implement a blog as another page, tightly integrated to all aspects of your
website. Alternatively, you could join an existing blogging community (such as
blogger.com), otherwise download a popular open source blogging software such as
WordPress (installed on most shared hosting providers, however please check with
yours first).
After
you've handled the above-mentioned technical details, you'll need to "get the
word out" about your new blog. A great way to do this is to post articles to
other websites. You could also post your blog to general news aggregating web
sites like reddit.com or digg.com. There may also be news aggregating websites
targeted your specific field: For example, to post your computer and web related
blog, try slashdot.org.