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Website DesignDateline: 3rd January, 1999 A very Happy New Year to you all, and I hope that 1999 brings you health, peace and happiness. I suspect that I look at more than thirty Websites a week, and I mean look at, not just read. I check out the design and the content, the navigation, the graphics and illustrations. If you have a British theatre site, then I am probably the most critical visitor you get! In the last six months, I've had a lot of emails from webmasters and mistresses asking for advice on the design of their sites. I'm always glad to help - with the caveat that whatever I say is my own personal opinion and should not be taken as gospel! However I do think that there are some rules that should always be obeyed, primarily because breaking them makes a visitor's stay at your site a less pleasant experience than it should be. I have seen too many sites in recent months that, were I an ordinary visitor looking to be informed or entertained, I would have left within seconds of arriving, so I thought I'd begin the year with a few suggestions as to how webmasters/mistresses could make the visitor's stay a pleasant one. So, here they are: my suggested new year resolutions for web designers! To begin at the beginning (That's a quotation from a British play. Recognise it?) You have to accept that the average surfer's attention span is short. It's a bit like someone flicking through magazines in a shop at a railway station or an airport. You've got to catch the potential reader's eye straightaway or you've wasted your time. If, therefore, your opening page takes a long time to download, many visitors are going to hit their [BACK] button straightaway and try somewhere else. Big image-maps look good and show off your Net-savvy-ness (is there such a word? I doubt it!), but they do slow things down alarmingly, especially for those who have a slow modem (yes, there are still people surfing at 28.8, and some, with old machines, at 14.4!). And, of course, there are times when the Net is very slow - the good old World Wide Wait - and then image-maps are a big pain. If you must use an image-map, then please, please, please compress your graphics as much as you can. Remember that JPGs can be compressed by 50% or more for Net use without appreciable on-screen loss of quality. And remember, too, that there are still those who surf without images enabled to speed things up, so, even if you must use an image-map, give text links as well. If you really want to alienate and annoy your visitors, have an opening "splash screen" which does nothing but look pretty and then redirects the browser to the real starting point of the site. And if you really, really want them to get hopping mad, make the next screen a welcome screen saying how nice it is to see them and please will they click on the link to find just what is on the site. I can guarantee you will lose at least half of your potential visitors that way! The Background Do not, under any circumstances, use a background with a fine texture, espcially if you're intending to use normal sized text. It'll break the text up so much that, if it isn't actually illegible, it'll be so hard to read that many people will give up on it. If you must use a logo as your background, import it into an image editing program and lighten the colours so that the image can just be seen. You may think it's a good idea to have your logo in front of the reader all the time, but not at the expense of his/her being able to read the text! And do be careful about coloured backgrounds. Black is very popular - it's dead cool but I, old fashioned person that I am, find it just dead depressing! If you must use black, make your body text white. No other colour, please, just white, and, unless you're using a larger than usual font size, embolden all the text. That way the reader doesn't have to strain to see what's written. I've seen black backgrounds with silver, grey, red and blue text, and the only way I've been able to read what was there was by clicking on [View] and [Source] and ploughing through the HTML! There was one site where I was reduced to saving the page to disk, then editing the HTML to change the background and text colours to white and black respectively, otherwise I'd never read it. You may have a 17-inch monitor, but remember that there are people out there - me, for instance! - who are using a 14-inch monitor. Those additional three inches make a helluva difference to the clarity of what you're reading. Colours Keep your colour-scheme simple, please. Don't use every colour you can! If you want the world and his wife to believe you're a thirteen year old with no sense of style at all, then make each letter in every heading a different colour. Even worse is to make each word a different colour. Colouring each letter suggests an attempt (albeit dismal) at design: colouring each word differently suggests you're colour-blind or high on something! You'll notice that on all of my pages on this site, only three text colours are used: black for normal text, red for drawing special attention to something or for sub-headers, and blue for links. Of course, there's the purple of visited links, too, but we've grown so used to that we hardly notice it any more. That's a good rule-of-thumb: no more than three colours for the text on any one page. I came across a framed site recently where the designer had made each page a different colour, and changed the colour of the navigation frame, depending on which section of the site we were in. That led to some horrendous colour clashes, some of which actually hurt the eyes. Just because we have a large colour pallette to work with doesn't mean we have to use every damned one! Simplicity is the key. Frames Frames can be useful aids to navigation, but do remember there are still those who are using browsers which don't support them. Hard to imagine, I know, but true. You may decide that frames are a necessity and the loss of those few potential visitors whose browsers don't support them is a price worth paying for the benefits which frames confer. Fair enough: I suspect that the number of non-frames broswers out there is now very small indeed. But please don't go mad! Two frames is fine, if you're using one for navigation, but do keep that navigation frame small. If you have to use a frame for your logo (better than using it as a background!), then stick it in the corner somewhere - and keep it small too. Remember that people come to your site for the content, so keep the information frame as large as you possibly can. I've come across sites (which were otherwise good and useful) where the information frame is so small that you have to scroll down to read a three sentence paragraph. That is ludicrous - and it's very off-putting. Navigation I never cease to be amazed at the number of sites without internal navigation links except on the first page, so to move through the site you have to make continual use of the [Back] button. That's a great time-waster, especially when you consider that, at the page creation stage, it's the job of a very few minutes to copy and paste a set of internal links, even to a number of pages. What is worse is the number of sites (fewer, yes, but still too many) where a section is divided into a number of pages with links to take you to the next page, but when you reach the end, there's no way of getting to another section but to keep pressing [Back] until eventually you reach the index page. The Text I made a big mistake with my very first site in that I let my body text run right across the page. In my defence I have to say that things were a bit less sophisticated in 1996, but it was still a mistake, a mistake which I am now paying for, because I'm having to go through a huge number of pages and cleaning up this mistake. Why is it a mistake? Well, why do newspapers and magazines use columns? Simply because it makes things easier to read. It's a psychological thing: there is no doubt that the sesnsible use of white space facilitates reading. This is particularly true on a screen. Tables are the answer. Create a table, and put each item on the page in its own cell. That way you can be quite precise in your positioning of page elements (not as precise as Dynamic HTML, but probably half the browsers in use don't support DHTML and just make the best of the page they can. Not what you want!). But please, avoid some of the disastrous uses of tables I've seen on some British Theatre sites. First comes the too-narrow-column syndrome. If your column will only accept four or five words before it moves text to the next line (like many newspapers do), then it's too narrow. It may work in print, but it doesn't on a screen. This normally goes with the too-many-columns syndrome. This is normally seen on opening pages and it is obvious that the designer wants to mimic a newspaper. We are used to reading down a newspaper column, then going back to the top, the going down again. Fine with print, but on a screen we have to scroll, and that is a big nuisance. Although there are design rules which are common to both media, they are not the same: a website is not a newspaper! Unless, then, you want to annoy your reader, don't treat your columns like those in a newspaper. Rather use the table to produce a narrower text area, one that is easier to read than the full screen. If you're going to put one or more additional columns in, use them for illustrations and internal links. One other thing: don't set table and column sizes using pixels, use percentages. That way visitors will see your site precisely as you designed it, no matter what screen resolution they use. You'll occasionally find sites where you have to do a lot of sideways scrolling to see what's there. That's because the designer has set table and column widths using pixels and (s)he was using a larger screen resolution than you. The whole page appears on his screen, but you have to scroll sideways to see it. We accept up-and-down scrolling as a necessary evil: we heartily dislike sideways scrolling. This site is under construction We've all heard horror stories of people going on holiday to the Costa Packet and finding that the hotel they're booked into is little better than a building site. Such people - quite rightly - complain, and, if they shout loudly enough, manage to get some kind of refund on the cost of their holiday. THey don't want to live on a building site. Who would? And who wants to go to an Internet site that is still "Under Construction"? I certaily don't, particularly if it means that there are internal links which take you to a page saying "This is what will appear on this page"! There's only one thing worse - getting a "404 - page not found" error. If your site is worth putting online, it's worth finishing it first. There is absolutely no point in putting a fraction of it online because many visitors - perhaps even most - are going to say, "Sod this for a game of soldiers" and not come back again. The only point, as far as I can see, of putting online an unfinished site is so that the author can say, "I've got a Website, you know"! Finish it, and the upload it. Please! Updates If you are going to update your site on a regular basis - and you should if you want people to keep coming back to it - then make sure it is regular and that visitors know when the updates will be. This site is updated every week, around about 4.00 on a Sunday afternoon, UK time. Everyone knows that If it's not going to be updated at a particular time - as was the case over Christmas - I make sure visitors are aware of that fact. Please don't leave your visitors to guess when your site might be updated. Give them a date - and stick to it! And don't leave the awful message, "This site is continually updated. Please come back often", because the first time they come back and see that it hasn't been, will be the last. Of course you can ask them to leave their email address so you can let them kow when it's updated. Some will, but the majority won't. "Dead" sites If your site has a News section, then make sure it is updated. I never cease to be amazed at the number of sites where the "Latest News" is a year old! Theatres - especially amateur theatres - have been known to do this, even with programme details. There's nothing worse than going to a theatre site to discover that the last show advertised was three months ago. That's It! I would not presume to tell webmasters/mistresses what content they should put on their pages. Much as I dislike high slobber/drool factors, there are those who like them (For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like - another quotation), but I would suggest that, to borrow marketing jargon, your site should have a USP a Unique Selling Point. If you're just repeating what's there already, then you'd better do it a damned sight better than the competition! All of the faults I have mentioned here I have seem - in some cases very frequently - on British theatre sites. There are sites which I would not visit again by choice, because their design makes them an unpleasant experience. Please web designers: think on these things! Articles Indices: |
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