10 golden rules for great website design
|
1 ensure a
quick download traditional guidelines indicate 10 seconds as the maximum response time
before people lose interest. On the web, users have been trained to endure
so much suffering that it may be acceptable to increase this to 15 seconds
for certain pages 2 Beware cutting edge technology
It's not worth the the time to figure out how to work a site when there
are five million others to go to, so avoid gratuitous graphics and
plug-ins such a Java and Flash on your site 3 Keep it calm traditional giudelines indicate 10 seconds as the maximum response time
before people lose interest. On the web, users have been trained to endure
so much suffering that it may be acceptable to increase this to 15 seconds
for certain pages 4 Limit your frame Splitting up a page into frames is very confusing for users. it can
also prevent them from e-mailing a recommended URL to other users 5 Choose a simple address
Keep your website address, or URL (Unique Resource Locator), simple or
you will confuse people 6 Stay up to date So many sites are continually updated that users do not stand for stale
information and any site that is not current is bound to lose credibility 7 keep scrolling short
Only10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the
screen when a page comes up. All critical content and Navigation options
should appear on the top part of the page 8 Provide a site map Don't assume that users know as much about your site as you do. They
always have difficulty finding information, so add a site map and a search
function 9 Standardise your link colours
Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to
previous seen pages are purple or red. Don't mess woth these colours as
consistency is key 10 Brand all your pages
Make sure that every page includes a clear indication of which website they belong to since users may acccess pages directly without coming in through your home page. If you don't use frames (see rule 4) this is not a problem |