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Does Your Website Suck?
An exceptional website is not as hard as you might think to create. Knowing what your trying to accomplish and staying focused is very important. It will help keep the site concise and more manageable.
An exceptional website is not as hard as you might think to create. Knowing what your trying to accomplish and staying focused is very important. It will help keep the site concise and more manageable.
If the website say, for example, allows users to download a super important PDF file, then it should do it well. It should do it over and over again without fail. It should also be easy for the visitor to figure out how to perform their part of the task. This may sound like the obvious, but all to often I go to a site that has the potential to be a great one, but then they drop the ball at the crucial moment. So, test, test, and test some more.
The Information Architecture (IA) is possibly one of the most critical areas of the design of a site. The IA is basically how the site will be laid out, and how the visitor will be asked to navigate it. How will the navigation links be displayed? What resources should be placed on the index home page versus secondary pages? When a visitor comes to the site what are they looking for and how easy is it to find? When you are visiting a truly exceptional website, you never think about these questions. You simply look for a moment, then flow to where you want to be next. That is what great IA is about.
Style and design aspects are what most people think of when they imagine how cool their new website is going to be. This is the emotional component of a website. Much like what a person is wearing, the type of perfume or cologne they may have on, their style of haircut, do they have on a Rolex watch or a Swatch, leather and beads or gold and diamonds. A great website makes the visitors feel at home. It will make them feel comfortable and at ease. This can only be done if you design your site for the appropriate audience. If your website targets teen girls, use common sense and don’t use a conservative business motif.
I like Flash and video, and use them often. However, if they adversely effective the load time of your main pages then something is wrong. Excellent websites should have excellent load times. There is nothing wrong with using Flash animation, just make sure it loads in the background and doesn’t keep the visitor waiting. This is a basic concept taught in beginning website design classes around the world, but more often than naught the temptation to put that cool video on the home page is just too great. Don’t do it. Don’t lose your visitor before they even get to see your website. Keep your load times down.
A lot of quality information is always at the core of any great website. Without good content why would a visitor even want to come to your website? However, having exceptionally unique and valid information will set it apart as an exceptional site.
How current and up-to-date a site’s information is can make or break it. Exemplary websites will always be 100% current and be used as an almost real-time communication tool to interact with their visitor base. Stale content, even if it was all the rage last month, often times just won’t cut it for today’s best websites.
Ensuring a visitors security while they are just visiting or making an online purchase is of the utmost importance. Exceptional sites go the extra mile to assess the risks that their visitors might encounter while visiting and do everything they can to both disclose and mitigate those risks.