Web Design Usability Ottowa

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What can you do to ensure that you design a website that suits both your budget and your audience without assistance from a professional in the field?

As a novice professional in the web design and development field, you need to be able to match the demands of a variety of clients, for a variety of situations with varying specifications. What can you do to make sure that you fulfill your job requirements?

In either of these situations, the solution is attending a web usability course! It may be expensive, but it will prepare you for the business world. It will provide you with knowledge that will serve you well with all of your clients.

Web usability courses are available through a variety of locations, and at a variety of costs. One of the best ones is the Ottawa, and is provided over two days for a cost of $1390. It covers several aspects of web usability in a manner which allows several different professionals to benefit.
Covered in the web usability courses are topics such as:
• User Centered Design (UCD) techniques and how to apply them to your project.
• How, when and where to create and implement usability testing in your project.
• How to refine and specify your requirements, along with those of the intended audience.

Why is all of this important to you regardless of the scenario that brings you to this web usability course? Simply put, the more you know, the better off you are! Entrepreneurially speaking, your website needs visitors who will then become customers. Without determining the needs of this audience and then making the best attempt to cater to them you decrease your likelihood of being able to capture the visitors to convert to customers. Applying UCD aids you in making sure their needs are met. From the technological standpoint, you need to be aware of what can be done to cater to an audience, what it takes, and what it costs in order to take care of your clients and their audience.

Both situations will require knowledge of requirements and specifications for your audience so that you know how to take the User Centered Design principles you learn, and use them effectively to meet them. Generally speaking, the more refined those details, the smoother the process runs.
Usability testing will work with your UCD and specifications and requirements to ensure that you have chosen the right course of action. It is used with a test audience to make sure the project is responded to as intended, and results are used to alter the project if different than expected.
No matter where you stand in the spectrum of web usability, or the root reason behind enrolling in the Web Usability Ottawa course–it should now be clear that web usability covers a wide array of subjects, all of which are closely intertwined. The focus on web usability determines the success of a website design, and therefore must be given careful thought and consideration; and many times, this aspect is too often ignored in many projects.

They also offer free webinars that may give you some good design ideas as well as holding a yearly consortium with two days packed with courses and seminars. I’ll put a link in the Web Diva’s Resource box.

What is the Best Website Design?

Your website should be simple, easy to navigate and quick to load. All of the elements and graphics should be designed to clearly convey the information and be a reflection of your business. The information flow should be designed so you guide the user easily through the information gathering and decision phase to guide them to the outcome you desire. Your user experience and their ease of use should be utmost in your mind as you design the web site.

Your viewers will be coming to your web site using different browsers, different browser versions, different displays using different resolutions and they will be connecting to your site using different speed connections. Some of the older version of browsers may not even display your pages and may not support new modifications and new tags. When you design a website, ensure that it is tested at least with the latest version of browsers - Internet Explorer and Firefox. Also keep in mind if your site has a lot of graphics you may be making it unusable for users connecting through dial up.

You can also check your design on BrowserCam, which allows you to view your site using different browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, and remote access to any of their testing machines. It’s a little expensive ranging from $19.95-39.95 for a one day access. However it might be worth it if you grouped all of the websites you wanted to check together or had an important client and wanted to check everything. For the full time web design firm the full subscription at $999 might be worth it since you would be spreading your costs among all of your clients.

Your web site should load fast. Today’s fast click web user will click off to another site if yours doesn’t load quickly. Some of the web design software today will even show you the estimated loading times of the sites you are designing.

Your design should have a consistant look and feel to it so that the users’ impression of the site will be reinforced. That consistency will also reinforce your branding. Background, colors, fonts used, graphic buttons used, and navigation location should also be consitant to reinforce the users impression The design of the website should permit easy navigation. Building a small text menu at the bottom of the screen will aid in navigation.

Study what others are doing and mimic the best out of them to design your own eye catching website. I’m not suggesting that you steal someone elses work and copy a website directly but look at different successful web sites and borrow the best. You might like the email capture box of one site, the way the header graphic of another website appears, the way another sets up it’s text boxes, etc. One of the things I would suggest is asking a couple of people you know at varying levels of computer expertise go to those site and get their feedback. You might find out a design feature you like most users find a problem.

Collect together all of the features you and your survey group like. Use a screen capture program and capture the images of those different elements. Cut them out and create a layout board that mocks up the layout you’d like to follow.

If you are going to be outsourcing the actual coding work to a third party now is the time to start writing up a detailed specification document. The more detailed and specific your specification document is the smoother your job will go. It will also end up saving you a lot of time and money doing a lot of revisions because you weren’t clear in your specifications.

If you are going to be doing the coding yourself I would still recommend writing up a specification document. It will clarify a lot of the things that you wanted, make them specific and make the transition from thought to paper to code a lot smoother.

Successful Web Design Elements

Have you ever wondered why there are common elements between many of the websites you visit? The navigational elements are usually either in the left column or on the top of the screen. Some websites even repeat their navigational menu on the bottom of the screen to help make sure that their users can always have access to the things they need with ease. Think for a little bit about your favorite website, and why it works so well for you. What element, or elements about the website (specifically its layout and interface design) have separated it from the rest in your mind?

When you identify these things, you can pretty much bet that the person who designed the website counted on that being your answer, and developed it for you in that manner. He or she did this so that you would revisit the site, and continue providing your business or traffic to them. Now that you have the need and desire for a website of your own, you should start shifting your mindset from that of a consumer, to the ideal consumer for your business.

The layout of a website refers to the structure developed in the web design. Directly, the layout design refers to the manner which all the information will display on the screen; i.e. navigational buttons on the left, text in the middle, graphic on the right. However, in some instances, the layout will also make reference to the informational structure of the website, i.e. home screen, about screen, (which points to subscreen 1, 2, and 3), etc.

The interface design refers to how the layout will be visually represented, and with what multimedia elements. Several things must come into consideration here, such as the target audience users browser, internet connection speed, operating system, etc. will come into play. Along with the considerations of your target audience, your own financial limitations must be considered here. What sort of elements will you need to have created for use in the project, and what sort of elements do you already have? Budgeting is a serious issue with web design, and being able to maintaing a pleasureable interface that facilitates usability within the budget you have is not always the easiest task in the world.

The interface design works in conjunction with the layout in impacting the way your customers will percieve it; and together, the two of these things can make or break your website when it comes to generating traffic and sales when it is finally live on the internet. Knowing this, you will want to focus on conducting user study groups and market research that will help you determine the needs and desires of your consumer base. Then, you will be able to match those with your own needs to create the best possible business website deisgn for all.

Remember though, a website is nothing without traffic, and traffic will not come to you without proper focus and design. Without proper planning, you cannot have proper design! The most important thing to consider in your venture is yourself, and your audience, no matter what the end result may be!

Before you begin - The one Crucial Factor for your Web Success

Gary Halbert, acknowledged to be one of the world’s best marketers, posed the following question to the audience of seasoned internet marketers at the seminar I was attending. “Say you are building a hamburger business and you could only have one thing to make your business a success –what would that one thing be?” Hands shot up throughout the auditorium. One advertising veteran said location. Another said a big television budget. Another said a big print media budget. Another said advertising. The answers went on and on. After a few minutes Gary continued.
I’ll give you all those things and I’ll still be more successful. If I could just have one thing –
Give Me a Starving Crowd

That’s what market research is. It’s identifying that starving crowd before you have spent your money, or invested your time or built the web site to find out if people want what you have. More people have failed on the Internet by getting the cart before the horse – building the product or web site and then going out to try to find someone who wants it.
Save yourself time, money, and heartache and do the market research first. Find the starving crowd first.

You are an individual who wants to make some money on the Internet, after all millions of others are doing it. You’re an entrepreneur who sees the opportunity for you on the Internet and you want to grab a piece. You’re a small business person who wants to expand your business on to the Internet. Where do you go? What do you do? How can you find out? Well the first place you come to is WebDesigningDiva.com for the information, guidance and resources you need. We’ll send you in the right direction or recommend the right low cost or no cost tools.

So how can you find out within a few minutes if there is a hungry crowd looking for what you have? Go over to the free Wordtracker tool and put your product name in. See how many people a day are searching the Internet for what you have. While you’re at it go over to Google and use their free tools to see if people are looking for what you have. Another good indicator is eBay pulse and Google Trends. If it’s an existing item you want to sell check on eBay to see how many people are buying that item. Want to get a better idea of how hard it is going to be? Take a look at the competition. You don’t have to hire a corporate espionage firm – it’s all there right on the net to see. All you need to do is take a little time.

After you have proved to yourself the value of this market research (often called keyword research on the Internet) and made some money you might want to invest some money and get a paid subscription to a keyword service like Nichebot which will give you much more power to allow you to find those profitable keywords. One of the other great features of Nichebot is that it allows you to automate a lot of the tasks you would be doing by hand saving you hours of time. The reason that I prefer Nichebot over other subscription keyword tools like Wordtracker is that is gives me access to four different subscription databases. So rather than paying four different subscriptions you pay for one and have access to all of them. So click on Nichebot - it will take you to a link that gives you full access to all of the tools for a two week trial for one dollar. If you don’t feel it is helping you just cancel before the two weeks are up. Your trial would have been free and hopefully you have saved all of the keyword research you did to your local drive - the information certainly will be worth much more than the single dollar you spent for the trial.

It will take a little time to do the market research. However it will save you a lot of money, time and wasted effort. If you would rather not do the market research yourself drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with some reasonable market research companies that will do it for you. It will be worth the investment.

You might be saying to me that I’m just a web design - someone else gives me the website they want done and I just build the site they see on the Internet. Now let me ask you a question. Say you design the most beautiful attention grabbing, high conversion web site ever seen. And no one comes because no one wanted the product in the first place. Let me ask you - who do you think your client will blame - themselves for not doing some basic market reseach first for their dream product. Or you for designing a website that “sucks”

You can even put yourself above the crowd of web designers by bundling some keyword research into the services you offer your clients. This way you’ll be spreading the cost of Nichebot among your clients and putting yourself above the competition by differnetiating your services and expertise.

Welcome to Important Design Elements of Web Pages

Welcome - I’m working hard to bring you the information you need to design a web page the will increase your search engine rankings. Check back on Monday.