What is the Best Website Design?

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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.