What is an ‘effective’ web site?
In the years I’ve been learning and practising web design, I’ve always thought about making a site ‘effective’.
Over time, I think my idea on what constitutes an effective site has changed and been refined, so I thought I’d document the kinds of things that make a site ‘good’.
First things first, a web site needs to have goals.
Anyone looking to get a web site for the first time need to have an idea about what they want it to do. If you don’t know that at all, then there really isn’t a great deal of point in getting one.
An effective site has to be centred around achieving those goals.
It could be a sales platform, a branding promotion, simple findable contact page. The way it is designed and works should be defined by the goals it sets out to achieve.
I personally think your web site should always provide a way of finding out what you do, and how to contact you. Regardless of what else it does, it should tell visitors something about you. That might be limited to informing them you are a plumber, where you are based, and a contact phone number…. but that would be achieving that particular goal.
For all but the smallest sites, usability is always an issue. If you just want a 3 page brochure site, it won’t be such a worry, but if you want a full on shopping cart, or information provision service, usability and navigation around the site become pretty paramount.
Unless you are showing off some kind of fancy portfolio, or possibly some kind of marketing scheme, and are encouraging people to nose around the page looking for things, it’s generally a good idea to make navigation pretty obvious and usable. Make it easy for people to browse the site, and think from a customer point of view.
One thing that sometime nark’s me, is sites that split things up by brand too much. Sometimes I want to look at a cross section of brands, based on common features (a particular size perhaps, or particular speed). You may know all about your own products and think of them in terms of brands, but your customers may not.
Knowing what they want to look for, and how they want to look for it can be the difference between a web site being highly effective at achieving your goals, and being a complete burden to look after.
Where it fits your goals, give people the information they want to access. What is it about the service you provide, that people are going to want to find out via your web site?
Ugly design can work. There are many cases of ugly sites that are successful, and at least as many very nicely designed sites that are next to worthless.
I would always say that a nice looking site that is also usable, is going to perform better than an ugly, but usable site.
Take Slashdot and the redesign currently under way. Slashdot I consider a pretty ugly site at present. It uses annoying serif font (never as easy to read on a monitor as sans-serif), some areas are too small and but up against each other too much, there’s little clear definition between some sections, and generally looks pretty unrefined.
The winning redesign of their recent competition though, takes that general look, and makes it much smarter and cleaner. Much easier to read and skim over, generally nicer on the eyes and I don’t feel like my attention is pulled around as much. Generally I’m impressed.
I’ve never been a slashdot reader, but that design swings my opinion a bit. I won’t actually become a regular reader though, as really, the appalling nature of the comment thread generally put me right off….. But I probably will take a bit more notice of it in the future, and not be so resistant to reading odd articles that are highlighted to me.
An effective site should also perform pretty well in the search engines. A site at least optimised to ensure it can be crawled easily enough, and that the spiders can find the relevant content is very much likely to out perform a site with lots of parameters in URLs blocking spiders, and badly marked up content.
I’m not talking snake and oil tactics to ’scam’ the engines (huge grey area about what is and isn’t right/wrong there anyway), I’m talking about basic practises to make a site search engine friendly.
I would argue that an effective site should also be accessible and follow good HTML markup guidelines, though it’s too easy to point out successful sites that aren’t particularly accessible, and aren’t well coded. I would certainly suggest it’s a design goal to strive for though, and would like to think that some of those successful sites would be even more so if they were more accessible and more sematically marked up.
Even though am I a bit of a web standards and accessibility evangelist, these comments have come toward the end of the list of things I suggest make an effective site.
How effective a site is, is more about the content it provides, and the methods of navigating around, and finding that content. If your site isn’t doing as well as you hoped, have a think about whether you have a clear idea of what it is trying to do, and investigate how it provides that service.