When you create a print document such as a brochure or leaflet you know exactly what the result will look like to the reader. You can easily build into the design stage different sizes, folding leaflets, banners, etc. With all of these you can guarantee your work will look exactly the same for everyone.

Designing websites is different. Read on for more..

When designing a web site, you don't know:

- How big the user's browser window is, in either inches or pixels. everything from a low resolution 10 inch screen up to a user running their browser on a huge LCD TV set.

- Which browser is being used, the current popular browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Safari and Chrome.

- What operating system is being used, The default font settings for Windows, Apple and Linux users all display websites differently.

- What 'extra' capabilities the user's environment will (or won't) support, including:
Images (dial-up users may suppress them)
Style sheets
JavaScript
Cookies
Java
Flash
Adobe Reader/ pdf
Microsoft Word

- How fast the user receives data (dial-up, broadband, mobile, cable or optical fibre).

- How well the user can see (perhaps not at all).

- Whether the user will navigate using a mouse or the keyboard.

 

Dealing with the design problems.

So how do we manage with the huge variables in the user experience when visiting your website? Fortunately website design has developed into a set of broad guidelines for useability to help websites display consistently across systems. In the same way you expect a book to have a front and back cover, an index, chapter list, prologue, etc. Visitors to websites expect to see:

- A consistent and easy to navigate menu either at the top or along either side, often all 3!

- A logo to show who you are, clicking the logo usually takes you back to the home page

- No horizontal scrolling, whatever the screen size/resolution. Although horizontal scrolling is often used to good effect it confuses most web users.

- Vertical scrolling is fine, as long as you aren't forcing a visitor to scroll down for endless text vertical scrolling is expected on a website, we use a double height scroll on a 'normal' 15" laptop as a guide, anything more than this and the page probably needs splitting into 2 separate pages

- A front page which outlines what you do, this can be in the form of images, text or both. The front page often has extra's such as twitter feeds and latest news items.

- Keep fonts for the main content simple. For the main textual content of your website the font should be kept simple such as Arial, Helvetica or Times New Roman. This ensures a user has that font installed on their system and looks how you intended. If you build a site in an obscure font it's very unlikely your user will have it installed and their browser will choose the next best match.

- An obvious 'Contact Us' link, if you've ever been to a site without this and tried to find an address or telephone number you can see how important this is.

- A website isn't a printed leaflet. Although design elements such as colour schemes, fonts and logo's can transfer from print to web, using a website as a static brochure is a wasted opportunity. Websites can and should be updated often with relevant content.

- Be wary of asking us to design for your own screen. Try and look at the broader picture for your website and trust us to build a site we know will work consistently across different systems.

- Internet Explorer 6 needs to go to browser heaven! Internet Explorer 6 is over 8 years old and doesn't support many of the modern browser standards such as some transparent graphics, it's also buggy and a security risk on your system, even Microsoft recommend you upgrade to 7 or 8.

- The 3 Click Rule. For easy navigation and ease of use all of your content should be accessible within 3 clicks from anywhere on your website.

So our job when designing your website is to ensure we blend your needs with a clean, easy to navigate layout which appears consistently over a broad range of sytems, we currently build our sites for a base resolution of 1024x768 (roughly a 13-15" screen) and test all of our sites on Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome on both Apple and Windows operating systems.

If you have any questions please contact us.

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