Developing websites — structure, content, and design
August 2nd, 2008How do you plan a website?
I design and maintain web sites for a living, and the one thing that I see most often is too much of a focus on the graphic design of a site, or the “look and feel” and not enough on the idea of interaction with the site.
Design on the web is a very different beast from designing a print brochure, or a newsletter, or a trade show booth. I’ve spent my career doing all of these, and would like to share a bit of my insight into an effective approach to successful website planning and implementation.
Above all, you have to realize that websites are resources to be used. Unlike a magazine or a brochure, they have a bit more of a complex role when it comes to interacting with their audience – and more appropriately, vice versa. This doesn’t make them any easier or harder to implement, but web interface and interaction does bring a unique set of challenges and considerations to the table.
Anybody who thinks they can separate design from structure from content, has not spent enough time working with good teams to develop an appreciation of the importance of all three.
Structure is King
Yes, yes, I know that’s not how it goes. Everybody keeps saying that content is king, and I’ll agree with you in the next section, but for now, just bear with me. Structure determines how the entire site will work. Think of wanting to build your office. Yes, you have to know who’s working there, but much of your planning involves figuring out the space you need, and getting the doors right, and hiring the right architects and structural engineers before going to Ikea to buy all of your furniture. Yes, you need to know the basics of your intended content, but at this point, it’s at a very high level. Don’t get carried away with too much content development without determining a strategy to deliver and navigate it.
When it comes to websites, structure is something that every designer needs to think about before choosing a typeface or a colour scheme. The planning in these stages shapes how your content is presented and accessed, but in some cases, may actually influence appropriate content choices. Decisions about navigation shouldn’t be left to the end of the planning process, for your designer to deal with as an afterthought. Content is what you want on your site, but it’s extremely important that you make a commitment to a method of organizing it.
Use your target audience to guide you. No marketing decisions should be made without appropriate research, so make sure you’ve got as much information as you can before you start deciding on technologies and colours and neat Flash splash pages. Let that research take you to competitors, and put yourself in the shoes of a customer. What makes things easy for you? What frustrates you? What are you doing just before deciding to buy, or deciding to leave?
Content is King
Okay, that’s more like it, you say. The medium is the message? Not if you want that Google PageRank (sorry, Mr. McLuhan, I’ll make it up to you in another article). The medium only gets you so far, but the swing for the internet is back to purity of content. People are becoming a lot more flexible in the way that they access content, and to some extent, it’s created a platform war — from huge desktop screens to tiny Blackberries, iPhones, and UMPCs. Fortunately, we’ve got the standards and tools that are up to the challenge. A good separation of content and presentation is all that’s needed. Make sure your users can change the medium, and still keep the message intact.
Search engines play the part of a user as well. Make sure they have information to digest. Google in particular is almost entirely geared towards finding and ranking relevance of information. Their entire credibility relies on making sure they have information on sites that let them return pertinent search results. Their ad systems also work this way. All other successful search engines follow a similar path. If they don’t know what your site is about, they can’t send interested people there. Content should be written in such a way as to not only inform a human reader, but to make sense to a artificial intelligence, as well.
Design is King
Oh, come on. We all know that form follows function. A good and successful design needs to be more than just pretty, however. This is where your users get the opportunity to interact with that properly organized content. The site should be clear to them, and often what looks good is not necessarily what makes for good design on the internet. Make no mistake, the demographic is very different from a magazine or newspaper reader. The time to grab someone’s attention is very short and there are always millions of competing sites at their fingertips, seconds away.
Some things in design don’t change, however. The basic principal of design is that you’re communicating effectively. That’s your job. You can be more successful if you’re creative, but don’t let the quest for aesthetic appeal overshadow the job that a designer has to keep in the fore — effective communication of ideas and content. To that end, use good design principles when thinking of your typography, page flow, and whitespace. Add to that a clear and consistent method for navigating from area to area without surprising, confusing, or insulting the user, and you’ve got the makings of a good website.
User experience is King
A site needs to look well-organized, not too boring, but not too confusing. The design is there to help guide the user, and to help them find what they want. You can’t force a path on them, unless they cooperate. Remember, just because there’s only one path to follow on your site doesn’t mean they won’t just go away to a site with more choice.
Don’t ever think of your website as finished. You have to set objectives — milestones, as it were, but don’t ever think of a site as, “in the can,” throw-it-on-the-shelf-and-let-the-hits-come finished. This is where real website development sometimes starts. Sometimes it’s a bit painful to take a look at all your hard work and decide that you’ve made some mistakes - but it’s harder still to leave things to atrophy. Business models and advertising strategies change with their respective trends, and so should websites. Listen to your visitors. Find out why visitors are coming, and why they are coming back. Use the information to constantly tweak (not redesign!) the experience for the better. Don’t fall into the trap of changing things just for the sake of change, however. Inconsistencies in usability and design risk alienation, if there’s not a good reason for them.
Users are getting more savvy and have their own ways of doing things — make it easy for them to still access your content, without forcing them away from their preferred access method. Don’t re-invent the wheel, or solve problems that don’t exist.
At the end of the day, you’ll learn best from the people on the other side of the screen. Those people are your readers and customers, and they’ll be your best resource, through emails, forums, letters, purchases, visits, and comments. At the end of the day, treat your users like royalty.
Tags: content, creation, design, planning, presentation, structure, web, webdev, websites
3 Responses to “Developing websites — structure, content, and design”
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Great article, I am working on something similar. Over design plays a huge roll too. Usability is king. There’s so many good looking sites out there that still annoy the hell out of users and we just leave out of frustration. I would go so far to say that I am more likely to stay on an ugly site that is content rich and easy to navigate. I shouldn’t even be thinking about how the navigation works, it should just work. If I’m thinking about it then it’s not working. That doesn’t mean we should have ugly sites, but it seems lately the priority of some sites is over weight in design. Movie sites are notorious for this. Usually we just want to see the trailer or screenshots without trying to guess where to click or now to get back to the main page.
The movie site is a great example. They are almost universally over-designed, and every single one of them seems to have every possible new bleeding edge tech crammed into them. Apple’s quicktime trailers pages aren’t bad, though. Want trailers? You have the thumbnail, a cast and crew list, the synopsis, and the link to the trailers. When people are coming to a site for a specific reason, that’s the time to grab them, not confuse them.
Granted, most movie sites attempt to make themselves ’sticky’ by having extra stuff to do (games, viral sharing campaigns), but in doing so, they often overshadow or destroy the basic reasons for people to be there. Convince us to stay by first giving us what we want, not trying to force us into something else once we get there.
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