Slickbyte Media design philosophies
The philosophies laid out here are based on my experience and views on website design. If your views differ, that's just fine as it is my belief that philosophies are neither correct nor incorrect. It is important one adheres to whatever design philosophy one has. This ensures that sites are designed with a purpose and form.
Let them know quickly they are in the right place
One thing to keep in the forefront of one's mind is that most people "surf" the net not "saunter" the net. One types into a search engine and "googles" what they are interested in finding. One click here and one click there and presto....they are at your website. What happens now?
Here is what happens; they have an idea of the information they are looking for and want to know "RIGHT NOW" if it is here. Most will spend between 10 and 30 seconds poking around the site and at that time decide if they will find what they are looking for. If not..."buddah-boom"...off to the next click in the search engine and you will never know why.
This means that one of the most important features of a quality website is that it conveys concisely what type of information or features it has. This is also important to search engine rankings as they have put less weight in the "meta tags" and more to the text displayed on a given page.
This is why it is important that a website be designed to convey its range of content and purpose clearly and upfront to prompt viewers to delve into the site long enough to be attracted back time and again.
Deja vu all over again.
Now that you have convinced someone that what they seek may be on your site somewhere, maybe they will fish around here and there as they delve deeper into your creation,
As we know, some sites can be as little as one or a few pages and others could be ten, twenty or even many more pages. This means that someone could easily go through many different pages to find what they want.
At this point what are they likely to find? Will the navigation bar and links be in the same place or the same font, size and color? Will the content be in the same area? Will all the headings and sub-headings look the same?
Well...one would hope so. There is nothing that would make someone grow tired of a website as fast as having to relocate all these things each and every time they navigated from one page to another. Remember that a good number of these people have likely spent enough time sifting through perhaps many different websites before they got to yours and need a break from learning different layouts.
Even if they aren't conciously aware that this site is laid out in a consistant manner just for that purpose, they may still have a sense of relief or a feeling that this site is simpler to get around and this is the best reason for keeping the layout of a site consistant from page to page.
Who wants to know?
Are websites developed for the audience or the creator? If all designers developed websites for their own appreciation or enjoyment we wouldn't have to bother with this World Wide Web thing. Of course we are well aware this is not the case. Knowing this, it is important to keep the audience uppermost in our minds when laying out a site.
I am aware that not all producers of sites have the resources to do an exhaustive study on their target market to obtain scads of demographic data. We can however use the knowlege we have and use it to its fullest. For example, one should try to estimate the age group of their prospective audience. There are those of us that lived part of our lives without having a computer at home, at school or in our pocket and some had little or no exposure to computing devices well into adulthood. We call these people "baby boomers" and they are starting to comprise a large percentage of our population.
Now, what is our site all about? Are we providing information services to established audults in their 30s? Mad gamers in their teens? Are we looking to convey ideas to soon or recently retired? These groups require a different mindset as their knowledge and acceptance of computers as an everyday communications tool differs greatly. At one end of the spectrum, if sent to their room without supper they would say "Who cares, I have a computer in my room and don't need nourishment". At the opposite end we have a group that at best see computers as a necessary evil. Now I know there are many exceptions however this is often the case.
There are many other groups or subgroups that can be defined such as gender, social or financial status, scholastic level, interest area et al. I am no psychological expert so I will not attempt to go into specific attributes and requirements of these groups however keep in mind that differences exist. If in doubt find even a small sampling of the group you are targeting and get their reactions to the direction the site is headed.
