Beginning: Your Site, The Sequel

It's been a few months now since you designed your first Web site, and you no longer think it's the best thing that ever happened to the Internet. In fact, you now hesitate before giving your URL to all of your friends and family. If this scenario describes you, then you need to think about redesigning your site into Your Site, The Sequel. . . . Thought about it long enough? Good, then read the following site design tips:

• Analyze Your Audience
• Keep It Simple
• Organize
• Place Emphasis Carefully
• Be Consistent

Analyze Your Audience

The first rule when you write, speak, or communicate in any way is analyze your audience! Your audience is the reason why you are designing, or redesigning, a Web site. Answer the following questions, write your answers on paper, and save the paper for reference as you make design and organization decisions:

• Who is my target audience? What's their education level, their age, their gender, their nationality, their hobbies/interests, etc?
• What will my audience expect when they come to my site?
• What's their motivation or goal for coming to my site?
• What will their attitudes be?
• What will my audience know and what will they need to know when coming to my site?

Keep It Simple

According to Jeffrey Veen, executive interface director at Hotwired, you have three seconds to convince a visitor not to use the "Back" button. Think about your own habits when you surf the Net--it's true, isn't it? You therefore need to make your content and design immediately accessible and interesting. Design a home page that your visitor can see all at one time, without having to scroll. Make the sections and organization of your site immediately visable, and make the content or topic of your site very clear. Because you only have three seconds to draw visitors into your site, you don't want to alienate them by designing a site that takes forever and a day to load. Images bog down the speed of your site, so consider cutting down the number of images on your home page, in particular.

Organize

There's nothing worse then turning the page of a textbook to see straight text, with no columns, no pictures, nada. Similarly, there's nothing worse then clicking on a link to a Web site that pulls up a screen full of words, with no tables, columns, horizontal rules, nothing to break up the text. So, when redesigning your site, try to organize and break up your text as much as possible--for example, instead of putting three topics on one page, link to each of these topics and give them their own pages. Here's some more tips:

• To design your Web site so that your content is accessible, list everything that you want to cover in your site. Then group items into topics, and divide each topic into subsections.
• Put a navigation bar on each page of your site, and place it where visitors will easily see it (not at the bottom!).
• Use document design elements, such as lists, horizontal rules, plenty of headings and subheading, and tables to make your text fall into columns.

Place Emphasis Carefully

As you redesign your site, recognize what your design choices are saying or emphasizing. For example, if you have text that's moving, in all-caps, and is bright red, then that text will obviously get more emphasis than everything else on your page. The moral of this example? If you don't want to attract attention to something (and away from your page's content), then don't make it move, don't make it big, don't box it, and don't make it a different color! Decide to emphasize things that are most important on your page. Or, place emphasis to help you organize. For example, change font size, color, or style for your headings.

Be Consistent

Just because you can change your font size, color, or placement, doesn't mean that you should. Consistency relates to what your audience expects--if you start with your headings in Arial, size 2, blue font (like I've used here), it would annoy your audience if you change things in the middle. To help you be consistent, try recording your design decisions about the following and more:

• Headings: style, size, color, placement
• Spacing
• Link color and placement
• Graphics and visuals (borders, spacing)
• Font: style, size, color

That's it for the tips: Happy Redesigning! May your site's sequel be a success!