Expert Advices

It is not impossible to design Internet sites that are practical but also impressive (and getting high traffic) at the same time. You can successfully create user focused and aesthetic Internet sites by keeping some important points in your mind throughout the design process.

The fundamental points to remember while creating a web site will be explained here.

Determine Your Goal

“Determine the goal of your site before you design it”

You should decide how to design your site according to the reason of your existence in Internet.

Why are you creating an Internet site?

What are your goals?

Determine the Expectations of Your Visitors

“Determine the expectations of the majority of your possible visitors”

Your site must be functional, focusing on successfully meeting the expectations and the needs of the users. This relies upon your correct judgment of what your visitors will expect from your site. Do not design your site for an undesignated group, consider and decide what you need for the site according to your target group.

You can design your site as a commercial, private, entertaining, informative etc. site, or your site can be a mixture of several different styles.

After you determined the expectations of your visitors and the goals of your site, you need to follow some basic rules to achieve your objectives.

FOLLOW GENERAL INTERNET GUIDELINES

“Do not expect your visitors to learn how your site functions”

Users want quick access to information in Internet. If you, in a way, delay your users to access the information they want, most of them will go to alternative sites almost immediately. This change of choices takes much less time than you would expect. Therefore always make sure that the design, the contents and the navigation are handy and they serve your visitors' needs.

Navigation

“ Have a user-friendly site”

The users that visit your site look for an evident logic in your site. Thus the functioning of your site must be consistent. Deliver your users a clear and simple design to ensure that your users will have no difficulty in navigating through your site.

Pay particular attention not to have an inaccessible page in your site, provide access to other pages of your site in your content pages.

Provide additional tools to have your visitors easily perform their tasks.

Make sure that your visitors find the information they are looking for with minimal clicks. You can help your visitors to obtain information easily by implementing these little tips about navigation to your site:

Your links should be self-explanatory.

Provide clear means of proceeding to other pages in your site.

In every page, use design elements that show the users which page they are in and how they can go to other pages

Do Not Use “Frames”

Even if you have to use “frames”, use them economically. It may be confusing to the user; as in many browsers, functions and features do not work as they are supposed to in pages with “frames”. Also if we add the fact that almost 60% of Internet users use “back” button as their main navigation tool; it is safe to say that it will cause many problems in the functioning of your site when these features do not work as they should.

Error Messages

Avoid possible situations where your users will be likely to make an error to minimize user errors. You must also make known to your users where they made an error so that they can easily see their mistakes and correct them.

Design With Clarity

“The harmony between your design and your corporate identity must be your foremost concern.”

Avoid eye tiring, bright, colors that are in discord. Obtain basic color knowledge and select the color/colors that will suit you most. The harmony between the colors you chose will ensure that your users stay in your site longer and enjoy it more, it will also strengthen your, and/or your company's image.

Try to prepare your design accessible to all community with varied abilities and capabilities. Your aesthetic thoughts will affect your users as much as you.

Visual Elements

Place your important design elements such as navigation to easily seen locations to have your users understand what they can do and what they cannot at the first sight. Visual elements help users to guess the effects of their actions.

Memory Load

Prepare the elements on the screen to be clear and consistent and in effect in the whole site to decrease the memory load. This way your users will not have to remember what the elements mean when they go to a new page from another. Also relating new elements to the elements your users have been familiar with will be effective in decreasing the memory burden on your users.

Feedback

Provide immediate feedback for your users' actions. For example, when a user clicks on a button something on the screen should change so that the user understands that the system has responded to the action and is carrying it out.

Visual Design

Take clarity the most important thing when designing your site. Do not employ active animations uselessly. There must be consistency between the elements you use in your design.

The aesthetic of your interface plays an important role in providing your users with information effectively. Keep these visual design strategies in your mind when you are designing your site:

Design your pages to be clear and easily understandable.

Use graphics to give information. This will increase the motivation and the satisfaction of the users. However, please avoid including graphics that will just be decorations.

Try not to use graphics with big file sizes. As this will increase the speed that your page loads, you will not be wasting your users' energy and patience.

Design your most important elements to have priority visually.

* Group elements that are related, this way your users will be able to relate elements just by looking where they are.

Use white blank areas to emphasize important elements, to arrange your page visually and to leave some blank space for the eyes of your users.

Be conservative when using colors. Though colors can attract the attention of your users, they can confuse or mislead them unnecessarily. Also keep in mind that not everyone has the same configuration and be sure that the colors you use will be seen as you meant in web environment and in different platforms.

Content Is Everything

"What matters most in a site is content. Content is everything..."

With a good content you can easily increase the number of users that visit your site. Be sure that your content is parallel with what your users expect to find.

The presentation/order of your content is as important as your content itself. Do not hope that your users will benefit from a valuable content unless you present it with a certain order.

Try not to use long texts, as long texts tend to decrease legibility and interest in

Internet. Help your users to find the information they are looking for by dividing the text in suitable places into paragraphs.

Try to have harmony in the relations of the elements of the content. When selecting your images pay attention that they are in rapport with the texts in your site as well as the general color/design order.

Have your users benefit from your site even more by preparing documents that they can use even not in Internet. Make the access to these documents simple.

Accessibility to Information

Users want to find the information they look for easily and swiftly. To meet your users' needs:

Provide your users more than one option to find the information they want, however, limit the number of these options to prevent them from being confused. Divide the information into small, simple pieces that would be meaningful to the users. Design your site in a way that would let your users easily have an overview of the page easily; use tips that would allow quick access to the information your users look for in a quick glance instead of reading the whole page.

Legibility Of The Texts

Your texts must be clear and legible. When creating an online documentation pay particular attention to these points:

Use "sans serif fonts" instead of "serif fonts" in your texts, especially in the text body.

Do not use fancy fonts.

Use fonts with medium size. (In text body, 9-11pt for "sans serif fonts" and 11-12pt for "serif fonts" are usually adequate.)

Instead of using all capitals in your text, use a mixture of capitals and small letters.

It is harder to read texts with row lengths greater than 50-60 characters.

Pay attention that your background has the opposite color of the color of your text color to increase the legibility. A dark colored texts on a bright colored background is read best.

The Language

You can increase the functionality of your texts by following these tips below:

Use a coherent language.

Choose common usage of words instead of technical terms and jargons.

Use active voice (like "y made x" instead of "x was made by y") in your sentences.

Use simple sentence structures.

As Internet is a structure that is beyond the cultural and national borders, pay utmost care to obscurities. Below is a list of what can make people misunderstand you:

Jokes (Jokes can be translated into different meanings in cultures. It may become incomprehensible at best, outright offending at worst.)

Metaphors

Icons

Idioms

Puns

Update Your Site Frequently

"An updated site is visited more"

Being up to date is an important indication of the reliability of your site. Updates on your site persuade users to come back to your site. If a user does not see an updated site when visiting your site for the second time, a third visit should not be expected from that user.

Optimization Is Important

"Users prefer light sites"

You must always select optimized images for the pictures you will put on your web site.

Basically you should prefer "GIF" format for vector drawings, diagrams, etc. while you should prefer "JPG" format for multicolored, complicated images.

In "GIF" format you should decrease "color scale" as much as you can until the image becomes distorted.

You may also apply compression in percents until the quality of your image begins to decrease. "JPG" format is sensitive to red color. Unless the image is primarily red, a compression level of 60% is advisable. But all in all you should decide the optimization level according to the image you want to use.

Images that are optimized right (small sized) helps your page load faster and makes the users surf in your site easier.

Image Sizes

Selecting the size of the images you will use in your web site correctly greatly helps optimization. Images with bigger sizes also have bigger file sizes and so they are loaded slower. Thus do not use images bigger than necessary. If you have to include a big image, first show a smaller size of the same image and make it to enlarge when clicked upon to prevent unnecessary waiting for the users that do not want to view the image.

Increase Interactivity

"Take feedback from your users, and consider it seriously"

Create sections that provide your users a chance to participate and put feedback on your site by using common interactivity tools (polls, mail lists, message boards etc.).

Poll: By creating a frequently updated poll section allowing its results to be seen, you can learn what your users think about your site, sector etc.

Mail List: You can form a mail list to inform your users about your news, updates etc. much more quicker.

Message Board/ Guest Book: You can provide your users a tool to message other users of your site by preparing a message board or a guest book where they can mail or message one another.

Complain/ Suggestion Form: You can prepare a form that allows your users to be able to connect directly to you and in this form you can open sections about the information you want to know about your users (profession, education level etc.) and archive the information.

Have A Practical Site

"Do not provide your users with many options at the same time. Design your site so that a user knows what to do next in any section in the site."

GIVING JOY

Design your site to be easy to use and entertaining to view. The satisfaction of your users on the interface affects their:

Perception of the ease of use

Motivation of learning how to use the site

Thoughts about the reliability of the knowledge in the site.

What Is Expected From You

"Determine what is expected of you correctly, and listen your users carefully"

A recent research revealed that the online expectations of people had grown to very high levels in the past few years. According to the research, here are the four most important expectations users have in a good site.

1. 96%, the site must be updated frequently ;

2. 96%, the site must be easy to use ;

3. 93%, the site must have in depth content of the subject it is about, and

4. 89%, the pages must be loading fast , and the site must open quickly.