Designing sites for instant gratification!
The principles of effective web design start with the need to understand how users interact with web-sites, how they think and identifying the basic patterns of users’ behaviour.
We should all know some of the basic ground rules for today’s successful website:
• User-friendly design and usability
• Targeting your audience
• The widest possible visitor access
• Increasing your conversion-rate
• Continuous maintenance and fresh online content
Usability and the utility determines the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor to a web page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.
Web users are impatient and insist on instant gratification. If a web-site isn’t able to meet users’ expectations and the less intuitive is the navigation, then visitors are more willing to leave the web-site and search for alternatives.
We generally don’t read web pages! We scan, trying to find what we’re looking for as quickly as possible.
We scroll down the page looking at the items that stand out from the rest of the text. Accessibility to your website, means the use of headings, links, bold text and bullet points and making sure they contain descriptive text so the page can be instantly understood simply by scanning quickly through.
By improving website accessibility, you’re also improving its ability to be found and accessed by search engines.
Search engines can’t usually understand images, JavaScript, Flash, audio and video content. Search engines will be able to understand the purpose of your website more easily if you provide alternative, accessible text content to each of these. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) means the more confident a search engine is of what your website is about, able to match the key words and phrases with relevant content, the higher in the search rankings it will place your website when a search is made for those keywords and phrases.