How To Design Better Websites For Your Visitors

 

Designing Better Websites Is Not Rocket Science

But you learn both using the same basic process.

According to Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, it takes roughly 10,000 hours of effort to be one of the top people in any given field.

You might not be thinking of putting quite that many hours into learning how to build your website.

Never the less, you can use the same learning process to create a decent web page that will serve your visitor’s needs, as a person who is striving to be the top in any given field.

There are plenty of free products out there that you can build a web page with (Virtual Mechanics’ WebDwarf Free Web Page Maker is one of them). And there are plenty of online services that will hand over a template free of charge that you can then edit to your heart’s content.

However, if you have little experience creating a web page, then what you produce may not look great or have the intended affect on your audience, regardless of the tool you used to build it with.

Though you may not create the most beautiful or usable website the first time you try, if you follow a basic process for learning, you can create a great website.

 

The three steps of learning anything well are:

1. Instruction
2. Emulation
3. Practice

 

1 ) Instruction

 

I built my first website way back in 1996. I guess you could say it was my lucky break. I had finished university, but I had no idea what I was going to do for a living –  not really that unusual when you graduate with a degree in Fine Arts.

A friend and I – Eddie –  would hang out at the local coffee shop in the morning and talk about what we might do with our highly-unsaleable degrees.

On one particular morning the discussion got around to the latest buzz at the time. You might have heard of it, it was called the World Wide Web – at least that was what the Web was called back in the mid 90s.

I was flat broke, so much so that I was two months behind on my rent and I was getting eviction notices taped to the front door of my apartment.

I told Eddie that perhaps there might be something to this World Wide Web thing. So I decided to invest $35 in a book on making websites coding HTML – that was a big investment for me, both financially and psychologically, and I really agonized over it.

Within a couple of years of that purchase I was Executive Web Producer for Scholastic (Canada), the largest children’s book publisher in the world (you might have heard of this little series they published).

I guess you could say that $35 book on how to make a web page was a good investment for me.

Studying served me well. Look for a good book on web design – there are a lot more available now. It worked for me. Remember, the old saying goes that you should learn all the rules before you break them.

 

2)  Emulation

 

When I created my first website in 1996 I realized I had a bit of an eye for layout that I did not know I had.

I had done a double major in music and literature, but I had not done anything related to design.

That is not to say that I created great websites right off the bat, but I was able to tell what a bad looking website looked like.

I believe that we are all capable of doing just about anything. But having said that,  I don’t think I could whip off a symphony before dinner tonight and have it performed at the local concert hall if I have never created one (and I haven’t).

I think it is part of the human condition that it is much easier for us to identify good or bad quality in the works of others than it is for us to be able to judge our own work.

See what others are doing who are focusing on the same audience as you.

It has been shown that once we learn to navigate a certain type of website, we assume that other sites that are about the same thing will have the same look and feel.

CNN, FoxNews, Huffington Post. They all have the same look and feel. Whereas Jetblue, British Airways, and Air Canada have a different look and feel.

Check out what your competition is doing.

If you are selling off-shore drilling services, it is probably not a good idea to emulate one of the above news sites.

Howevre, if every offshore drilling company is using a certain design, then you could do worse than to emulate that (and note that I am explicitly saying ’emulate’ and not copy).

But emulating is key to not only having your visitor’s trust, it is also key to getting you on the road to learning about building websites.

 

3) Practice

 

When Virtual Mechanics first started distributing website design software in 1998, people would send us links to the websites they had created for us to post in our Gallery.

Not all of them looked great. And I had to really agonize over whether it would help us sell our software if we posted links to websites that were built with our tools that did not look good.

However, it was clear that the people who worked on their websites became better at designing sites over time

The more you practice, the better you become. Like all things, the more time you put in, the more reward you get out.

 

A Few Tips:

Include the fundamentals that every website should have.

Grow your pages, and your website. As you pick up knowledge and practice, you can add more to your site. But at first, keep it simple.

 

Conclusion

 

By following the same steps that all professionals use to become tops in their fields, you can create better web pages.

That means:

a) Putting a bit of time into studying some basic design and navigation principals.

b) Seeing what others are doing, and emulating them.

c) Practice, Practice, Practice makes Perfect.

 

Tell me what you think, what are the worst web page design blunders you have seen?