A Website Should Be Enjoyable

We use these rules of thumb to make visiting a commercial website we design a pleasurable experience:

• Colors: Use pleasing, coordinated colors that don't jar or grate on the eye. These colors can vary greatly depending on your target audience.
  
  
• Text Content: Write text that's easy to read, maybe even fun to read, then proofread it and check the spelling and grammar. Grammatical and typing errors cause discomfort and rejection when they are spotted by the reader. You want people to laugh with you, not at you.
  
  
• Text Style: Make your text big enough to see easily in a font that's easy to read. The baby boomers are getting older and if you want to appeal to them, don't make it a strain on their (my!) aging eyes.
  
  
• Text Color: Have enough contrast against the background so it is not a strain on the eyes, but not so much contrast that it is glaring. To visit a website that can help you pick a color palette for your site, go here.
  
  
• Images: Use professional-quality images. Make them clear and minimize the file sizes for faster downloading. Make the site quick to load. This site is, itself, borderline in that regard. If it were any slower, we would revise it to get rid of some of the images. There are maybe too many images in that navigational bar over on the top right. However, each of them is minimized to the smallest possible file size for faster loading time.
  
  
• Whitespace: Don't crowd the screen -- leave margins around things or people will get confused by the clutter.
  
  
• Page Length: Don't make the pages too long. Some of the pages on this site are borderline, but we're getting better at it. Believe it or not, this page used to be about ten times longer than it is. Try to summarize things and use hyperlinks to other pages that offer more information about particular topics. That's sort of what the web is all about, no?
  
  
• Navigation: Make it easy to get around and hard to get lost. Provide "Back" buttons and "Forward" buttons if you can. Offer to take people through a tour of the site.
  
  

Now you can add in your "designer" factors -- how you want the site to look and feel. But remember, you are always playing within the rules above. Colors that are "pleasing and coordinated" to a 14-year old games enthusiast (Black, Red and Orange?) are probably going to grate heavily on said enthusiast's grandmother. You need to know what types of people you are likely to attract to your website (to buy your products) and cater the site to their visual tastes.

Too many web designers started out as "graphic designers", or WANT to be graphic designers. That's where the glory is for web designers, designing a visually stunning, "killer" website. Your website offers them a chance to do this and have you pay them for it. But if all their attention is on the look and feel and coolness of the site and not on the other guidelines we list here, they may be shortchanging you without either of you realizing it.

By way of example, THIS website is designed with all these text, color, image and navigation points in mind. We may not follow every rule to the letter, but we have a reason (which seems valid to us, anyway) for breaking a rule if we decide to break it.

If you need help on any of these points, feel free to contact us here.

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