There are many pointless and abandoned websites in the world. How do you make sure your next project isn’t one of them?
Decide on the focus of the website and stick to it.
It can be quite tempting to create a website that does everything in one place, however unless you are building a deliberately generic site like about.com or Yahoo then this is generally a bad idea. Creating a single focus for your site will enable you to target particular audiences with your marketing and focus your efforts on a particular area with the result that the quality of that focused content will be increased.
Plan and implement user journeys to ensure customers can complete the tasks that they set out to do in a logical way.
Most if not all websites can be analysed as a series of tasks that a user must complete, for example a shopper at Amazon in a very simple way arrives at the homepage, searches for a product adds the product to their basket and then goes through the checkout process. By creating user-journeys and site maps you can ensure that your users can do what they come to your website to do efficiently and without frustration. If they can do that, they are more likely to return in the future.
Test to make sure your end-users can access the website as well as you can.
Just because you followed the last tip, doesn’t mean your website is going to be easy to use. Once your site’s functionality has been built, you need to test it with users to be sure that your logic is common logic.
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Filed under: Accessibility, Front-end development, Visual Design, usability No Comments »
Using a grungy hand-made texture or pattern on your website is a great way to make it stand out and look creative rather than corporate. Below is a list of my favourite grunge textures and designs available from bigstockphoto.com
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I read an interesting quote by Jean-Jacques Rousseau this morning.
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. ”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754
Filed under: Accessibility, Random No Comments »
Accessibility has been an interest of mine for some time and I always try to make my work as accessible as possible. So I was pleased to read a news story from the BBC about Soul legend Stevie Wonder urging technology companies to make their products accessible to the blind. It is nice to see a celebrity endorsement of a life changing cause that is so simple to achieve and at that same time very much ignored. Keep at it Stevie.
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I like my PC case, an Aspire X-Cruiser, presumably named because of its roadster-like appearance. It was this case in fact that sent me down the path of the self-builder. I decided I had to have this case and the only way to get it was to build a PC to go in it.
Recently however my head was turned by another rather sexy looking case, though case is the least appropriate way of describing this piece of kit. Chassis is perhaps a better word as this case doesn’t have the usual side and front panels, in fact it doesn’t have any panels as such.
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Filed under: Product/service review, Random No Comments »