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KrystalRose's Ten Commandments of Good Web Design
1 - Thou Shalt Not Make Thy Customers Wait Ten Minutes for Thy Page
to Download
Graphics and whirly-gizmos are great; they can say more about you,
in a few inches of browser real estate, than a thousand words. But
if they are large, either physically or byte-wise, your customers are
going to hit the "Back" button before they ever finish loading. The
average web surfer has an attention span of approximately seven seconds
- if they don't see some information quickly, all the nifty effects in
the world won't keep them on your page!
So do you have to give up pictures and special effects? No!
At KrystalRose Designs we have a big bagfull of
tricks to help your pages load quickly and still look great.
2- Thou Shalt Not Tell Thy Customers Which Web Browser to Use
"Best Viewed With *Insert Browser Name Here*" is not only free
advertizing for a certain company, it is also unfair to the millions of users who are
using some other browser. It's also a good way to lose a potential customer,
because nobody in history has ever gone and downloaded *that
other browser* just because some website they happened upon only worked
in that other browser. They merely went to a different site
that already worked with their current browser!
At KrystalRose Designs we know how to design
your web site so that it will look good in ALL web browsers (and believe
us, there are a LOT of them out there!)
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3 - Thou Shalt Not Make Thy Customers Download Anything Extra in order
to View Thy Site
This commandment is similar to the first. Flash splash-pages, background music, Java
effects, Active-X and -- the newest contender in the "How to Really Irk your Customers" arena, the massive PDF hidden behind an innocent-looking hyperlink -- are acceptable for casual websurfers with time on their hands, but
for grownup customers who actually have money to spend and who are seeking information on where to spend it,
all these whizbangs only serve to make your customer look elsewhere.
The worst part is: if your
customers do decide to go somewhere to download the required applet, they
just might not come back. There are lots of advertizements and other
distractions at the plugin download sites, and most people forget all
about the site they were looking at when they went away to download.
Don't deliberately send your customers away!
If you have something that absolutely would benefit from a plug-in application and really
can't be designed in plain HTML, provide your customers with an option. Put it on a separate
page, with a link stating that the following page needs a particular plug
in - and then provide an alternative way to view the information without
the plug-in.
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4 - Thy Site Shall be Easy to Navigate
Be sure that surfers can get from one page to another of your site
with ease, and can tell where they are in the grand scheme of your website.
Provide links and buttons that help them find their way back to where they
were. Don't assume a surfer can just use the browser's "back" button
to get back to your main page - some people may have stumbled upon a sub-page
of your site via a search engine rather than through the link you intended.
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5 - Thou Shalt Provide Information!
It can't be said enough, yet web designers consistently forget: It's
The Content That Counts! Some people surf the web looking for entertainment,
and it's fine to provide a little of this, but if you don't get your information
to the customer within the first few seconds of their arrival on your site,
you are likely to lose them. Don't force your customers to sift through
"enter here" links and splash pages full of graphics in order to find your content
- they won't!
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6 - Thou Shalt be Printer Friendly
Yes, even in this age of technology, some people still love paper.
If, for instance, a marketing associate wants to present your services
to the board for further consideration, he or she will likely want to print
out a "dead tree edition" of your web page to hand out at the meeting.
This is why it's a good idea to have your URL and email address spelled
out in black and white somewhere on your page, not merely linked to an image or some
other text.
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7 - Thou Shalt Not Annoy Nor Distract, nor Otherwise Cause Eyestrain
to Thy Customers
This commandment used to be about a quaint old "feature" of which HTML was once
capable: Blinking Text. Thank heavens, this is no longer supported by most
browsers! Now that we have got rid of that fine example of poor taste, however,
we have developed and learned how to abuse a much more annoying "feature" with
which to torture web surfers and our potential customers: the ubiquitous Pop Up Window!
Pop Up Windows do nothing but annoy web surfers.
Every merchant has, of course, a right to advertize, but irking your potential
customers does not make them want to purchase anything from you -
in fact, many people actively refuse to buy anything from
any company that assaults web surfers with pop ups. In addition, more and more
special applications are being developed every day that close pop-ups before
they are even seen, and some day (soon, we all pray!) popups may no longer be supported by browsers.
With our help, making your information easy to find, both on your page and on
the web with proper use of Meta tags, bringing your ad copy alive with professional
copy editing, and making your website user-friendly, will all go much farther
toward attracting and keeping good customers, than any amount of Popping Up
and refusing to let them look away. 'Nuff said.
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8 - Thou Shalt Keep Thy Links Updated
Nothing is more embarrassing than that dreaded "Error 404; file not
found" message, and chances are that if your customers stumble on a broken
link in your site, they won't even tell you about it. At KrystalRose
Designs we offer a maintenance service to check and update your links
periodically.
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9 - Thou Shalt Not Annoy Nor Distract, nor Otherwise Cause Eyestrain
to Thy Customers - Part Two
What could be even more obnoxious than PopUp ads? If you've surfed the
web in the last five years, you probably know the answer: Blinking and
Flashing Banner Ads!
Now, we know that Banner Ads do serve a necessary role, and
they are with us to stay, though in
fact their effectiveness is not anything near like what their inventors once
promised. In fact, most people have learned to simply block out anything
that appears in a rectangle at the top of a web page, so, if you have something
important to say, try not to put it in a rectangle at the top of your page, or
it will simply not be seen.
Some merchants believe they can make up for this immunity that surfers have
developed, by making their banner ads flash frenetically and blink wild colors
like a strobe light, to be sure they get noticed. They get noticed, all right!
But they do not make web surfers want to click on them and give you their money.
They make web surfers want to hunt you down and strangle you. In addition, did
you know that wildly blinking ads can cause people who suffer from epilepsy to have seizures?
KrystalRose Designs can create advertizing banners for you that are tasteful and
attractive enough to make people want to click on them, without resorting to
the visual equivalent of
jumping about and screaming like a used-car salesman on late night TV.
If you want to participate in a banner exchange program
with other merchants, ask the exchange service administrator what the
policy is on blinking ads, and choose a service that actively monitors and weeds
out banners that behave in insane and maniacal ways.
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10 - Thou Shalt Be Compassionate on Thy Fellow Humans Who Have Physical
Limitations or whose Access is Otherwise not as Fortunate as Thy Own
Accessible design is the crux of KrystalRose's
entire design philosophy. Despite what *certain browser companies*
say, it is NOT just as simple, for some people, as downloading *insert
that browser name here.* Some people surf the web from public
libraries, some people's computers are not capable of supporting the most
modern, resource demmanding browsers, and some people have physical disabilities
which require them to use special browsers that help compensate for their
challenges.
Blind web surfers, for instance, use special speech synthesizers to
read the text of web pages - so if your page contains nothing but graphics,
it is not going to provide them with much information.
Some people may not have *insert that browser name here,* but
you can bet they have money to spend, and will spend it elsewhere if some
other site is more accessible to them! At KrystalRose
Designs we know how to make your website accessible to all web browsers
and web surfers. Contact
us for more information!
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Here are a few links to other "Ten Commandments" sites across the
web - some are humorous, but all give a good idea of what your customers do and
do not appreciate when web surfing.
New: KrystalRose Designs Top Ten Ways to Totally Irk Web Surfers, a helpful alternative approach to Good Web Design!
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