Page Design

30% of surveyed web visitors complained about less intuitive navigation. So it's important that your menu should be intuitive, simple, and sensible to your target audience. We recommend keeping all menu choices together in one finite area (so web visitors do not have to go hunting for what they want), and if there are many items to choose from, organizing them into a sensible hierarchical pull-down menu system. Remember your target audience is primarily made up of persons who are not yet familiar with your message. (Can you remember that mindset?) So the test of whether your menu hierarchy is organized in a “sensible” way is not whether it makes sense to you, but whether it makes sense to them.

Many web visitors prefer to type a keyword to find what they want on your site rather than figure out how you've organized your pages, because it is faster to do so. Amazon and Google are popular for this very reason. So we recommend offering a site search tool on every page of your site. This is fully supported by Web Builder. If your page design does not offer a site search tool, we are happy to add it for you.

You only have a few seconds to get a very brief message across before a web visitor decides whether to continue on your site or move on, so use that time to grab their attention with a carefully-planned core message about how your site benefits them. Clutter is out. Lean and mean is in.

Since more columns (content areas) per page means more clutter, we recommend a maximum of one or two columns per page (not counting menu column, if any). Our Web Builder content management system supports two user-editable columns per page. If you require a design with more columns, and wish to edit your own content directly using the content management software, then keep in mind as you plan your page design that only two of your columns are user-editable, so any additional columns should contain relatively static (unchanging) content.

Color is the most important factor in initially grabbing the attention of your web visitors and making an impression, so choose your color scheme carefully, not only to aesthetically represent your unique identity, but also to help create the desired response in your audience. We recommend light-colored backgrounds and dark-colored text to give your site a more positive look & feel. (Dark backgrounds tend to feel “heavy”.)

Larger font sizes and colors offering good contrast are helpful in reducing eye strain.

Screen widths vary from one web visitor to the next. Page designs should either be expandable to fit the available screen width, or should accomodate the fixed screen width of the appropriate demographic segment. WAP designs should accomodate 90-pixel-wide screens. WWW designs should accomodate either 800-pixel-wide screens or 1024-pixel-wide screens. There are pros and cons associated with expandable designs vs. fixed-width designs. There are pros and cons associated with fixed-width designs of 800 vs. 1024 pixels. Let's discuss the pros and cons so you can make an informed decision about your web development project.

Designs heavy in Flash animation do not work for web visitors using a narrow bandwidth connection, and are more expensive to implement, so Flash-free designs are recommended. If some animation is desired, Javascript animation and GIF animation are good alternatives that do not carry the disadvantages of Flash.