Designing for the Internet
To design for the Web, we must first understand what it is, who uses it, and how these users use it. Firstly this is not the article to read if you want code snippets, this article is about theories behind designing and how to design with users in mind. Secondly the Web is not the Internet. The Internet is the hardware i.e. the wires and the servers whilst the Web is the documents contained within, linked together by hyperlinks.
Who uses the Web anyway?
The Web is growing rapidly, more and more people are logging on every day and it doesn’t look like it is slowing down, domain names have also rocketed making it more and more important for your site to be noticed amongst the masses. There are seven continents on Earth, and on these continents are people of all ages: teenagers, middle aged people, OAP’s, you name it. So why are all these people on the Internet, heck, why are you even here? According to Christina Wodtke, users on the Web are here for three reasons:
- to find out information,
- to accomplish a task, or
- to waste time
So for your site to succeed amongst the other fifty million you need to home in on one of these three categories.
But how can I make my site succeed?
Jakob Nielsen’s HOME-RUN will. HOME-RUN is an acronym for high quality content, often updated, minimal download times, ease of use, relevant, unique, and net-centric. With these seven criteria your site should attract, and retain, a large proportion of its visitors. I want to focus in on just the first three as to give you a taste of what the acronym really stands for.
- High quality content: If you are going to ‘stick’ something on the Web, make sure it is the best that you can do, don’t slack, first place is first and second is nowhere. Why would I go to abc.com when I know I can get far superior content from xyz.com?
- Often updated: What happens when something happens so infrequently? Yes, you forget and it is the same with websites, and often what they are reporting has gone out of date. The way to retain users is to give them reasons to come back for more.
- Minimal download times: I have seen it time and time again where designers create wonderfully attractive designs, but because the amount of graphics used it takes an age to download; and that’s me on a broadband connection! People on slow connections simply will not wait, if your site takes more than 8 seconds to download, around one third of your visitors will go elsewhere.
Here we can see just a taste of how important it is for you to consider your users, and taking into account the other four criteria will give your site a massive boost in the right direction.
The designing
Finally we get to the main section of the article. Whilst designing layouts we need to be aware of several things: the audience, costs, and the technologies.
The audience could potentially be anyone, as we discovered under ‘Who uses the Web anyway?’. Because of this, we need to design the site to accommodate for everyone. People are often surprised to hear that even blind people actually surf the Web, but the truth of the matter is that a significant chunk of users have some kind of disability which may hinder them on the Internet.
For instance, a user may have a visual impairment but can navigate around using tools such as screen readers or Braille outputs in which alt tags and headers are invaluably used. This in return leads us into costs.
How do I blend these two seemingly separate sections together? Simply that creating layouts via tables is more expensive than creating layouts in CSS. For some reason people still believe in making layouts using tables. This is a big no-no. David Siegel first did this back in 1996 when he created his layouts using tables filled with text; tables are meant for tabular data and certainly not layouts. Using tables as layouts created masses amounts of useless, bloated, non-semantic markup which is forced through the Internet. This can be avoided by using CSS, since CSS is cached on the user’s computer. So by using CSS over tabular layouts your hosting bill will be substantially reduced.
That’s not all though, by using CSS you are using the same style across the whole of the site by including one external file. Editing this one file will cascade around the whole site so changing the colour of a link is trivial. This is especially useful if your site spans several hundred pages.
I can also magically combine the audience with technologies since relying upon the user for certain crucial factors is simply… well, worryingly wrong. Let’s take websites using flash for example. Websites made completely from flash are essentially telling prospective users, who incidentally may be clientele, to go away. What if the user doesn’t have flash installed, or if they do not have the correct version? Java is another example, but Java is far less used for crucial factors of sites and is generally used as add-ons.
If one must use these technologies then degrade gracefully and inform the user they do not have the required technologies installed and to possibly consider upgrading since Flash, Java, and browsers are generally always free. Better still; provide alternate versions, greatly increasing the design cost overall, and so is often rejected as not an option.
So, to conclude…
To conclude, make sure you are aware of your audience. Actually, perhaps better wording would be “You have no idea who your audience is, so don’t loose them before they have even arrived”. Use CSS as much as possible to save costs, and which coincidentally is also the standard. And last but not least if you must use recent technologies which not everyone has, degrade gracefully, not spurt out an error.