Principles of effective website design.

As an introduction to our web design unit in CyberARTS, we we're taught the 10 principles to making a good website.

1. Don't make users think
2. Don't squander the user's patience
3. Manage to focus the user's attention
4. Strive for feature exposure
5. Make use of effective writing
6. Strive for simplicity
7. Dont be afraid of white space
8. Communicate effectively with a visible language
9. Conventions are our friends
10. Test early, test often


I think all these rules basically lead back to simplicity and clarity. If your website is confusing and hard to navigate, people just won't bother trying. When it comes to making a visually and mechanically appealing website, less is more.

The best way to teach good website design is to look at what bad web design looks like.



This is a great example of BAD website design. This breaks rules 3, 5 and 6. When you look at this site you don't know what it's about, what to look at, or where to start. Generally people start reading in the top left, so this is NOT a good place to put a request for a PayPal donation. Conventions are our friends, people don't need an arrow telling then to scroll down. Bad designers also always seem to ignore link conventions, they'll make underlines or change the color of any word they want to emphasize, this isextremely annoying.



Here's an example of a well designed website.



Simplicity is great! This website is really easy to navigate and comprehend. Simply color stripes are used to divide the websites in to sections. The four sections below the introduction are clearly titled with a link below. The site follows standards by putting contact info and details at the bottom and having site navigation buttons at the top. This site makes great use of simplicity and conventions and doesn't make users have to think much at all.