Web Design ABC - Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions.

Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions.

A mistake often made by people who are new to web design is thinking that they shouldn't pay any attention to what has come before: they're going to design a website the way they think one should work. You have to realise, though, that there's a difference between being innovative and being arrogant. In almost all cases, you should be sticking to the conventions that have gradually developed during the life of the web so far.

There are Millions of Websites.

Why would you need to do that? Well, if there were only a few hundred websites in the world, you wouldn't - it'd be fine for people to have to learn a slightly different way of working to use yours. Unfortunately for you, though, there are literally millions of other websites. Even your most loyal visitor is overwhelmingly likely to be spending the majority of their

time looking at other websites, not yours - and if your website doesn't work similarly to the others, then they're going to find your website hard to use.

The Learning Curve.

When people come to your website, do you really want them to have to figure out how to use it before they can get started? Do you want to write big help files and FAQs just to explain it to them? Of course not. Part of the power of the web (as opposed to desktop programs, for example) is that it gives a consistent interface to all sorts of things. If you break this, then you're making your site require some learning to be usable.

The web is competitive enough that, in most cases, your visitors will just desert you for your easier to use competitor - even if there isn't one now, one can easily enough spring up and take advantage of the niche you created with your bad design.

What are the Conventions?

The web's design conventions are simple, but effective, to the point that you probably don't realise they're there most of the time. Here are some examples:

Your logo should be a link to your homepage.
The links on your navigation bar should all be internal links.
Clicking a small picture will display a bigger version.
Links go to HTML documents unless they're clearly marked as a movie, PDF, etc.
Things are bought by adding them to a 'cart' and then going through a 'checkout'.
Identity checks are done with a username and password system.

There are many, many more.

What Happens When You Break Them?

People get annoyed. It's immensely frustrating to want to see a bigger version of a picture on an e-commerce website and click it, only to get the same size picture in a new window or something equally stupid - annoying enough that I, at least, would go and look for a site that had a better picture.

Not only do people get annoyed, though, but they also get confused. If you put an external link on your navigation bar, for example, then people could think it's part of your website - that creates all sorts of issues, since you have no control over external content.

Exceptional Circumstances.

The only time you should break the web's conventions is when your website is different enough to others that it will be worth people learning a better way to use it. For example, when Google launched Gmail, the world's first webmail service with a gigabyte of storage space, they introduced an interface that used Javascript to change entire pages without reloading. That broke the web's conventions, but worked well enough that the technique caught on, and is now starting to develop new conventions all of its own.

Don't get carried away, though, and start thinking you're more important than you really are. Your great new product is very unlikely to justify you adding streaming video to your homepage - it's more likely to just annoy people (far better to add a large picture of the video and a 'click here to see our new product' headline). Know your website's limits - for the most part, you should try to make it work as much like other websites as you possibly can.

The ultimate test is this: if you sit an experienced web user in front of your site, can they use it without getting confused? If they can't, then it's back to the drawing board.

Using Quizzes and Games to Get Traffic

The Importance of Validation

The Many Flavours of HTML

Taking HTML Further HTML might seem like a simple language for web documents and to an extent it is thats what it was intended to be If you know what

Perl Cryptic Power

Web Design
◦ 5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments.
◦ 5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look.
◦ 6 Reasons Why You Need a Website.
◦ 7 Ways to Make Your Web Forms Better.
◦ A Question of Scroll Bars.
◦ Ads Under the Radar: Linking to Affiliates.
◦ AJAX: Should You Believe the Hype?
◦ All About Design: Principles and Elements.
◦ An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro.
◦ An Issue of Width: the Resolution Problem.
◦ Avoiding the Nuts and Bolts: Content Management Software.
◦ Beware the Stock Photographer: Picking Your Pictures.
◦ Building a Budget Website.
◦ Building Online Communities.
◦ Clean Page Structure: Headings and Lists.
◦ ColdFusion: Quicker Scripting, at a Price.
◦ Column Designs with CSS.
◦ Content is King.
◦ CSS and the End of Tables.
◦ Cut to the Chase: How to Make Your Website Load Faster.
◦ Designing for Sales.
◦ Designing for Search Engines.
◦ Dreamweaver: The Professional Touch.
◦ Encryption and Security with SSL.
◦ Finding a Good HTML Editor.
◦ Focus on the User: Task-Oriented Websites.
◦ Fonts are More Important Than You Think.
◦ Free Graphics Alternatives.
◦ FrontPage: Easy Pages.
◦ Hints All the Way.
◦ Hiring Professionals: 5 Things to Look For.
◦ How Databases Work.
◦ How the Web Works.
◦ How to Get Your Website Talked About on Blogs.
◦ How to Install and Configure a Forum.
◦ How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favorites.
◦ How to Run Ads Without Driving Visitors Crazy.
◦ How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat.
◦ IIS and ASP: Microsoft's Server.
◦ Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG and More.
◦ It's a World Wide Web: Going International.
◦ JSP: Java on Your Server.
◦ LAMP: The Most Popular Server System Ever.
◦ Making Friends and Influencing People: the Importance of Links.
◦ Making Searches Simple.
◦ Offering Free Downloads on Your Website.
◦ Opening a Web Shop with E-Commerce Software.
◦ tag - they have one extra tag before it. This is the doctype, and it must be present right at the top of your document for it to be valid HTML. There are only really
◦ Perl: Cryptic Power.
◦ Photoshop: a Graphic Designer's Dream.
◦ Picking a Colour Scheme.
◦ Printing and Sending: the Two Things Users Want to Do.
◦ Putting Multimedia to Good Use.
◦ Python and Ruby: the Newer Alternatives.
◦ Registering a Domain Name.
◦ Registering Your Users by Stealth.
◦ RSS: Really Simple Syndication.
◦ Setting Up a Mailing List.
◦ Setting up a Test Server on Your Own Computer.
◦ Some Places to Go For More Information.
◦ Taking HTML Further. HTML might seem like a simple language for web documents, and to an extent, it is - that's what it was intended to be. If you know what
◦ Taking HTML Further with Javascript. Once you've built your HTML pages, you might need them to do something a little more interactive on the client-side (that
◦ Taking Your Website Mobile.
◦ Text Ads: Unobtrusive Advertising.
◦ The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation.
◦ The Art of the Logo.
◦ The Basics of Web Forms.
◦ The Basics of Web Servers.
◦ The Case Against Flash.
◦ The Confusing World of Web Hosting: Making Your Decision.
◦ The Evils of PDFs.
◦ The Importance of Validation.
◦ The Many Flavours of HTML.
◦ The Smaller, the Better: Avoiding Graphical Overload.
◦ The Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes.
◦ The Web Designer's Toolbox.
◦ The Web is Not Paper.
◦ There's More than One Web Browser.
◦ Time for User Testing.
◦ Titles and Headlines: It's Not a Newspaper.
◦ Tracking Your Visitors.
◦ Understanding Web Jargon.
◦ Uploading Your Website with FTP.
◦ Using Flash Sensibly.
◦ Using Quizzes and Games to Get Traffic.
◦ VBScript: Javascript Made Easy.
◦ Websites and Weblogs: What's the Difference?
◦ What Do You Want Your Website to Do?
◦ What You See Isn't Always What You Get.
◦ Which Database is Right for You?
◦ Why Doing It Yourself is Best.
◦ Why Java Will Drive Your Visitors Away.
◦ Why Word is Bad for the Web.
◦ Why You Should Put Your Content in a Weblog Format.
◦ Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions.
◦ Working With Templates.
◦ Writing for the Web.

GoogleSense

Making Money with Articles

Webhosting

RSS
◦ Reading RSS Feeds with an RSS Aggregator