Look deeper: See what web site you really get
Don't mistake popular What You See Is What You Get for What You Don't See Doesn't Matter.
The layers
Website is build with several "layers". Each of them plays important role in website's quality, but most of them are invisible to untrained eye.
Typical eCommerce and corporate websites have these layers:
Going from the ground up:
Server backend and database
Server software generates whole website and serves files to the user. It is important to choose server technologies appropriate for the job. Important factors are reliabilty, security, scalability, hosting costs and required development time and skills.
Wrong choice can increase development time and cost, force constly license and upgrade fees and impose technical limitations on your website that make your solutions unstable and unreliable.
In most cases we recommend widely supported Open-Source solutions, like industry-standard LAMP platform, that is proven to be reliable, secure and guarantee vendor-independence.
Content
It is quite obvious that webiste needs to offer high quality content. Content needs to be well-organized, neatly formatted, searchable and easy to update and maintain. To meet these goals webiste needs powerful Content Management System.
Never ever allow "Under Construction" pages or broken links. Use good titles to describe content of each page.
Structure
Structure of web page's code is a thing you actually don't see (unless you're a programmer and take a closer look), and because code structure is not directly visible to visitors, it is often ignored. But in fact web page structure plays key role in Search Engine Optimization and Accessiblity.
Today clearly the best choice to build structure upon is HTML Strict or XHTML. These technologies give efficient way to structurize content in a semantic way. This means that content of website will be easier to understand by computers.
Semantic structure allows search engines to better understand the page and match it better with relevant search phrases. This drives more interested visitors to your website. Properly structured code is required too meet accessibility requirements of UK Discrimination Act and US Section 508 regulations. Structure gives foundation to behaviour and presentational layers. If structure is flaky, they are going to be flaky too.
Behaviour
Web page doesn't need to be static. It may contain live elements and embedded multimedia. These are mostly created using JavaScript and Flash. These are very powerful technologies and can make website more attractive and easier to use.
They need to be carefully implemented, though. Too much "cool stuff" on your website may give you unprofessional look and be annoying to visitors. These technologies may fail (most popular browsers support them well, but search engines and niche browsers don't), so website must not be dependent on them and must degrade gracefully.
Presentation
If you only check how website looks you're missing a lot. Ofcourse design is very important, and there is more than just aesthetics.
Technology
Separation of presentation from other layers is extremelly useful. You don't need to update all your content to support new design of your website. You don't need to rip your website backend just to change behaviour of some small widget, etc. See csszengarden.com for live demo.
Modern Cascading Style Sheets, when used fully and properly, are priceless tool in implementing website design. Website may have multiple style sheets that give it different looks. Your website may "automagically" re-layout itself for printing, fit on small-screen devices and allow increasing font size and color contrast for people, who need it.
Usability, intuition
Design needs to work. Splash screens, background music and animated menus give "wow" effect when you present website to higher management, but for people who actually use your website they are useless and annoying.
People are accustomed to some conventions and take some things for granted. If your website breaks conventions and is too different from others, people won't intuitively know how to use it. Website might have stunning looks, but when somebody gets confused by this, they go elsewhere, where things look familiar.
One size does not fit all
Your website won't, can't and shouldn't look everywhere exactly the same. People have different computers, different browsers and different system settings. Most importantly they have different needs and preferences.
Don't expect your website to be rigid and identical everywhere. Expect it to be flexible and offer best it can to every user.
Credibility
Website design must be made specially for you, to match profile of your company. You won't be successful in selling insurance with a design made for a toy distributor, no matter how good it was.
There are lots of tiny things that affect your credibility, that users notice, but not necessarily realize they do.
Things working together
Speed
Make sure that website loads quickly not only on broadband, but on dial-up as well. You may have superb broadband connection, but the fact is that in 2004 only 26% Internet users in Europe had broadband. If webpage is well built, dial-up user could start using it after 5 seconds of loading and it should take no longer that 30 seconds to get "full experience".
Website should be cache-friendly. Dynamic websites often have poor cachability and even deliberately avoid caching. This makes browsing slower and search engines update such sites less often to avoid waste of bandwidth.
Navigation
Many designers stick to "3 clicks rule"; ie. it shouldn't take more than 3 clicks to get from main page to information user looks for.
Make sure that navigation is clear. This is very important area of website. If user cannot find where to go next - he'll find close button.
Good links
Some server technologies use long and ugly page addresses. This should be avoided. Good links should be short and simple enough to be remembered. Too long links often break (wrap) in e-mails.
Avoid "click here" links. Users cannot quickly find what they are looking for and have to read context of "click here" link first.
Little things
- Make sure that you and your webmaster can be easily contacted, but protect e-mail addresses listed on website from spambots.
- Offer contextual help everywhere.
- Check if your pages use valid code. Give a few links to W3C Validator for inspection.
- Control robots on your web servers. Decide whether you want your images searchable and exclude unimportant pages
It's worth the work
It's not just about dumping your files in the Internet. It's about having a website that works for you. Many super-cool and super-expensive sites fail miserably. Some are visible to search engines only as "You need Flash 7/Frames/Internet Explorer 6 to enter this website" (see accessibility). Your heavily scripted DHTML menu may fail for some users. If 'Contact Us' is in this menu - nobody will be able tell you that.
It's worth to invest in your website. In a year or two you'll need a new design - your company image will change or competitor's website will make your look old fashioned. If you get nicely separated "layered" website, redesign is going to be quick and painless. If you accept website coded in a quick'n'dirty way - you'll have to replace almost everything, over and over again.
If your website uses browser-detection scripts, hacks and proprietary technologies, you'll have to debug, fix and re-test all hackish code every time new browser comes out. If your website is written in future-compatibile and fail-safe way - you can feel safe that it will work tomorrow.
