Website Design Review - Honey Do List Part 2

This week we continue the series of posts related to improving your company's web presence.

Last week I talked about a simple and easy test for site usability and design. Now we are going to look at some basic website design issues. You do not need to understand HTML to see if your site suffers from these design issues, but you will need to know HTML to fix some of them.

Displaying too Much Text

Some websites have too many words on a page. This wall of words will discourage many website visitors from reading your content. This is probably one of the easiest issues to check for, but hardest to fix.

1. Look at the pages on your web site.
2. Do they look like this image?
3. Are they made of large blocks of text?
   

 If so your site is made up of a wall of words.

1. Break your content into smaller paragraphs.
2. Add Headlines where possible.
3. Include bullets, lists and highlighted words when appropriate.

 Janice Redish's book, Letting Go of Words is a good read if you need to rewrite your web content.

Making Links Hard To Identify

Users have been trained by other websites to expect underlined text to mean a link. Sometimes websites make it hard to figure out what is a link and what isn't. This makes getting around a site difficult for visitors. If your site is not easy to use, then they will be less likely to return or recommend your site to others.

1. Look at your site.
2. Are all links underlined?
3. Do they change when a user mouses over them?
   
4. Is a different color assigned to links that have been visited?
5. Is other text (not links) underlined.
   

Navigation links do not need to be underlined, but they should clearly be links and consistent throughout your site.

Confusing Navigation

Is your navigation easy to identify and understand? Look at last week's blog and reread the section on Quick Usability Testing.

Can people, not familiar with your website, identify navigation links? Do they understand them?

In the late 90's I worked on a site for a large discount retailer and we tracked user's searches. The most popular search was "Jobs". There was a main navigation link "Career Opportunities", but people did not associate that with jobs. After changing the text on the navigation link to "Jobs",  searches for that word dropped by about two thirds.

Good information architecture can help create meaningful and useful navigation and is as important as good user interface design.

Avoid Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN)

I'm not sure who came up with the term, I think it was Vincent Flanders. It means having navigation (or design) that makes it hard for people to use or remember what function goes with an individual design elements. It is a reference to the unidentifiable food historically served in many American public schools.

It is not just small businesses that use mystery meat. Large companies can incorporate MMN in their sites, for example here is a video from Qualcomm's old website.

1. Look at your website's navigation
2. Do the navigation links use acronyms, technical or phrases from your companies corporate culture?
3. Is site navigation made up of  images and not words?

If you answered yes, then you need to change your navigation. The exception to #2 is intranets. If everyone using the site knows and uses the same terminology, then acronyms or corporate slang is OK. Just remember that web hires still need to use and navigate the site.

Avoid Flash Splash Screens.

To check for this, go to your website's home page. Does a Flash movie load before the real content? Few sites still have a Flash introduction, but some do.

If so, remove it.

Do you remember searching on Google, clicking a link and seen a page with a flash movie that needed to load. Was there a "Skip" link and did you press it? Was there no "Skip this Movie" links and were you frustrated and could not wait for the real page to load.

I'm sorry to tell you, but your flash introduction is no more interesting that anyone other one.  People feel the same when they visit your site as you did on those other sites.

If there is a message that you need to tell about your company, and it can only be accomplished using flash place the movie on your home page. But make sure it does not take up to much real estate. Remember visitors will see the home page several times during their stay at your site. They can quickly become annoyed if they constantly need to scroll down your home page, past the huge flash movie, to see navigation or content.

Using Images Instead of Text

I'm not talking about using images for design elements, such as navigation links, on a site. Although from an SEO perspective text is better than images. This issue is for those sites where entire pages are made up of images instead of text. Yes they still exist and I run across them every week or so.

The easiest way to test this is as follows.

1. Go to a page on your website
2. Right Click (Apple Cmd Click for Macs) on the content of a page
3. Does the pop-up menu show commands such as: View Image, Save Image, Copy Image...?
4. If so, then your web page is made up of images and not text.

Why is this bad? Because it does not let users change the size of the text if they need to make it larger to read. It is also bad for SEO; move on tat next week.

You can use the "Test Image" to see how your browser responds to an image when right clicked.

The Goal of Good Website Design

Make it easy for your site's visitors to use your site and find what they are looking for. If you have good content and it is easy to locate, then visitors are likely use your website or suggest it to others.

Remember Jakob Neilsen's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend most of their time on other websites." This means that they form their expectations for your site based on what's commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave.

When designing your web site, or reviewing it, you should keep that idea in mind. Your site should function like other sites.