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Web Page Design For Beginners Article
There are established Web Design
Conventions and standards on the design scene. Understanding and sticking to
these accepted Web Design Conventions will save you lot of money and time in the
long run.
Also please realize that most web design professionals comply with these
conventions. So abiding by these web design conventions following it with your
website is a beneficial factor that will save you from future troubles.
Why You Should Stick to Web 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 realize, 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 web design.
Another basic question to ask at the web design stage is why does your website
exist? It exists because it should impart information to your visitor instantly.
If your web design is bad, the visitor will simply click away to to some other
site!
He is not interested in knowing what web design conventions you have adopted. He
just wants information instantly and now. So any web design style that he is not
used to seeing conventionally scares him and he moves away from your site
forever!
What are these Conventions?
The webs design conventions are simple, but effective, to the point that you
probably don't realize 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.
But these are the very common web design conventions followed and practiced by
most. And the millions of users are used to this kind of web design styles on
millions of sites!
It is not easy for these ordinary visitors to mentally accept a different web design
style than that he is used to. He is used to it on a daily basis and for years.
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.
Quality is better than quantity. It is of no use writing numerous pages of
nonsense for the reader. Instead, it is better to write a short, and informative
article on specific subjects like web design. People tend to enjoy it more.
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 and coming out with a conventional web design style.
Hope this article on web design conventions was useful to you. You will find
more articles on web design in this site.
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