Designing for the User

So let's say you've came up with this real spiffy layout that looks very modern and slick. That's great, but is it enough? The answer is no. The real drive behind any website design needs to keep the end user in mind throughout the ENTIRE process. How hard will it be for someone to move around the site? If the answer is "not very easy" then those users will probably not stick around very long and probably won't come back either. The definite bottom line: Think in terms of your potential customer at all times and how that user will experience your site.

Here are some helpful things to keep in mind when designing a website that will increase user experience:

• Write in the second person and write content that deals with their needs/problems and how you can solve them. This keeps the focuson the user.

• Map out the site for them! By this I mean help the user understand where they are at all times within the site. You all know from experience how deep you can get into a website and how confusing it can be to get back to one certain area you are trying to re-locate. One method web designers use to solve this is breadcrumb navigation, which basically means there is a clickable link usually at the top of the screen for each of the previous spots the user came from.

• Call to Action. Clearly state what you want the user to do with a call to action button. This helps guide them through the process. Use active words like "now" or "go".

• Simply put, don't make your potential customer think. Fine tune the site as much as possible so that it is straightforward and obvious. Confusion leads to customers leaving frustrated.

• A clean navigation. The buttons located at the top of the site should be simple and direct. Start broad and get more specific deeper into the site. A good example is for a dealership to have a navigation button for "cars" and a seperate button for "trucks" and so on.

• Make sure all links work! Imagine you have gone through the entire checkout process and when you go to click "order" the button accidentally takes you back to some random page and you lose all your data you have entered. Not good.

• Use appropriate title tags and alt tags. Title tags are what appear on your browser screen for each page and alt tags are what appear if you scroll your mouse over an image, link, etc.

This list is obviously not all there is to creating a good user experience on your site, but it is a good start. I have found that wireframes are a good way to organize the sequence of pages that could potentially occur within your site. Drawing these out and actually visually observing where a potential user online could all go can be very helpful. They say the customer is always right, and that is true for the online world as well. Always keep them in mind so they will want to keep coming back again and again!

Wordpress: More than a Blogging Tool

Wordpress was started by Matt Mullenweg in 2003. What started off as a standard blogging and CMS (content management system) has come a long ways in its short life, primarily in its effects on the web design world. Wordpress is now a full featured web site creation tool. It truly ranges from standard blogs to professional looking websites, and everything in between. Wordpress functions sort of like the backbone of your website due to the fact it is an open-source software. This means that the code and files on wordpress are open to the user to customize and enhance to the user's liking.

The meat behind Wordpress is its extensive template and plugin system. These hundreds of themes and plugins allow for almost unlimited creativiy and customization. This link from tripwire magazine highlights 35 plugins they consider crucial for a succesful blog or website.

TripWire Plugin Article
One obvious disadvantage to Wordpress and to a web designer/developer is that if you use wordpress alone you do not own your domain name. What I mean by this is that if you were to create a site on Wordpress the URL to your site would be something like 'jordanmarshallwebdesign.wordress.com'. Now Wordpress does offer you the option to purchase a unique domain name, and I believe the cost on this was something around 12-20 dollars per year, which isn't terribly expensive.

I have only done minimal research on Wordpress as of right now and I have some questions regarding how it really stands up against traditional professional web design/developing standards using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and NotePad. It does sound like an exciting service though does have a ton of real world value, it's just that it feels like creating something on Wordpress has less luster than creating a visually stunning website from scratch and giving the creator the peace of mind knowing they did everything on their own and didn't have to use any pre-built templates or things of that nature.