All website designs incorporate the following…
- Your requirements and preferences including branding, colours, styles, imagery.
- Usability.
- Accessibility.
- Search engine access.
The first point is obvious and self explanatory. But the other three points merit some further mention.
Usability
Usability is all about making sure that, having found your site, your visitors stay there long enough to benefit from it. Things to consider include the clarity of your site’s message, ease of navigation, orientation within the site, the identification of links, the possible need for a site map/search, etc. The list goes on. This is just the tip of the iceberg. But even if the site is user friendly, is it accessible to all visitors?
Accessibility
Accessibility is all about making sure your site is available to the disabled and disadvantaged. Apart from the fact that this is enshrined in disability discrimination law, you are also reaching a wider audience and being a good social citizen. People to consider include the blind, the colour blind, those with attention deficit disorder, those with motor control disorders, the elderly, etc. Again the list goes on. Addressing these issues is not a case of major surgery to your site, just a matter of understanding and complying with standards.
Search Engine Access
The other visitors to your site are search engine robots. In a nutshell their job is to crawl across your pages and pass the content to the search engine processors so that it can be assessed, indexed and ranked. So it’s important to design the structure of the pages to make it as easy as possible for them find and interpret all the content. Search engine optimisation actually goes way beyond robot-friendly content but if this will ensure we get off to a good start.
And just for good measure we must also include consistency, accuracy and scalability in the design.
