Website Style

A creative individual, the head of a religious organization or charity, owner of a boutique, or a business that wants to project big business professionalism–they’re all going to want a different website style. But there are a lot of design options out there. How do you decide what not to include in your website?

Conventional wisdom consistently lists the following:

Dated gimmicks. Flashing, pixelated GIFs; poor navigation structure (even or especially if it looks “cute”); smiley faces; pictures of puppies and kittens–They’ll make you look like you’re well behind the curve in all of your business dealings, including the one you’re trying to sell (and even if it’s a personal website, you’re selling something–yourself).

Large graphics. This is less of an issue than it used to be as people move more toward high-speed Internet access, but I recommend visiting the local library to try to put yourself in a visitor’s shoes. You’ll have, on average, a half hour. How much of your half hour of library Internet time is eaten up waiting for your website to fully load? Even 5 seconds can be too long for some people.

Poor SEO planning. Flash websites–last I heard–aren’t SEO friendly, though there are ways to improve that, even with Flash sites. Blogs are getting better, but also have trouble managing good SEO. Search Engine Optimization means you’re found when people are looking for what you’re selling. It’s important to be sure that the site is constructed in such a way that the search engines can find it and list it appropriately.

Other things to avoid? I hate the ones above, but the ones following the cut are my top five:

1. Music. Unless you’re a musician, or music is somehow a part of your mission or aesthetic, steer clear of including music on your site. Even if you are a musician or music is somehow a part of your mission or aesthetic, when you include music, either make it opt-in, where you recommend a song and allow the site visitor to turn it on and listen, or make the “OFF” button clearly visible.

According to Websense, a significant portion of the workforce visit websites during working hours (”Men admitted to spending on average 2.3 hours per week on personal-related websites, and women admitted to spending 1.5 hours per week”.) There’s a reason NSFW (not safe for work) is a well-known acronym. You don’t want your site visitors to not only stop visiting, but tell their friends not to visit because your site is NSFW. On top of that, your taste in music is not everyone else’s, and/or they may find it intrusive. Eventually people will stop coming even if they don’t remember why.

2. Frames. Frames went away…and then they came back. Why did they come back? So designers could fit a lot of content in a small space while keeping their pretty borders always in sight. Unfortunately, the scroll bars are obnoxious and the whole thing looks clunky and poorly planned.

3. Mixed signals. Is your company fun, eclectic, happy? Is it reserved, serious, focused on the bottom line? Is it exclusive, classic, artistic? Is your letterhead and logo blue and yellow?

Thinking about these things before your designer starts can save everyone from major headaches. I ask my clients to look at other websites and tell me what they like about them. That cuts through our inability to use the same language. What I think of as RGB color #8CD622 a client may call “pretty green” or even “soft green” or “electric green” or “yellowy green”–I’d call it chartreuse. If my client is consistently drawn to sites that have bright blocks of color, I’m not going to design a site using maroon, gray, and tan. But, if their logo is maroon, gray and tan (and they won’t let me change it for them) or they want their site to come across as sedate and professional, I’m going to steer them away from blocks of #8CD622 on a #FFFFFF (white, or, horrors, #000000 [black]) background.

Every business has a generally appropriate look, and that look needs to function according to their needs. It has to please their customers, “feel right”, and say to site visitors that here is a business or person who is funny, or artistic, or classic, or business-like, or quirky, eclectic… If the site has quirky elements mixed equally with sedate elements, no one knows what to think. The site “feels wrong” and the visitor goes looking for someone who seems to know what their doing, not considering that a site that feels wrong has nothing to do with the competency of the business or the people who run it (unless they’re in the business of website design).

4. Excessively wide or narrow use of space. People need “white space” to rest their eyes. Don’t fill your site with long paragraphs of unbroken text, small fonts, multiple pictures–everything jammed together. However, don’t go the other way and include a narrow, boxed central section that leaves visitors wondering if you’re still using a monitor set at 800×600 resolution. Try to shoot for adequate white space for someone using the average 1024×768, but try to keep it just inside, for those whose resolution is much smaller, and I personally try to make something interesting in the background for those web visitors who have the monster monitors with super high resolution.

Liquid layouts were quite popular for a while as a way to address the issue. If your first website visitor could only see 800×600 but your second could see 1024×760, no problem, the content shifted to fit the width of the window. Unfortunately, as websites have become more complex, designers have found it more and more difficult to make liquid layouts look good–especially using CSS instead of table design, while making the site cross-browser compatible.

5. Poor or “cookie-cutter” layout. It says little about your creative problem solving ability, certainly doesn’t put you in front of the herd, if you have a website that looks like every other insurance broker, artist, author, blogger, actuary, insert your industry here website. For that reason I dislike buying templates on the web that promise to give you a professional look. If it looks like every other professional you’re not much farther ahead.

However, where you put the content is as important as the content itself. It’s important to get a designer with a good idea, or go back and consider design principles for yourself. While you don’t want to be limited by it, thinking about how good paper layout is managed is a very good start. Most websites look like pages to us–it’s why we call them web pages. Putting graphics in to a document willy-nilly looks like bad design, top heavy or simply confused. Forgetting or not including attribution for your quotes, graphs, or photos makes you look like you’re stealing instead of ignorant of the best way to include it. There are, of course, a million bad designs out there, but if you consider the elements of good paper design, you’ll have a start on figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

That’s a lot of what not to includes. What should you include? Elements of your own personality–that’s the best way to be sure the site’s unique–and your expertise–content is still king.