** Continued From: 30 Ways to Design Better Sites! - Part #1
To keep your edge and primarily your clients and customers, it's crucial that the sites you design are as effective as they can be. The first part of this series outlined some tips and helpful hints relating to layout, graphics and information arrangement. This article will cover navigation, animation and interaction, which will definately add to the depth and style that your site can posses.
Setting up navigation can be very close to the information arrangement process, but involves tangible images and descriptions to engage the user. These five tips should get you heading into the right direction.
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"Try and use terms that your target audience will understand. Use clear categorization and consistency in visual language." |
1. Identify your audience. Establishing the type of user will allow you to design a navigation system to suit their needs in terms of how familiar they will be with the medium you are providing, how much time will they spend on your site and their understanding of the sites function.
2. Approach the design of the navigation system with some imagination and creativity. It will not only make the site look better but will allow the user to have a more emotional experience.
3. Try and use terms that your target audience will understand. Use clear categorization and consistency in visual language. This includes the choice of typeface, color and simple interactivity such as rollovers.
4. What is this site expected to do? Define the function and what you feel the users will expect from the navigation. Establishing the functionality early will help guide the user to what you want them to do. Do you want to lead them to a purchasing decision quickly or allow them to browse and interact with your site?
5. Experiment with sound as well as graphics. Do not always design the same thing over and over again, push the boundaries and see what you can come up with. From spaceship-style controls to cave paintings used to drive sites, there is no limit to what you can design to drive your site.
Almost every site we view on the web these days has some sort of animation built in. However, using animation has its downside, often requiring plug-ins, animation slows down downloads and most animation used is either tacky or commonly used on other sites. I have complied five flash related tips, which should help inject some life and uniqueness into your site.
1. Once again define your target audience, then ask the most important question - Do I need animation? - Think hard; clarify who your audience will be and what effect animation will have on their viewing. Also keep in mind bandwidth, plug-ins and browser compatibility.
2. If you are thinking of fading symbols in flash, try and experiment using a tint rather than an Alpha fade. Doing this not only saves on processor time but if you have a light or white background you can use the white tint fade to fade out a symbol.
3. When starting, choose and get your frame rate from under the modify and movie menus from the start. For a basic flash movie a minimum of 12 frames per second will help cut down processor time, but generally use 20 to 24 fps.
4. An often overlooked element of most great animation is sound effects. Edit down effects and insert your sound into key frames to coincide with the animation. You'll be surprised at the amount of difference it will make.
5. If you are using the Flash line tool, be aware that zooming and scaling will distort the detail of the edging. Distant images do not need to be detailed, it only adds to the file size in the end.
Interaction is exactly that, it involves providing the visitors with games and gimmicks on your web site to keep them interacting with the site for as long as possible and keep them coming back. Below are five tips to help capture your visitors' attention and time.
1. Keep your content updated. If your content never changes there will be no need for the user to frequently come back. There are multiple companies that can feed content to your site on a range of subjects.
2. If you decided to have games on your site give them a high score table. This allows the user to enter their game playing efforts and will make them come back to see how their going and if they have been beaten.
3. If you are designing a flash based site make sure the first screen is quick to load. Mainly to capture the user attention and allow them to interact with it sooner. Once you have them interested in the content, then you can have heavier areas for other sections.
4. People love to have their say, so try and add some kind of voting or opinion poll system in relation to what your web sites about. You can even set up weekly letters or a chat room.
5. Encourage the user to register so you can target them with promotional or web site updates via their email. Tell them why they should register, what added value they can get by registering and that you do not give their email address to anybody else. Make sure that they do not need to register to use the site though, that will turn people off the site.
You should by now have a good idea or outline of what you need to do and prepare in order to design a successful and professional web site. The advice and tips provided in these articles can be saved as reference material for another time or dipped into today. You never know what will appear on your client's wish-list one day.
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