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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly!

When the internet was first started, it was a collection of informative sites. Institutions lavished it with information for the greater good, all in the name of progress. The day the internet was opened to the general public this all changed. It became a canvass for the techies to show off their prowess and the wanna-be's and artists to show off their creativity.

I can't recall how many times I've been approached with the line: "look what we paid two thousand dollars for, and compare it to what my 16 year old neighbor did in one afternoon. Isn't the kid's so much better?" This invariably makes me cringe. Too many people out there have purchased some or other site creation tool, and are now calling themselves web designers.

I have witnessed students graduating from "Web Design School" filled with knowledge of the latest bleeding edge technologies, but totally unaware of the internet's demographics. The last thing you need is for half of your site's visitors to turn away because they can't see your site, or don't like what they see and/or hear.

Sound is a big consideration. While you may think it's a cool effect to play a sound every time a certain event happens, others may not. Any visitor that comes by your site in an office environment will shun you for sound - when people are unproductive at work, they don't want everyone to know what they're up to. Music is even more controversial as musical tastes are as vast as the Sahara desert, and to date some browsers still crash when introduced to a midi file.

Colours are another big consideration. Not all browsers see all colours, and not all people have 20/20 vision, therefore a site's colour scheme needs to be extremely contrasting. A positive colour scheme is dark writing on a light background (like pages in a book), and a negative scheme is light writing on a dark background. These days it is standard that business sites have a positive scheme, while entertainment sites may have a negative scheme. Many research studies have been done on human ergonomics, and black text on a light background has consistently been proven to be the easiest to read combination.

Falling in line with the choice of colours, are fonts. The easiest to read fonts are the Verdana's and Arial's of the world, with Times New Roman and Courier close behind. Most others are quite hard to read, especially Script-style fonts or anything in italics. Font size is another consideration, as well as allowing dynamic resizing of fonts for those visitors with less than 20/20 vision.

Fancy graphics are another consideration. While broadband internet access is growing, the vast majority of visitors will still come to a site through a dial-up connection of 28.8 to 56K. To increase speed, many of these visitors turn off graphics on their browsers, which means these users cannot navigate sites that have a graphic-only navigation system. Furthermore, large graphics take time to download, and seeing that the attention span of most surfers is down to about 5 seconds, chances are modem users won't stick around and wait for a large graphic-intensive site to load.

An intuitive navigation system is the most important quality a site can have. Sites that try to work on the 'arty' concept and rely on strange icons that don't clearly state what they do, don't retain visitors. For the person that created the site, it might make sense to click on the picture of a postman's cap to send e-mail, but to the average visitor it won't. Most people need to be told directly what to do in order to elicit an action.

A general rule-of-thumb is to do what the corporate giants do, but scaled-down. Most of the large corporate sites have the same look and feel, and these sites are the ones training the general public to use the web. If all of them use a simple picture of a house to represent 'Home', then you should too.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as design considerations are concerned. As there are different people with different abilities potentially looking at your site, they are using as diverse a collection of computer equipment and software to do so.

You should decide early on in the design process who your typical audience is, and then design your site around that. After all, you don't want all 38 million AOL users to get stuck on your intro page because they can't do Java?

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