A Google search for “website designer” brings up about 3/4 of a billion hits. What separates me from the “I took a class at the community college and now I’m going to get rich on the interwebs” crowd are the critical principles I follow when I work on a WordPress site.
- F-ing Up Your Page – Studies from the Nielsen Norman Group demonstrate people read in an F pattern. Visitors read the first couple of lines and then skim along the left side to find eye-catching features such as captivating subtitles. This is why so many websites work on the same basic layout: bold subheadings, menus on the left, an engaging opening sentence, and so on. It all revolves around the F pattern, even if the designer doesn’t know it.
- Counting On My Fingers – Other research shows people read fewer than 11 letters of a heading or title. If you don’t capture the user’s attention in the first word or two, you’ve lost an opportunity. Look at the last section for example. I’ll bet your eye caught the phrase “F-ing Up” and you went, “Wait, what?” and read the rest.
- Sense No This Makes Sentence – It took you an extra second to translate that heading, didn’t it? You’d never write like that, so why lay out a page like that? Slapping text, graphics, search boxes, menus and other elements randomly on the page is just confusing. A clean, efficient and consistent page layout improves site usability and user appeal.
- Isn’t It Semantic? – Website design uses a language called HTML. Originally, HTML used markup commands that said “put this in italics” or “put this picture here”. Modern HTML uses semantic language. Instead of saying “put this in italics”, say “emphasize this phrase” and let the browser decide how to do it; most use italics but others use different methods. Semantic HTML simplifies support of all browsers including text readers for visually-impaired users, and tablet or cell phone browsers.
- Failing With Style – Have you ever been to one of those fancy websites with all kinds of cool special effects and animated menus and a chorus of angels and dancing penguins, and a laser light show…and when you leave you have no idea what just happened? Yeah, I don’t design those kinds of sites. A website exists to disseminate information. If the site is all Flash and no substance (pun intended) then it fails. Visual appeal is important; visual fluff is distracting.
- No Cheese In This Maze – You don’t want your users to feel like mice in a psychology experiment as they wander aimlessly through your site. Some large sites seem to have been assembled in the dark, and it is very difficult to find what you need. A well-organized layout allows users to get where they need to go quickly, and encourages them to explore more of the site.
I was very excited when I discovered the Genesis Framework by StudioPress. It supports the same WordPress website design principles I believe in and makes it easier for me to bring high-quality, bulletproof sites to my clients.
Call me today at 626-794-9543 or head over to my contact page to send me a message. I will build you a robust, efficient and visually appealing site to your exact specifications.