How to build a better website

star ledger ^ | july 8, 2010 | allan hoffman

[Coleus]

Back in the mid-1990s, when the web was hitting a mainstream audience, a motley mix of college dropouts, freelance writers and underemployed programmers typically patched together the websites of startups, Fortune 500 companies and everything in between.

Budgets were spartan, the technology wasn’t all that complicated and many of the people involved really didn’t know what they were doing. (They learned fast.) Yet things got done, even if the results were minimal (no audio, no video, sometimes no images) compared to what’s available today. Things have changed markedly in the last 15 years.

Now there’s an entire field — or several overlapping fields, really — devoted to planning, building and maintaining websites. New services and tools have made it possible to construct great-looking blogs, social networking hubs and even e-commerce websites without a lot of technical know-how. There’s much more available online, and what’s out there is astonishing in its breadth. Overall, the web is a far more welcoming place.

So why, I often ask myself, must I put up with so many malfunctioning contact forms and other annoyances? I have gripes, and I’m sure you do, too — likely some of the same ones as your truly. Here’s a list of nine gripes, along with three quick solutions. Let’s start with the gripes:

• No contact form: Is your company playing hide-and-seek? Please, make it easy to find your contact form.

• The missing search form: Search is how people find information on the web these days; visitors to your website expect to see a search form. If search wasn’t built into your website, it can be added with Google Custom Search (google.com/cse).

[Psycho_Bunny]

Do not use page forwarders. Ever.

If you must use Flash or Silverlight, have a text alternative for every element.

[Captain Beyond]

bflr

[Psycho_Bunny]

lol...I just remembered that FR uses forwarders....but I never really notice it because FR is the only site I’ve ever seen that does it correctly: the forwarder is opened in a new window, thus avoiding the infinite forward-back loop.

[Justice]

The original article source about how to build better websites actually has pop-up ads. LOL how lame is that.

[glorgau]

Simple, unless you’re linking inside your own site, always hand it off to a separate window.

[antiRepublicrat]

No contact form: I add, make it a real form. An email link is no good.

Mission statement: After visiting numerous government sites, I totally agree. Nobody cares! It wastes valuable front-page space. If you must have it, hide it some place, or place your mission statement as part of the About page.

Blinking ads: Users of the <blink> tag will be tracked down and shot.

I add mobile: Make sure your site works on most mobile browsers. With the iPhone and now Android, the number of people browsing mobile is growing exponentially.

I add compatibility: Make it work on all modern browsers. Don't use browser- or plugin-specific anything unless you absolutely cannot accomplish your goal any other way. At least try for graceful degredation for IE6/NN4, but it's not absolutely necessary. At a certain point the extra work for backwards compatibility isn't worth it and you have to forego too many useful tools.

Users of "Best viewed on XX browser" will be tracked down and shot twice.

[Psycho_Bunny]

No....inside your own site is still a mistake.

[FrankR]

I think my biggest gripe is people redesigning websites for the sake of redesigning it.

For some websites of the decorative type, this is ok, but like our local newspaper site...it has dozens of links, and about the time you learn where they all are, they change it all...it's like a 60 cycle of redesign. Same with the Georgia lottery page, been using it for several years, all of a sudden it's totally different and you have to drill down through 5 links to get the same info one click used to get you.

Before taking early retirement I was a systems analyst for the phone company, specializing in Lotus Notes/Domino; with the advent of the web side of Notes, Domino, we were instructed by IT that our InTRAnet pages must allow the user to reach the info he wants in not more than two clicks. Sometimes that was a challenge for the programmer but it was nice for the user.

I don't mind learning a new website, but when you have to keep relearning the same site every 60-days it gets old.

/rant off

[chrisser]

I’m sick of the flash and clutter. Videos, audio, stuff moving around, graphics for no purpose.

I think I liked it better when you had to code html in a text editor. At least you could find information instead of being assaulted by “artists” trying to out-bling each other.

[antiRepublicrat]

I always used the three-click rule. However, the click rules are more of a general guideline, not the result of hard UI testing. Real UI testing shows that users rarely give up looking or become impatient after three clicks.

The click rule has its value in guiding designers to create logical, consistent, efficient, user-focused navigation, which itself is far more important than the actual number of clicks.

[FrankR]

I agree, but the phone company was hell-bent on two clicks for the inTRAnet...I didn’t work on any Intranet sites then...that might have been three clicks.

[Jane Austen]

I know what you mean. The DC library used to have a clear and effective site for researching the catalog. Then they redesigned, and now often it is almost impossible to find anything. If I type in a title, I might get a list of thousands.