by Before the app revolution came into effect, the one go-to place where everyone looked up information about a particular company was their website.
Earlier, a Google search comes up with only search results and doesn’t really give you the information upfront. So the only way you could get all the solid facts was through opening the website directly.
As everyone’s aware of a customer or in this case a savvy internet user’s attention lifespan is extremely short. If the page took a long time to open, or even if the graphical elements in the page were numerous which resulted in a longer loading time, the user quickly closed the tab and went to an alternate website. In other case even if the website loaded quickly, but the site design was too complex to get the information in a couple of clicks, it was doomed to be a failure.
Of course a lot of advertisements in the page totally distracted the user from concentrating on the information he desired in the first place.
A website may be of various types. Among them the top popular ones include
- News Websites like TOI,Rediff,NDTC,Hindu,New York Times etc.
- Sports websites where one could get live scores, match updates and even watch highlights of the match like cricinfo.com,cricbuzz.com,soccernet.com etc.
- Shopping websites which basically was the backbone of Internet E-Commerce. This category among others was a huge revenue generation one and hence the higher criticality. The top Shopping websites in India were basically Flipkart, Amazon, Jabong, Ebay, Paytm etc.
- Social Media websites , where people could share photos, add friends, send messages/tweets etc. These included Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc
So when the user chooses your website, the navigation and User Interface experience is highly critical and can have a huge impact in your rankings, revenue and even the priority of your site in the search results
Like any other design template, a website’s navigation should be simple, straightforward and easy to find information in less than a couple of links. Customization can come in the next step , but when the basic design itself is too cluttered it loses all its credibility.
Font should be the basic Times New Roman or Arial or not any comic sans type font. Flash should be avoided as much as possible, while media content should be in low-res format for people with low bandwidth to navigate quickly
Dark background colours can also be avoided as it adds an additional strain to the eyes. Easy to read captions, self explanatory links should be present. A menu bar with a drop down style for a complete site navigation is highly desired to add a huge positive impact to the website experience
The art of zen in designing can also be incorporated whenever you plan to design a website to make it real classy.
Here are two reviews I did recently : IGP.com website review , Home Canvas review.
This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.
