Things to consider for your website Part 1

In today's business climate a business can't run well unless they have some sort of representation on the web. If you look on any search engine there are billions of individual webpages indexed in each one. Some search engines index information that other search engines don't have indexed. So how do you differentiate your site from another? The main thing is to find a web designer, or web developer that thinks about the things that makes websites work. The most important thing for a website to think about is the user's experience. In part one of our three part series on designing a good website, we are going to look at consistency, and how a good web designer or web developer conveys that to the end user.

Consistency is the measure of the similarities in design between pages overall on a website. There are subtle aesthetic differences between the main sections and sub sections of most websites. For example all of the main sections of Amazon.com all have individual tabs to select from. Once a navigation tab is selected a subsection specific menu appears to let the user further navigate a section until they reach their destination. Navigation buttons are an integral part of consistency. Thus, it is “important to make navigation buttons look like they should be clicked as well as follow the convention of underlining links when they are text-based links. Conversely, non-navigation objects should not look like they could be clicked in order not to 'trick' the user into thinking they are links (Bernard:http://psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/visual.htm). All of the conventions are made to ensure similar end user experiences. A happy end user is using a site that follows most of these suggestions. Everyone has experience with a poorly laid out site. Usually these experiences lead to frustration and an early exit from a website.

Buttons are an integral part of consistency. Buttons serve as the first navigation utilized by an end user. For the most part these buttons should be easy to distinguish from the rest of a web page. "Generally, buttons serve as primary object for initiating actions, such as submitting or confirming information. Buttons also can act as the primary link for movement to other web pages, usually within the same website. When this occurs, text-based links often serve as a less important, secondary or supplemental link for the buttons. Normally, however, text-based links are the primary link to other internal web pages. Navigation buttons cannot confuse the end user" (Bernard:http://psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/visual.htm). If the end user can't figure out how to get from section to section on a website, they will not be able to use the website.

Consistency must also make sense to the end user. If a site is organized in a way that makes sense to the designer and it doesn't make sense to end user, the end user will be disoriented. "Disorientation or "lost-in-hypertext" problems, which arises from an unfamiliarity with the structure or conceptual organization of the site. Here, users have difficulty deciding which node (which is typically one web page) to view next because they are unable to visualize where the information they are looking for could be. The decision concerning which node to view next first involves understanding one’s current location within the site, then selecting the proper route. However, users may not even know their current location within a site"
(Bernard: http://psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/structure.htm). It is hard for the end user to navigate to another page if they aren't sure of where they are on a site.

Placing similar items in the same category can confuse the end user. "A proper way to reduce this problem is to organize the site according to the typical users' mental model of how a site should be organized. This can be done by having representative users sort cards into several categorical piles in which each card represents the information that would be placed on the actual website. Each pile should indicate the information that would be clustered within each category and subcategory. This would give the designer knowledge on how users mentally organize the structure of a particular site a technique that uses this method is discussed in Usability News" (Bernard:http://psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/structure.htm). Organization is subject to interpretation by each individual end user. Performing usability studies and beta testing websites prior to launch will address most of the consistency issues.