The World Wide Web: A New Medium for Design

Designing Successful Websites

So what makes a good website? Nathan Shedroff, a creative director at Vivid Studios states there are six 'basic ingredients' for a successful website. They are:

Content

Perhaps the most important of all six, after all its usually for the content that users go to a site in the first place. If the content is interesting, useful and well-written people are likely to come back for more - especially true if it's constantly updated.

Organisation and Navigation

Users are likely to get tired quickly and click away to another site if they can't find the information they're after, so how content is organised and how it can be navigated is crucial.

Visual Design

This is not only about making a site look good, its also about giving a site a unique look and identity. When it comes to branding, it is not only about the logo and visuals of a site though; it's also about the users experience on the site - as shown in the example of Boo.com.

Performance

Although the delights of broadband (faster) Internet connections are reported to be just around the corner, it will no doubt take several years before they become standard, so it is important to make sure pages don't take forever to download. The '30 second rule' is often mentioned when talking about designing for the web, If after this time a page hasn't finished downloading, many users will click away. In reality, it is probably even shorter than this.

Compatibility

Where most frustration awaits a web designer. As mentioned earlier, this involves taking into account the fact that the end user may be using one of a number of browsers, of different versions, on different platforms. The most successful sites are those that provide different versions for different browsers, or those that can find a compromise in their design.

Interactivity

You should build as much interactivity into a site as possible “particularly anything that allows communications and adaptive (or customised) experiences, as these provide the most value”

One recent example of a good interactive site is that of MTV2 (www.mtv2.co.uk). Here viewers can experience a real sense of interactivity not only with the site, but also with the channel for which the site accompanies. This is accomplished by allowing of the site to choose their favourite tracks and create their own hours to be shown on the channel. Other users of the site can then view these choices of music and e-mail each other about what they think. This adds a whole sense of community to the site.

The site is built in Flash and contains no HTML alternative for those without the plug-in. However, as the target audience is likely to be 'e-literate' and already have Flash, this is not so much of a problem as it could be for other sites. There is a good use of colour and typography, and an original but logical system for navigation using a system of three-dimensional coloured coded objects. There is further interactivity as the navigation includes secret areas that contain hidden games such as 'Tetris' and a typing toy, that hopefully with increased use, users should come across and feel rewarded.

Some may see this as an example that only good sites can be created if they use technologies such as Flash. I would disagree, as the website for the band 'Radiohead' aptly demonstrates. The design is regularly changed to coincide with the band's album releases, and each time the site is very much an entity in its own right. The site always make the most out of the hypertext nature of the web, letting users make choices and find their own corridors through the site. As for content, this is usually in the form of

...sketches and ideas and images that don't fit in anywhere...It has no news, no gig guide; no useful information at all. There are a lot of unofficial Radiohead sites that do what we don't. We link to them because they're useful and we aren't.

(Stanley Donwood, co-creator of radiohead.com)

So as a site then, it's pretty useless, but as a means of promoting the band's image (the site contains a lot of links to sites such as 'Jubilee2000' and 'Reclaim the Streets') and driving fans into a community of other fans, the site works well, and does what it needs to do.

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