Constructs - Ideas on your new website

The Constructs of a Good Website:

The development of an effective website is a challenge at worst and a really difficult, thankless task at best where everyone has an opinion and most of us have stumbled on various little site's of horror.

Fortunately, the Self-Maintained Website concept embodies the constructs of good website design:

By reversing the top 5 or so no-no's we can get a sense of direction for a new or rewritten website:

• Consistency: surfer's see your site and have certain expectations, valid or not, about how things operate. The more your site keeps within the behaviors implied by your site appearance, the better the visitor will like it. That means if you click on a tab, information should appear based on what the tab says.
• Clarity of purpose is very important so the visitor knows why your website is there.
• Provide your information in the way a visitor expects to see it. If you are marketing a service, at least tell the visitor the what, when and where about it and some idea of price. If you are providing a web presence with information about your organization, then certainly you want things like mission and why your organization exists with goals and objectives stated. If you are trying to do both on one website, then you might want to separate the two areas and identify them for what they are.
• Usability is an expansion of consistency which describes how easy it is to get around your website and to find what you are interested in. While in the early days of the Web, the concept of exploring characterizes how may viewed the web. Now, most are seaching for something they a interested in on your website and they expect to be able to view it within a couple of clicks or they go elsewhere.
• Writing for a website is not the same as writing for copy to be printed. Remember that time is of the essence when it comes to a surfer - if it is boring, inscruitable or not organized well, click, and they are GONE! Here are some of the ideas for making web writing better:

-- Use subheads

-- bulleted lists

-- highlighted keywords

-- short paragraphs

-- the inverted pyramid Article

-- a simple writing style

-- and de-fluffed language devoid of marketese

(Provided by Jakob Nielsen in his article Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes)

This may be all well and good, but what does it mean? Well simply put, you will get more readership by making your site as simple and uncluttered with no razzamataz than you will by fancy moving images and so forth.

And that is why we believe in our Self-Maintained Websites as they start with a webmaster working with you to create the presentation (look and "feel" of your website) to which you add the content of want you want your website to say and the result is a professional, highly useable website.