In a previous article, I asked, does your website look good? And if it (your website looking good) actually mattered?
Pop Quiz – did anyone go out an try to find a “pretty” website? Just curious.
If I had asked you to think of an ugly site, you could have probably come up with several examples easily. You might not be able to explain why they were ugly, but you could come up with them. People find it easier to remember bad things than good things.
Your site’s design shouldn’t be recognizable.
The fact of the matter is, if you easily recognized a website as being attractive, it actually broke one of the most important rules of design. The underlying rule is that design shouldn’t get in the way! Call it the form-over-function/function-over-form argument.
If someone is ewwing and awwwing over how your website looks, are they really paying attention to your website and what you are trying to do (sell, inform, etc.) with it? The design of your site should help perform the task of your site. Whether this be to get a user to purchase something, or get a user to learn more about a given topic important to you. Regardless, the site design purpose should be to make the website easier to use. Fancy animated banners, complex backgrounds, and vast colors, often make the site more difficult to actually use.
When you recognize an ugly site, it may be just a guilty of getting in the way of the user. However, I only say that it may be just as guilty, because the website might actually be a successful, profitable website.
Where does your site design matter?
Your website’s design does matter, in some areas. Now that you’ve done a gut check to see if your website it looking pretty, let’s check on the usefulness.
- Can people get to where they need to go? Can they get there in 3 clicks or less? Your site shouldn’t be confusing.Ever used a website, and went to buy something, only to not figure out how to check out? How easy is it to find your phone number on your website? Users not finding the information they need on a website, is the most common reason for people to leave.
- Can your website be easily read in multiple browsers, on multiple computers? Is the text too big or too small? Is there two much text to read?
- Are you asking too little or too much from your users when they check out/download your information?
These three things are simplified of course, but this is where your site really matters – can your site be used. That is what will make it successful.
Successful Websites
Here is another question I asked my students: List 3 “successful” websites. As with all things, being successful is a somewhat subjective. So we defined successful to be an established website (no flash-in-the-pan or fly-by-night I was successful for a day websites), and profitable. The profits did not have to be sky-high, but basically it needed to make more money than it cost. See if your answers would match any of their common answers:
Now I’m sure most of you have viewed at least one of these sites. How many of them would win a design award for how they looked? I’d say none! Then why were they constantly on the list? We’ll look at that in the next article.
PS – Want to see what the list of the top 500 popular website’s for United States viewers are? Alexa has a list – which one’s do you consider attractive?
About Walter Wimberly