Begin at the beginning - being found. There are 11.5 billion web pages out there. How do you expect your audience to find yours? If your URL is relatively straight forward, and your users are fairly internet savvy, they may guess your URL and just type it into the address bar. They may see it on a piece of paper, a TV ad or a radio spot. But most likely they will use a search engine. And that search engine will most likely be Google.
Design can play a role in how high up the list of search results your website appears.
Imagine if road signs were treated like website navigation.
Usability is a preoccupation of a lot of people who make websites. Your page can be as pretty as you want, but if people can’t find what they’re looking for on your website, what does it matter?
This is a brand new subject for people who are used to producing print publications where the instructions are pretty much universal and taught from childhood: grab right edge, pull to left, repeat.
And websites do more than just give people a new way to read words. You can interact with people, buy things, reserve plane tickets, get your work done, file your taxes, etc etc.
There are age-old standards for road sign placement that ensure people know where to look to see if they have to stop or not, all this web stuff - even at 12 years old - is very new. And constantly changing.
Design isn’t the only consideration in creating a usable website, but it’s the one that overshadows all the others.
All graphic design aims to portray identity and create empathy in the viewer before fading discretely into the viewer’s subconscious to let content take centre stage. The visual message the design sends is supposed to amplify or corroborate the message of the site’s content.
And that’s as true for a web design company, where the message is "we do exciting design" as it is for a trade union, where the message might be "We work for justice and equality in the workplace and everywhere."
The urge to create is strong in many people who sit down to create a website. And in seeking to create we seek to do something that has never been done before, to make a name for ourselves, to leave a legacy. Yadda yadda yadda. Whatever dude. Get over it. Okay. We come back down to earth and accept that it’s all been done before. Fine. But we still don’t want to be like everyone else. Each local of a union has some distinctiveness, and no matter how dearly we hold the notion that the whole working class has common interests and needs, we all want to be different.
Some of these goals have some commonality. However others are at cross purposes. Designing to be original, for example, almost always collides with designing to be usable. Imagine the world’s most original cell phone, designed to leave an indelible mark in your memory of things unique and awe-inspiring. Buttons, menus and even a keypad that no one has ever seen before, emblazoned with symbols hitherto unknown to humanity. Think it would be a big seller? On the other hand, imagine a site that strictly followed all of Jacob Nielsen’s rules. People like looking at pretty things.
The usability people say one or two colours maximum, where one colour predominates and the other is ’accent’; use system default colours to indicate link text.
The design people say use however many colours your muse tells you to and default link colours make it look like something is broken.
Colour conveys impressions, evokes feelings, etc.
the web is an additive colour system
"Browser safe" is obsolete.
The purpose of design is to fade into the background and let the content come to the fore. If the ever-rotating image works as prescribed, it does exactly the opposite. If it’s subtle and tasteful, no one will notice it. So why do it?
Sound is worse because you might be ratting someone out at work for surfing to the union website.
Web design that succeeds generally posesses some or most of these characteristics:
A widespread phenom that results from the dynamic of scarcity of real estate on the front page.
There lots of ways to get on the front page, most of which involve creating compelling, useful and timely content.
Failing that, those who clamour for their button on the front page, should know the following:
The decision to put a menu item in a menu, and in turn put that menu item somewhere prominent is more a topic for the information architecture workshop.
The design people will be wanting to limit the number of menu items and indeed the number of menus.
The proliferation of menu items and menus is usually a sign that information could be better organized.
If they must have a bazillion menu items on the front page:
An organization that’s all about representation is going to have some concerns about whether 'who' it represents is reflected in the website’s design.
We’ve all been told: "put the members in the picture", "tell real stories," etc etc.
But going there necessitates a quick trip to the doctrine of inclusion, and a multi-layer grid which includes boxes for gender, culture, ability, geography, occupation and physical ability.
And so we work into our flag an array of models dressed up to look like members, or actual members. Maybe they rotate. Maybe they’re just a lot of really small faces.
So what is the actual problem with the human rainbow?
It usually involves placing a huge image or - worse - an animated gif that
Warning: your logo on the web may suck. It’s true. Most logos hearken from an era before the web. Generally speaking anything that’s got a map of Canada, or a picture of a truck, plane, or some other bit of hardware or work product is going to suck.
Why? Because if you have to reduce those sorts of logos to average web digestable size, the detail is going to be lost and there won’t be much to distinguish your logo from a close up of a piece of pizza.
So what to do? If you don’t actually have the authority and budget to do a complete rebranding of your union, you may have to do some sort of visual treatment of your logo that hearkens back to the actual logo but presents the organization’s name in (stylish no doubt) text.
Union websites apparently.
I admit, some of my cute design jokes are made at the expense of sites that are ages old and so hopelessly out of date that even their creators would not defend them in a court of law. So the presence of so many splash pages must be explained by the fact that unions are still stingy when it comes to web design right?
No. I give you caw.ca. Relaunched in the last few months, and still with a splash page. A splash page. What year is it?
Why splash pages suck
Most people who have splash pages have them because they run english and french websites and they want to allow the user to switch to the language of their choice before going on their journey.
So why not register your union’s french domain name and point that at the french language website? It’s a whole $15 per year. Figger the union can spring for it?
If you think you’re impressing people, stick to armwrestling in bars or driving a spiffy car. Trust me on this one.
In print land, they have to worry about paper stock, postage and all that. We don’t, but we have our own crosses to bear, don’t we?
Initial visibility: Is all key information visible without scrolling?
Readability: How easy is it to read the text in columns?
Aesthetics: How good does your page look? Is it awash in a sea of whitespace? Is it jammed? Tucked into the corner?