website fundamentals: 3 main principles

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Website Fundamentals3

Main Principals

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More and more, a website is one of the most effective means of marketing yourself or your company. Many businesses nowadays view their website as the foundation of their marketing efforts, and for good reason. Rather than printing thousands of expensive brochures, posters, knickknacks and other marketing collateral, companies can simply display their products or services on their website, where the storage is unlimited and they have extensive multimedia op-tions like video and Flash to promote themselves.

To start your own website, you need three things: a computer server, a domain name, and, of course, content.

1. You need a computer server to “host” your website: basically you need a place to store your website content in a manner that other people can access and browse through it through the internet. Any computer can become a web server, although it takes a decent grasp of the technical and security issues involved if you want to turn your personal comput-er into a web server. What I recommend to my clients is leasing server space from a dedi-cated hosting company like HostMonster.com. The prices are cheap — around $6 a month — and they take care of all the technical support and security issues for you.

2. In addition to a place to host your website content, you will also need a domain name for your website. What is a domain name? Quite simply, that is the address of your website, as in “www.yourdomain.com.” You typically lease domain names in increments of one year or more through companies that specialize in facilitating these transactions. Odds are, the company you choose to host your website will also offer domain name leasing services, so you can take care of both of these steps together.

3. Finally, after you have server space and a domain name set up, the last thing you need is content. This is the text, pictures, video and/or anything else that you want your site visitors to see and interact with. Website content is arranged and formatted in a computer language called HTML: HyperText Markup Language. These HTML files are the foundation of every website. The HTML code of web pages determines both the structure and division of the page content, and the visual design and formatting of the page. If you cannot or do not wish

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to try and design and develop these HTML files yourself, contact a professional who can work with you to build your website for you.

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IN CHAPTER ONE, we wrote about the first steps to starting your own website: setting up hosting, leasing a domain name, and producing content. Now let’s talk further about this last part: producing the content.

When planning your website content, it’s important to plan it using the principles of user-centered design. This means thinking through the mindset of your target audience and planning your site according to what is important and useful to them — not what is interest-ing to you. You’re creating it for other people to see, after all, not yourself. Over our next few chapters, we will discuss the following website usability principles:

1. Provide consistent navigation and layout

2. Focus on the users’ needs

3. Keep it short and sweet

Provide consistent navigation and layout:

This may sound like common sense, but travelling between web pages isn’t like travelling between places on physical land, where you can see your destination approaching in front of you and your starting point slowly receding behind you. Rather, it’s more like teleport-ing — you leave your starting point and instantly arrive at your destination, with no sense of distance, location, or relationship to surrounding areas. Clicking a link between two pages on the same site is exactly the same as clicking a link between two websites on opposite sides of the planet. Because of this, consistent navigation and visual design is extremely important. In fact, outside of the page address in the navigation bar, the site’s visual layout is often the only clue to the visitor that they’re still on the same website.

Here are a few things to remember:

• Keep the primary navigation consistent across every page of your site. If your main navigation is at the top of the page, keep it on the top of every page of your site. Likewise, if it’s on the left side of your page, keep it on the left side of every page of your

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site. Take Amazon.com, for example. They have a lot of page-specific navigation op-tions on their various pages: customer comment links, related products, product tags, advertisements, etc. But their primary navigation — search bar, store-wide product directory, shopping cart link, etc. — always stay in the same position at the top of every page. Consistent primary navigation ensures site users don’t have to re-learn how to use your website on every single page.

• Keep the visual design consistent across your site pages. If a site user is on a page that is minimalist and predominantly blue and white, then clicks on a link and is taken to a page that is busy and loud, filled with red and orange, they will rightly assume that they have been taken to a new website. If both pages are, in fact, on the same site, it will cause confusion for the user and will break the flow of their browsing, as they try to figure out “where the heck am I now?” Consistent visual design across all your site pages will reduce the jarring “teleporting” effect on your website users as they browse between your various site pages.

These are some of the concepts behind providing easy-to-use navigation to your site visitors. In our next two chapters, we will talk about the other two website usability principles men-tioned above: focusing on the users’ needs, and keeping it short and sweet.

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WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE of our discussion on building websites according to user-centered design. The three principles we’re focusing on are:




In our last chapter, we wrote about providing consistent navigation and layout. Now, we’ll be talking about the next principle: focusing on the users’ needs.

The first thing to do is put yourself in your site visitors’ shoes. Outside of your mother, no one is going to proactively come visit your company’s website just because they think you’re a great person. They will come, either through search engines, advertising or refer-rals, because they feel that you might be able to help them with something.

For instance, if you’re running a residential plumbing company, your website visitors will most likely be people who have a broken sink, busted pipe, or some other plumbing prob-lem, and are looking for help to fix it — and probably get it fixed as soon as possible! So your website homepage should immediately show how you can help your target audience with their problem(s). It should say something like:

“Hi, we’re ABC Plumbing Co. We specialize in:

• Replacing sinks

• Fixing broken pipes

• and many other services.

Call us at 1-800-ABC-PLUMBING to schedule your plumbing repair today.”

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The homepage should also include prominent link buttons to the website’s contact page or other landing pages with specific offers, to make it easy for your site users to contact you. There should also be links to more info on each of your company’s capabilities for those customers who would like more info — and of course some nice eye-catching images are always a great idea as well.

In any case, you DON’T want to put something like this on your homepage:

“Welcome to the official website of ABC Plumbing Company. It all started when we were incorpo-rated in 1986 in Centennial, Colorado by our founder John Doe. John had a vision of providing quality plumbing services in the tri-county area, and through his tireless work, we grew to where we are today…(etc, etc, etc.)” This text would be appropriate for another internal website page, like an About Us page. That way your site visitors can read it if they choose. But it should never be on the site’s homepage. If you’re a homeowner whose basement is current-ly flooding from a cracked pipe and need help immediately, the last thing you care about is the rambling back-story of a particular company’s history.

We hope these pointers are helpful to you in planning, building and maintaining your com-pany’s website. In our next chapter, we’ll write on our third website user-centered design principle: Keeping your site content short and sweet.

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We’re in our last chapter of our e-book on building effective websites. The three principles we’re focusing on are:




In our last chapter, we wrote about focusing on the users’ needs. Now, we’ll be talking about our final principle: keeping it short and sweet.

It’s a well-known fact: people oftentimes don’t truly read web pages; they skim them. In fact, it has been documented that most web pages are viewed for less than 10 seconds. If people want to do in-depth reading, they’ll pick up a book, not go to a website.

What does this mean for you? It means you need to design your web pages less like an essay, and more like a billboard. Here are some suggestions:

• Replace lengthy paragraphs with bullet points, block quotes, and sub-headlines.

• Break up your text content with images and icons.

• Highlight important words or sentences with bold text.

We would say that for website homepages, a good rule of thumb would be to avoid having more than two continuous paragraphs in a row. Body pages, or the “inside pages,” can have more text than the homepage, because they oftentimes need to present more in-depth in-formation — but you still shouldn’t be turning your website body pages into the next edition of War and Peace!

Additionally, intersperse your text with various calls to action: links or buttons with labels like “Learn More,” “Contact Us,” or “Sign Up Now.” This helps guide your website users in their browsing process — ie. “What do I do with the information that I just read?” (This is also a

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good sales practice as well.)

A lot of this ties in with the usability principle we wrote about in the last chapter: focusing on the user’s needs. Like we’ve stated before, people aren’t visiting your website to read a lengthy tome on the ins and outs of your company history. They’re visiting because they want to know how you can help them. You need to succinctly show them what you do and why it should matter to them.

Here are some examples of websites that do a great job of “keeping it short and sweet.”

• www.FreshBooks.com

• www.BaseCampHQ.com

• www.Mozy.com

• and of course… www.Apple.com

We hope this e-book has given you some good pointers on what it takes to design an ef-fective website. Effective website design and online marketing is an enormous subject, and we’ve just scratched the surface of it here. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to download our other free e-books on these subjects. Or if you need more help, please feel free to con-tact us through our website.

website fundamentals: 3 main principles

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