How to design your websites? Part 2

User knowledge required: programmer, amateur web author, designer

These are various categories in which all websites can be generally categorized (Skip this if you one to jump to the real thing directly):

1. General Portal - These are websites which are aimed towards general topics, they are mainly projected as one stop shops for everything a person needs. These are like super malls of internet. A few good examples of these websites are Yahoo.com, AOL.com, etc. My personal feeling is that there is not much future about these kind of portals. They hold their promise in the past when the search was not powerful and the user has only way to route to the information they seek using these portals. I really doubt people will go to AOL.com to read a news article or to shop or to read some sports column, rather I will go to NYTimes.com to read news, Amazon.com to shop, and ESPN.com to read sports. The whole idea of becoming a super mall of everything on internet is ill advised, and the reason is that in real life people go to malls because they get everything at one place and they don’t have to go from one shop to another for everything they need, while on internet everything is accessible at a click of the mouse. I would say these sites don’t hold that much value in future, unless they come up with their own business model.
   
2. Company Website - These are aimed towards customers and sometimes employees to get information about the company and their business. These websites are mostly searched using some search engine, unless the user is an employee. Therefore these websites should think about their search engine ranking to get more business and more visibility. I will talk about search engine ranking in a later article, but to give you an idea, this term is used for the sequence in which the name of your website is shown when the user search for a product which is related to your company in a Google or yahoo page.
   
3. Particular Theme And Audience - These are websites aimed towards one type of information like News, Sports News, Technical Articles, Product reviews etc. The websites of these types are also found by search engines, but generally these are websites who have already created and established their presence on internet. The users of these websites are kind of sticky and they rarely go for information to other websites, for a similar kind of information. They have their own fan base.
   
4. Particular Utility - These are websites which give you some particular utility, like shopping, auction, dating, matrimonial, classifieds, photo printing etc. These websites are always competing with each other to further innovate and to get attention from people. They always try to offer something new to the user, which can bring them to their website.
   
5. Search Engines - These are the GPS (Global Positioning System) of internet life, which guide users to different web sites based on what they are searching. Without these websites it is impossible to find anything on internet and it is just a huge web of entangled information map.

Following are the technologies which are being used to create websites these days (Hope you know atleast two out of these to be a web author):

1. HTML - Hyper text markup language
2. XHTML - Xml structure like markup language
3. CGI - Used for server side programming
4. ASP.NET - Microsoft's solution for server side programming
5. JSP - Java approach for server side programming
6. PHP - General purpose scripting language for creating web pages
7. Flash - Adobe's technology to create animations for websites
8. JavaScript - Client side scripting language (which runs on browser)
9. CSS - Design and layout language for HTML pages

Common pitfalls which everyone make (Don't skip this, it can break or make your website):

1. Overuse of Flash - Some websites make an overuse of flash to give the site a good look and feel, but they forget that not all web users have high speed internet which makes the website for them really very slow and irritating. Mostly flash is used to increase the appeal of the website, but it should not disrupt the information in the website for users with low internet bandwidth. Thirdly, flash pages are not searchable by search engines like Google, yahoo etc. and therefore their web ranking are very low.
2. Making the website Accessible - This aspect of creating a web page is important for people who are disabled. This helps to reach a wider audience and also helps to show a humane reflection of the company's website.
   
3. Browser page real estate - The real estate of the browser is the area in which the content is shown in a browser. Because of the limitation of the screen size and resolution the actual area in which the content of your website will be rendered will always be limited and therefore we need to make the best possible use of this space. If we don’t make use of this space, the user won’t stay on our website for a long time. It is important for us to remember that user hates to use his scroll bar, so if the user has to scroll down to see the content in your website most of the time, he will not be doing it in majority of the cases. If he has to scroll horizontally, he won’t bother doing that, which means you end up showing your users what you actually put on the web. Therefore the area in which your content is visible should be best utilized to show all the important information user wants to see, rather than wasting that space in animations etc.
   
4. Think about rendering in major browsers - This is also an aspect most web designers do not take into consideration. These days we get various screen sizes from very small to very big, and therefore it is important for us to check whether our website looks perfectly fine in both the extremes. I have noticed some websites will show their content in just the left side wasting almost 30-40% of their user's screen on the right if they are using a bigger monitor. On the other hand, users with smaller screens will have to scroll to see the complete content on the website if their screen is smaller.
   
5. Think about rendering in different screen resolutions and text sizes - I have seen some sites saying that their content is best viewed in particular screen resolution. I feel pity for these people who think that the user will change his screen resolution just to view their website. So if you want your user's to be happy, better alter your content rendering according to the screen resolution of the user or be prepared to loose your audience. Other important fact is that users can always increase or decrease the size of their text in a browser, which most web designers complete ignore. This is important because few people find it difficult to read very small text at a very high resolution, so they change the text size rendered by the browser, but most of the time it screws up the layout of the whole website. If you want to make your website user friendly to every kind of user, be prepared to fix this problem.
   
6. JavaScript testing on different browsers - This is the biggest problem I have seen in most of the websites, although poor web designers are not to be blamed for this problem. This problem is caused when you open a website in Firefox, or Opera, or Safari instead of Internet Explorer 6.0. This causes the JavaScript to act weirdly and start showing errors in the customer's face. This problem is actually due to different implementation of JavaScript engines and their DOM model, but if you want the user's to like your website better be prepared to take all these into consideration. These days there are frameworks available to code cross browser JavaScript and CSS code.
   
7. Making use of CSS - This is the most important but most neglected aspect of a website creation. Customized Style Sheet is a language which can change the look and feel of your website without touching your actual markup or content. Every browser conforms to some CSS specification formed by W3C. Please ensure which CSS specification you are using and its support in various browsers, before using that style. Various advantage of using CSS is ease of maintenance, fast pages and better look and feel.

What users want from your websites? Part 1

In today's world of cut-throat competition, the most basic question about any company and product is what user's want? It reminds of a Hollywood movie which had a similar title starring Mel Gibson. The crux of the movie was what Women want and how Mel Gibson attains the power to know what they want, which gives him an edge over people who are just whimsically making guesses on what their dream girl wants?


We can compare this situation to the situation of a company who wants to acquire new business, or sustain its old business. They have to constantly re-invent their product, be it an automobile, a desktop computer, laptop, iPod, iPhone, Wireless phones or any other and what they are trying to do is to make it make it more "User Friendly", "Customer Friendly" etc.


There should be something about these companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and their products which lures so many customers to their products and keep them glued, and in some way they become their fans and their own brand ambassadors. I remember the first time I used Google Search, back in 1998, and I have never used any other search after that. The difference was phenomenal between a Yahoo search and a Google search, the time it used to take to return the results and the quality of results, both were of superior quality. In fact, when I first accessed the page, I thought the results are coming from internal cache of my browser, but I was wrong. It was coming from the Google's famous search algorithm.


Same is true with products like Apple's iPod, iPhone and Microsoft too, which brought the computer to masses and made it so user friendly that anyone can start using one without much technical knowledge. I can see it, because even my technology afraid father can use it for his own small work. Its damn simple.


So why do we forget the same simple principles of user experience while designing our websites? The reason is simple; we think that we want to provide the user with everything which we know. So we try to make our website like a physical newspaper where the user can go to various pages and read every page one by one, or like a story book, where there are chapters and we expect users to go through each of them one by one consecutively, or may be randomly, but they are just chapters in the end. We just forget to use the power of computing when we create our websites. We forget that computer is more powerful and is an intelligent machine, and therefore we need not provide the barrage of information in one shot to a new customer looking for some particular information. I have hardly met anyone who just goes to a yahoo page to read everything which is on its home page, it just doesn’t make sense, compare it with Google, which just provides a clean interface, which lets you search what you want and not what they want you to show.

In my next few articles I will be discussing about some thumb rules which we should keep in mind while designing our websites, and which can really make the user glued to your website. Feel free to write your comments and suggestions if you agree or disagree with my views and opinions. These are my personal opinions and therefore may be a little biased in some sense sometimes.