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Great Web Sites Are Hard To Build
June 9, 2007

One of the great fallacies of the twenty-first century is a truly great web site is easy to build. In reality, the easiest web sites to use are the hardest to build. Think about it, the design is so subtle that you move from one page to another without frustration, you know where you are at all times and how to get back, and you find yourself spending longer on the site than you originally planned. Did this happen by chance? Of course not. A great web site is one of the hardest tools to build. My husband, an extremely gifted web designer, discusses this issue with me often. As the director of user experience for a software company, he has to figure out the best way for their clients to interact with their web-based software. He talks to people who use it almost daily - mainly human resources managers - and listens to what they like, how their fingers crawl around their keyboards, and where their eyes land on a page. He says he's amazed at how much they take for granted, rather like how they slip in behind the wheel of their car and expect, when they turn the key, that it'll start and seemlessly drive where they want it to go. Nobody really thinks about the years of research it takes to get to that moment behind the wheel, but they assume it doesn't take too long. Isn't that why assembly lines were manufactured? A great web site is the same way.

There are 4 traits that distinguish a great user-friendly site:

1. the ability to understand what's going on in the site from the home page
2. simple navigation - you know where you are at all times
3. comprehensive search engine - think of Amazon and Google when they prompt you with a misspelling, "did you mean...?"
4. lack of clutter

Some great examples are (notice the golden rule of good use of white space):

• Apple
• Dell
• GlaxoSmithKline
• Target

As a small business owner, you can have a great web site that you're customers love. One of the quickiest ways, if you don't have a lot of money to spend, is to use a company that has pre-designed templates. If you can afford a large budget site, know that it will take time to achieve the results you crave. No matter how fast the Internet has made our life, humans still have to build it.

Posted by Suze Bragg on June 9, 2007 | Comments (0)