Checklist: Site Design

Checklist for good site design

• The Internet world is all about instant gratification, speed and motion, so don't expect the images (photographs) on your website to look as good as they would in a printed brochure. You have to accept that you'll be giving up image resolution in exchange for control, relevance and utility. But in return, there are also opportunities for two-way communications and a certain informality about the Web that you won't find in print.
• How difficult will it be to expand your menus and add more content to your site? Is your site designed for easy and cost effective maintenance using templates, or pages created dynamically using content from a database?
• Do methods of interaction and navigation remain consistent throughout the site? Are they intuitive?
• Is your site designed to function well across a range of browsers, such as Netscape v4.5 as well as v6, and Internet Explorer 5 and above? Do you consider it important to design for the small number of users still on version 3 browsers? They may turn out to be your biggest potential customers. Opera is a great browser that is becoming increasingly popular. Does it cause any issues with your site?
• What happens to your site when it's viewed on a screen set to only 256 colours?
• How does your site look on different screen sizes? Some users are still on 14-inch monitors that may be set to 640 x 480 pixels per inch (ppi) screen settings. Are those users forced to scroll sideways? 21-inch screens with 1280 x 1024 ppi are becoming more common - is your site just a tiny box in the corner on those screens?
• Don't build what you can't maintain and support. Match your goals to your resources!
• Colours can look a bit different on Apple Macs, and Mac versions of browsers have some differences in the way they interpret the code and layout of pages.
• Can your site function with the images turned off? Some 5-12% of hard-core users-in-a-hurry surf this way. Also, visually-impaired people with screen-reading software can't navigate with images. Text navigation at the base of the page is a minimum concession to these users. It is also quicker for everyone to use bottom-of-the-page links than scrolling to the top when they want to move on to another page.
• Are statistics set up for your site? Can you tell how many people are visiting, how many pages they are viewing, where they are coming from, etc.?
• How does your site print? You do not have control over everyone's printers - do you need to provide a special printable format for some parts of your site?
• Is your site user-friendly for every type of audience you are targeting? Remember, new users are logging on every day. Watch a range of users with different Internet experience try out your site. How do they interact?
• If your site is frame-based (use of frames can usually be identified by navigation that stays put while other parts of the site scroll), can a user bookmark your pages or gain access to pages not in their correct frames?
• Is most information no more than 'three clicks away'? If users have to click through multiple screens to see a picture of a product they're likely to lose interest. Flattened hierarchies were invented as a way to limit the amount of navigational steps.

interVations will ensure that your website will be designed to meet your requirements perfectly.