Keep It Simple

Keeping your website as simple as possible has to be one of the primary goals of website design. Whilst the temptation is often to try to impress with fancy technical know-how, this often does little more than distract and irritate the visitor. Here are seven rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs its purpose.

1. Provide clear and simple navigation

   Assume that your customers are busy. Clear and simple navigation helps visitors easily find information on your website. If they cannot find what they are looking for or they get confused, they will go elsewhere. A breadcrumb trail at the top of each page can be helpful with this. Also, simple navigation is helpful to search engine web-crawlers, making sites such as Google more likely to find all the information on your site.

2. Remove all unnecessary functionality

   Technical bells and whistles are fun for programmers but do not necessarily communicate your message efficiently. Keep any movement simple and, unless they are your essential selling points, avoid complex animations. They can distract the reader from the content of the site, and whilst they may be impressive at first, soon lose their appeal. Features which require plug-ins to be downloaded should also be avoided, as should large flash animations. When confronted by a "please wait" message or instruction to install something, a visitor may well lose interest and leave the site.

3. Make sure your website works

   This may seem a little obvious, but it is amazing how many websites simply don't function correctly. Apart from the impression this creates, if your visitor can't get to your content or can't order your product, they won't. You are dead in the water.

4. Avoid the use of splash pages

   Splash pages are pointless introductory pages you see when you arrive at a website. They often contain Flash animations and welcome messages, along with the inevitable "please wait" and "click here to skip introduction". The first of these tells you what experience the user is having, the second tells you what they want to do about it. Search engines don't think much of them either as they rarely contain any real content.

5. Don't be hooked on .com

   People often don't use the name that they wanted for their site because it is not available as a .com domain. Unless you are setting up a global business, there is nothing wrong with national domain names such as .co.uk which are also cheaper than .com names.

6. Avoid using media on your site which plays automatically

   Personally, I find this practice a little offensive. If I want to listen to something or watch something, I'll click the play button. Being hit by someone else's music not only wastes my bandwidth, it gives me the same sensation as when someone sits behind me on a bus playing their music out loud.

7. Do not use too many banner advertisements

   Preferably, don't use any. Most people have been using the Internet long enough to be able simply to ignore banner advertisements. If you need to advertise, include relevant affiliate links into high quality and relevant content. Your visitors will follow links because they trust you to be sending them somewhere that matters, rather than somewhere that will pay you for getting them the click-through.

Summary:

• make sure your visitors know where to find what they want;
• make sure they can get to it quickly and easily;
• make sure it works when they get there.