Keep it simple, stupid!

Successful people have long known that the simple solution is almost always the best one, but unfortunately when it comes to practice, too many designers and clients think that having lots of varying stuff on their website will somehow meet the needs of everyone – rather than nobody.

Good designers instinctively know that simple, familiar designs will perform better, and one of the scientific theories that backs up this intuition is cognitive fluency.

So, what is cognitive fluency and why does it matter for my website?

Cognitive fluency refers to the experience of how easy or difficult it is to think about something. As a general rule, humans prefer things that are easy to think about and shy away from things that are hard to think about.

This principle influences pretty much every aspect of human behaviour - and decision making when it comes to buying goods and services online is no exception.

So, if a user reaches a website for the first time, but the navigation looks similar to the vast majority of other websites they been to, then it will feel familiar and ‘right’ and they will feel at home and know how to proceed.

On the other hand, if they arrive and the navigation is in a completely unexpected place, or requires them to figure out some kind of krypton factoresque puzzle in order to find their way around the site, they are more likely to think the site is ‘wrong’ or at the very least it leave them with a vague, sub-conscious uncomfortable feeling.

The Mere Exposure Effect

Cognitive fluency is closely linked with The Mere Exposure Effect, which basically states that the more you are exposed to something, the more you prefer it. This can easily be seen when popular brands change their imagery, and all the customers moan and groan that it’s not as good anymore, even in the product inside is identical.

If you’re smart, you can take advantage of this exposure effect with your web design, by playing on the experiences people will have had in the past and ensuring your website echoes those experiences.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should just copy everyone else, or that all websites should always look exactly like they did in the 90s – far from it. But you need to use originality and innovation where it works, and in small enough chunks that it delights your users in comfort rather than baffling them.

Further reading:

Read more interesting and research backed up stuff about cognitive fluency here: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/07/how-cognitive-fluency-affects-decision-making.php

Here are our top five tips for web designers who are just starting out:

Keep it Simple

It can be tempting to put something in just because you can, not because it's right. This tends to lead to animated gifs, flash banners, scrolling marquee tags, loads of different fonts and basically a horrible mess that is a confusing turn off for visitors. Try to avoid including anything that doesn't have a clear purpose, and keep the design clean and simple.

Check the website on a range of browsers

Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and  Chrome all interpret code is slightly different ways and it's worth checking your design on each of them to make sure nothing breaks. These days lots of people use mobiles to view websites as well, so check its not impossible on a smaller screen.

Focus on the visitor

Your starting point should be what the visitor wants, not what you want to tell them. This means being careful about using jargon or any terms or concepts they might not understand, and thinking about their objectives and how they might move around your site.

Make sure the structure and navigation is clear and consistent

The main navigation should be identical on every page, and ideally every page should be able to be reached from the main navigation. If there are a lot of pages, then use dropdowns. The exception is if you have large resource banks or ecommerce stores with hundreds of pages, but in this case consistency and clarity is even more important.

Don't have autoplaying music

This is one of the biggest turn-offs for visitors, who might be browsing at work, or at the very least might be playing their own music, which yours will conflict with.

For more advice about good and bad web design and SEO, check out our resource bank.

If you're looking to hire a web designer - click here.

Like most things, there's no clear and straightforward answer to this question - it depends on a lot of factors.

For those of you that aren't sure what PayPerClick (PPC) is, it's basically where you pay Google for particular positions in the listings. These are kept separate from the (sacred) natural listings, which you can't buy a position in, no way, no how. For a more detailed explanation of what PPC is and how it works, read our article.

In fact, you don't actually pay to be displayed in the position, you only pay when someone clicks the link and goes to have a look at your site. Just hanging out there (or getting the 'impression' to give it its technical term) is free. So you pay for each click. Pay per click. Get it?

We've found PPC to be one of the most effective forms of marketing we've undertaken - the others being newspaper adverts, radio adverts, flyers mailouts and highly targeted mailshots. Having said that we're not professional marketers, so it may be that we just didn't carry out the other campaigns as well as we could.

The reason it's so effective is because you really are only paying for people who are interested in your products (unlike the newspaper, where there are all kinds of people who will see your adverts, most of whom aren't your target market).

Whether it's going to make money for your business or not depends on how competitive your target key phrases are, how niche your products and services are and how well you design your campaigns. However, it's fairly easy to test the water, so it's probably worth a try.

If you'd like to learn more about having an effective website and how to improve your search engine optimisation, visit our site.

Sentiva is a web design company serving Leeds and Reading.

Choosing a web designer is hard. You want to get someone professional and skilled enough to build you a good quality site, but you want to pay as little as reasonably possible. But how can you tell if you're paying peanuts for monkeys or if you're getting ripped off?

Well, experienced web designers are unlikely to just say 'Yes, I can make you a website' without finding out a bit more about the project, the objectives and the client's expectations.

Below is an example list of questions a good web designer will be asking very early in the process - probably in the first conversation, or certainly at consultation. The answers to these questions will help a web designer get a good grip on the project and get an idea of timescales and development effort involved.

If they haven't asked any of these questions, it's possible that either they don't know what they're getting themselves into (and therefore may not be able to meet demands) or are picking a number out of the air, instead of honestly estimating the amount of work involved.

Critical

 

1. Can you describe your business in a few sentences?

2. Do you want mostly an information site, or do you want extra functionality, e.g.

· Ecommerce

· Social media integration

· Private login areas

3. Do you currently have a logo / branding?

4. Who will be responsible for the website’s content? Text and Images?

5. Do you have any websites you’ve seen that you particularly like?

6. Where are you based?

7. Do you have a specific budget and deadline?

Additional 

 

1. What’s your USP (what sets you apart from you competitors)?

2. Can you name a few of your competitors?

3. Can you describe your target customers?

4. What search phrases would you like to be found for?

8. How did you hear about us?

For more advice and tips on choosing a web designer, check out our resource bank.

If I’m amazed at how often I see the W3C html or CSS validation button on a website, I’m gobsmacked at how many times I click it and the validation fails.

These widgets check the quality of your code against the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium - the closest thing to an official industry body) standards and tell you whether you’re following all the rules perfectly or not. If you’re not, it indicates how many broken rules there are and where they are, so that you can correct them if you wish.

There are several issues professional web designers have with putting this code on the website.

Who cares?

The first one is the same as the hit counter – it’s self-indulgent. No visitor gives two hoots whether the website is standards compliant or not. They’re only interested in their experience, and whether the website is easy to use and helps them achieve their goals, or not. 

Plus, normal mortals don’t have the first idea what that button is about or what it means. So the only people who are interested in having such a thing displayed on the site are: the person who designed it and possibly the person who owns it. And if you’re prioritising these people above your audience, you’re losing your noodle.

What does it prove?

The second issue is that ‘standards compliant’ does not equal ‘excellent website’.

Meeting the W3C standards is basically a box checking issue, and as anyone who’s used any document spellchecker knows, dogmatically following algorithmic rules is still nowhere near the level of the complexity of the human experience. Spellcheckers are excellent now, but if you blindly followed their rules, you could still end up with a garbled mess.

The same goes for standards compliance. It might help some web designers to keep their code tidy and cross-browser compatible, but it won’t stop them building a terrible websites with, for example, a confusing structure, busy pages, jarring colours or misleading navigation.

And by the same token, some of the best websites out there will NOT be standards compliant. You may wonder how this could be the case, but the reason why is quite simple.

The Internet is Alive

The Internet, computing and coding are modern technologies which are constantly moving, constantly updating and always changing, improving. Organisations that have to set industry standards are slow, plodding things. 

With its priority on only approving technologies that are completely robust, reliable and work in pretty much every context, W3C standards compliance is about five years behind the cutting edge.

That means that if you stick to the standards, you greatly reduce the options that are available to you.

Now, if your website is a community service website for the hard of hearing, for example, you probably will want to make sure your website is as solid and accessible as possible, and those with ancient computers aren’t going to have trouble. Plus, you’re providing a service, so you don’t need to convince anyone to visit your website.

However, if you’re running a high-fashion online clothing store, sticking to the standards will frustrate your target visitors and give the impression the company is ponderous and old fashioned, because the website can’t do any of the little flourishes and quick responses to make their experience sexy – because the technologies that do those things are too new to have been approved yet.

Crossing the line

And to finish with the ‘failing’ point – next time you see one of those buttons, try clicking on it. About 95% of the time, it come up with a big red warning that says ‘ERRORS!’, often with many of them being ‘fatal’. The absurdity of including this button when the site doesn’t even pass is beyond words.