Website Structure?

[GSeybold]

Hello Folks
My organization is currently redoing our website and I'm wondering a few things.

What are things you do and don't like to see on a website? Such as music, graphics etc.

How important are colors for you? Which colors do you prefer?

Do you like flash?

Page sizes?

Any other advise would be great. Of course, everything is relative to subject but just in general.

Yes, I looked online a read a bunch of stuff but would like to hear it from the horse's mouth

Thanks

Gabby

[SEOvB]

avoid spiny, fire, glitter, junk graphics that look like some geocities pages from 1998

No music, unless its 100% neccassary for the site

Depending on the site and the target, light pastelish colors are the way to go, or offering a dark alternative to match it also helps.

No, flash is horrible, avoid it at all costs

Even with broadband connections, keep the overall page size under 30-60k

Design for a 1024x768 resolution screen, keep javascript to a minimum and try to use as much CSS as possible

[dismas]

No music unless absolutely necessary (e.g. if it's a music site but even then, do NOT have it auto-play)

No "click to enter" splash page crap. I'm there at your site, of course I want to see what you offer, so why not put it on the front page? Don't annoy me by asking me to deal with some splash page that tells me nothing.

Keep flash to a minimum unless you're hosting games or whatever. Depending on which system I'm browsing from here at work, I may not be able to see the flash elements and I'm sure I'm not the only one with employers who don't allow flash to play.

Don't open new windows/tabs if I'm not leaving your site. This is one of the things that I hate about GoDaddy. By the time you get even the smallest thing done on the site, you've opened five new windows/tabs. I want to control how many tabs I have open, I don't want to be told how many I'll have.

[iogames]

ppl so 'communicative'
ppl a little more prepared and professional

[KTBleeding]

Originally Posted by GSeybold

Hello Folks
My organization is currently redoing our website and I'm wondering a few things.

What is your organization about? What do they do?

Originally Posted by GSeybold

music, graphics etc.

No music, please. Nothing is more annoying than that. Browsing the net while someone is sleeping and having your speakers blast some song.. listening to your OWN music and having it sound like trash because the website your on is playing Celine Dion in the background. You should never force your visitors to make decisions. They're coming to your site for nothing more than information, and playing music in the background is not going to make them feel like they just walked into your front door.

Originally Posted by GSeybold

How important are colors for you? Which colors do you prefer?

Colors are extremely important. Does your organization already have a set of preferred colors? Maybe part of their logo? Stick with them. If they already have an established name, drastic changes just throw people off.

Originally Posted by GSeybold

Do you like flash?

No. No no no no no. If you MUST use Flash, use some sort of detector (I use swfobject.js) and offer them an alternative.

Originally Posted by GSeybold

Page sizes?

I think anything from 100 - 200kb is pretty realistic. This takes into account any and all css files, images, source markup, javascript, etc.

Originally Posted by GSeybold

Any other advise would be great.

Don't use images where you don't have to. Use webfriendly fonts EVERYWHERE (even the navigation). Make sure it won't give the developer any headaches coming up with the markup. Make the site container no wider than 960 pixels wide, this will keep you inside of the standard 1024 x 768 resolution.

[GSeybold]

So I guess music and flash are out then? LOL

Man thanks so much... Super appreciate this! ALOT!

Get this, my last developer shipped my contract to Pakistan. When I got their first draft it was identical to someone's website on my Board of Directors, even all the links! I was shocked. They had no clue this guy was affilated with me.

Basturds. Now I'm with someone else. Wish me luck.

Gabby

[Princeton]

you should be thinking about and targeting your visitors needs and wants

the more you know about your target audience the easier it will be to "build" for them

What do they like?
What type of connections do they have? Broadband, Dial-up, Mobile, etc
How old are they?
Male or Female?
etc

once you do that, you need to consider your goals and needs (eg. increase revenue, increase membership, SEO, etc)

with that said, avoid music and flash - they should only be used to showcase ..

[Marco van Herwaarden]

With the design aim for usability, not for all fancy graphics.

Never try to limit a users "normal" browsing experience:
- No right-click disabling
- No irritating popup (or pop-over) urging a guest to register.

[GSeybold]

Thank you Joe, Marco. I'm going to give it a try myself. I'm so sick of paying for stuff when I don't even know what I'm paying for. In other words, I get a bill for two hours of tech support and I don't even understand what they've done. Trying to understand vbulletin has forced me to understand all the server and uploading crap and I'm getting better at it. Although my ass is bigger and my eyes are shot. LOL Prior to this, I never had to worry about my company's website but man I've been taken to the cleaners over the past year and I've had enough.

My audience is quite specific and surrounds a ton of legal stuff so it's even more difficult.

The difficult problem I'm having today is formulating the basic structure. I've viewed the source of a view websites I like and used their HTML as a temporary template on my site and that is giving me some ideas. Of course, I won't use it but this is helpful. Every time I try to create my own template it looks so homemade.

If there is one thing that I've learned over the past few weeks... HTML isn't as scary as it looks, just very time consuming. I now know why developers charge and arm and a leg for this stuff.

Thanks again

Back to the drawing board.

Gabby

[KTBleeding]

Almost any theme / style / whatever you want to call it can be done with minimal markup. I wouldn't take html code from another site, cause it's a bad way to learn it. You'll be using someone elses practices and they may not (most of the time) be practical.

I start with this base of html when doing anything (I have it very slightly more complicated cause I deal with a lot of multi column layouts):

<div id="container">
	<div id="header">
		<h1><a href="index.php">Site Name</a></h1>
		<h2>Site Slogan</h2>
	</div>
	<ul id="menu">
		<li class="first"><a href="#">Menu Item 1</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Menu Item 2</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Menu Item 3</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Menu Item 4</a></li>
		<li class="last"><a href="#">Menu Item 5</a></li>
	</ul>
	<div id="content">
		Content goes here
	</div>
</div>

70% of the time I can do almost any layout with just css and without ever altering the HTML code.

The other 20% of the time is when I have to add in custom elements that just don't exist (say a phone number in the header, or maybe to display some flash ). The above markup is just a core shell of what I use.

Not as time consuming as you are imagining it, I'm sure?