We all may be self-proclaimed experts in color combination, typography, marketing, etc. However, when you boil it all down, we know nothing about what goes on inside the head your website's audience (without actual feedback). In this article, I am going to help you to understand them better.
This will be a series of several articles, in which I will try to help you keep your audience in mind when designing content. You will notice that some of the most popular websites on the internet are often the most simplistic and well designed. Learn about this and more when you read Quality Web Design Tips.
Note: This article assumes a certain experience-level with designing and programming websites, and will not go into detail on how to program each suggestion.
Testing your website
Before even discussing the other points of this article, I felt that this topic should be discussed first. Testing can be an often overlooked task when designing a website for one reason or another.
There are many items that need to be addressed in this step in order to ensure that everyone gets the same expierence you seeing on your monitor. All it takes is one little thing, visually, for a user not to want to return to your site.
- Your site should be optimized for most monitors. You may have a massive monitor running a resolution above 1280x1024, but your audience most likely doesn't. So, I would suggest not to exceed a width of 1024px (according to Wikipedia, about 48% of the web's users are at 1024x768)
- This brings me to my next suggestion. Some people are firm believers that a user should not have to scroll to view your site's content, which means your site's height shouldn't exceed 768px. With this practice, comes the use of many pages in order to break up the content and may not be possible for your site's material. Therefore, I would suggest not to exceed 11in in height per page (US Letter Size; 8.5"x11"), and stay well under it. The last thing your user wants to do is scroll through endless amounts of info to find what they are searching for.
- Test your website in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, which are the two dominant browsers on the market. You may notice that some CSS settings will appear properly in one and not the other, which means exceptions will need to be made for each browser in your code.
- Opera holds a small amount of the browser share, so it might be worthwhile to test in that environment as well. There are some testing tools out there that allow you to test it without installing the actual browsers.
- Test your website on different computers. This will allow you to see how your website looks and performs on different monitors, graphics cards, processors, and internet connections.