Web Design Best Practices

Web Design Best Practices
For approximately the last eight years I have been doing web design work for various companies, organizations, people, and non-profits. Through the years I?ve learned many lessons and have become better by analyzing my past work and determining areas where I can improve not only my designs but also my interactions with clients. What I?d like to share with you today are a few best practices that I learned the hard way. Hopefully by you reading these, you will be cognizant of them and thus not have to learn them the hard way.

by Mathias Gelment

For approximately the last eight years I have been doing web design work for various companies, organizations, people, and non-profits. Through the years I’ve learned many lessons and have become better by analyzing my past work and determining areas where I can improve not only my designs but also my interactions with clients. What I’d like to share with you today are a few best practices that I learned the hard way. Hopefully by you reading these, you will be cognizant of them and thus not have to learn them the hard way.

My absolute best practice, which I highly recommend to every designer, is to ask the client to provide you with a document that displays a few of their favorite web sites. Underneath each URL, ask them to provide a paragraph or two of why they like the site so much. Tell them to be as specific as possible. Also, have them include any bits about the site that they actually don’t like. This document will help you greatly in crafting your design for the client. By receiving this, you are getting a glimpse at the client’s tastes; you’re seeing exactly what they like and can tailor your design to what they like.

To go along with the list of sites that they love, you’ll also want to get a list from them of sites that they don’t like that are also in their industry. Again, you’ll want an explanation of why they do not like the sites. This will help you in avoiding design elements that they do not like. This is just as important as the list of sites that they love. Ensuring that you design something that leaves out elements that they hate is important.

Another key eve aspect of a web site that you should dedicate a good amount of effort and studying on is navigation. The navigation is critical to the usability of the site and thus it demands that you fully understand what the client wants. After understanding this you want to develop the cleanest method to organize all of their information. Once you have the client lock into the peaches that they want in the hierarchy of how to let the navigation, you can really begin to think about where you’ll place the navigation on the web site.

As you progress and do more and more designs, there are many other little things that you’ll come across. I hope that you’ll take the time to write a document like this that passes on this information to other web designers. Thieway we’ll all get better is by sharing our information. The tipses above are just a few that I learned in all of my time is a designer. I learned from my mistakes and it’s important that you do the same.

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