Website design is the presentation of content to the final user. It is, as known in general, the description kind of technology used to create a web page. To be more specific, it is the job that focalizes on the building of front-end of page.
To create a page there are the basic markup languages used to tell any browser how to expose the content of any page- HTML and CSS. These markup languages, most of the time, are combined with other database driven languages to permit more dynamism and interactivity. PHP, ASP, python are the most popular database driven languages. To make a website more attractive and communicative, web designers use videos, flash animations and so. However, there is always a question that imposes itself on all web designers: how to combine these technological tools to create a web page that displays content, functionalities and includes information that could interact with both Men and search engines?
On his PDF “Eight Principles of Information Architecture”, Dan Brown talked about the structures of a web page and how it should be designed. For him, these 8 basics principles should respect the structure and the presentation; it should have a good understanding of the users need and how they want the content and functionalities to be displayed; and, also, the information architect should be coherent with content and functionalities.
The 8 principles of information architecture are:
- The principle of objects
- The principle of choices
- The principle of disclosure
- The principle of exemplars
- The principle of front doors
- The principle of multiple classification
- The principle of focused navigation
- The principle of growth
For more information: Eight Principles of Information Architecture
To apply the above principles, we need to answer the following two questions: Where I am? And what can I do? That is to say, when a user comes to a page (land on it), it should provide everything that he is looking for by being clear and simple. It should also call for action which is the answer to what can I do? Most of the time, when a user landed on a page, he is ready to take action but if he isn’t guided, he may leave without performing the desired action. That’s what happens. This is due, unfortunately, to less importance given the internal pages by designers.
Every single page on a website should be treated as landing page since that search engines do not treat a web site as a single and unique book. They treat every single page as a single unity. So, every single page should be treated as a landing page. More than that, 50% of users may land on internal pages and not the front page. Every page of a website should reply the above question.
Concerning the front page, it is the page that has more importance; it is the image of the website and the first contact with users. Therefore, how should it be? The front page should tell, define and classify websites which means that it should tell every landing user, what is a website about? And, what they could do? Though this doesn’t mean that it is needed to link to every part of content, it is preferable to link to categories or to the most visited pages. The home page should focus more on helping users to find their way while they are on the website by linking to the most important content of the website.
Finally, the web design job is helping people find their way. While helping users to find easily the content that they are looking for, they should perform specific action that web site owner are spending money for. Thus, web designer is the medium between user and owner and its job to satisfy both of them.