UntiedShoes

Design Philosophy

With today's business environment, an effective web site is becoming an ever increasingly cost effective way of raising your company's profile. A professionally designed web site can give your company the edge over your competitors allowing your company to reach millions of potential customers around the world.

Accessibility using Web Standards:
Our design philosophy is geared towards accessibility, whether it be consideration for impaired users or the tweaking of images, CSS or markup to develop faster loading accessible sites.

Firstly, accessibility to a wide audience is guaranteed. By carefully structuring and coding your website, we can ensure that people with visual disabilities can access the content on your site just as able-bodied people can. In practice, this means the code we use to write the pages of your website can be understood by screen-readers and modern web browsers alike, with no loss of context or message.

This is how we do things:

Have goals:
Have goals for the site and design while trying to achieve those goals. Identify your target audience, list your main objectives and outline the information your site will contain. Building a Web site is usually an ongoing process - allocate responsibilities for provision of content and maintenance. If you have no commitment to your site don't build it.

Know the audience:
If you know your audience and know what they want from your site, you can provide it to them more easily. People will not visit your web site expecting to be entertained, they want the information or service you can provide. Make it as easy as you can for them to find what they want.

Look at your current site:

• How easy is it to locate a specific piece of information?
• Can a visitor tell if they have seen everything, and what they have and have not seen?
• If you change your site frequently, can visitors figure out what was changed, and when?

Find out what your visitors do most often at your site and make it easy for them to navigate and find the resource they are looking for.

Keep it simple, keep it fast:
Users will not tolerate long delays. As a general rule pages should load in under 10 seconds. To achieve this at 4Kb per second your total page load should not be greater than 40Kb. Of course, faster is better. Avoid using large or gratuitous graphics - the web is not a CD-ROM. If this is unavoidable, inform the visitor of a delay.

Be consistent:
Make sure all layout elements (including user interface and typography) are the same on every page. Make navigation consistent and predictable. Give visual confirmation of the user's whereabouts and options and provide context - tell visitors where they are, where they can go, and where they have been. The site structure should be obvious on each page.

Seven plus or minus two:
Human short term memory typically lasts 15-20 seconds and has a limit of seven +/- two items. This can be improved by chunking - placing information into subsets that are remembered as single units. Create menus taking into account these short term memory restraints. Rather than have 49 options in one list, create seven lists of seven +/- two options each. Organise information in screens, not pages.

Because you can doesn't mean you should:
New technologies can often slow the loading of a page without assisting the visitor to achieve their goals. Don't create a site that only a small percentage of your visitors can view properly.

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