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Web Design Tool Kit



This is a work in progress. It is a collection of notes, tips and hints on web site building.

4 Stages of building a website:
  1. Planning
  2. Building
  3. Promoting
  4. Improving
Making a good website is similar to making a movie. You have a lot of parts that need to come together as cohesive whole. (See The Foundation for a Great Website) Each part must be done with the right people and the right efforts to come out well. A successful site then combines all those parts for a whole that works.
     Those parts are:
  • Clear Purpose & Goal for the User
  • Design (It has to look nice, and feel right)
  • Information Architecture (It has to be organized logically – and easy to use.)
  • Copywriting (The text must be clear and well written.)
Building a successful website is a process. You start with the big picture, and as you work and build you get down to the finer points of detail.
    From Good Experience:
“My colleague Josh Seiden compares it to sandpaper: if you're building a house, you wouldn't start with the fine-grain sandpaper - the logs aren't even cut yet! To build the house, you start with the "strategic" tools - blueprints, saws, hammers - then you gradually work down to the tactical level. It's impossible to build a house (or a customer experience strategy) out of fine-grained sandpaper (or task-based user tests).”


Go for Very Good – Not excellent.
Excellent usually takes a lot longer than very good, and the pay off is usually negligible. Go for very good.

On a website, first impressions count.
The visitor has to ‘get it’ immediately. Simplicity and clarity of your goal are the starting steps to being able to relay that to the visitor.

Marketing is the oxygen of your business
  • STEP 1 - Look for addicts.
    Everyone is addicted to something.
    They buy & talk to other people.

  • STEP 2 - Make your ads addicting.
    Create your own USP - Unique Selling Proposition
    1. Ultimate advantage - what is the one benefit your customers get from you that they cannot get from anywhere else.
    2. Sensational offer - what bonus can you offer to sweeten your deal. Something that doesn't cost you much but adds a lot of perceived value.
    3. Powerful promise - offer a clear guarantee, keep your promises.

  • STEP 3 - Leverage your efforts with joint venture partners.
    Hook up with people that already have relationships with positive addicts - do joint ventures. Get their endorsement to give to their customers for a SPLIT of the profit. Rather than competition, think cooperation.
Review this list for one minute each day, it will put you ahead of 99% of all businesses in the world.

Design Tips:
  • You must SKETCH! – it is not possible to have a quality result without sketching.
  • Comment your code! – You need to be able to find things and change them quickly. Even pages you made 4 years ago, and have long forgotten.
  • Know the difference between a GIF & JPEG. (article)
  • Always crop images, unless it is intentional. Makes layout much easier.
  • Use Stockphotos – Photos.com, istockphoto.com, Corbis, etc.
  • Get a Digital Camera – take photos of what you need.
  • Don’t Use Frames -- You never want to put great content in frames or using session IDs that won't work when someone else clicks on them.
  • Don’t put spaces in file names.
  • Don’t put weird characters in file names. (like &, ", etc...)
  • Never put up web pages with errors (HTML, programming, spelling, layout or otherwise). Your pages must work PERFECTLY – ALL the TIME.


In 1999, Zona research showed that 30% to 50% of the visitors will leave the home page if it doesn’t load within 8 seconds. – Make your site fast, make it clear.

Jakob Neilson researched that online reading is 25% slower than offline, and that most people read in jumps looking for important words. Only 16% of users read word by word.

Online Eye movement shows that 78% of readers focus on the text and ignore graphics and surfing elements.

Ads – It is the idea that counts. A great idea will make a great ad. Good graphics cannot make up for poor ideas.

Website Stats – you have to know what is happening on the site. (user sessions, page views, search engines, keywords, paths through the site.)

User Experience vs Taste
The rule: First impressions count, and a web site has to work as a whole unit.
     Everyone has different taste - they like different colors, flavors of ice cream and each person will like different things on a website. If you want to make a site work you have to ignore issues of Taste. "I think this should be red." for example.
     What counts is the user experience and overall degisn of the website:
  • Does the page make a good first impression?
  • Does the layout work and focus users on the goal?
  • Is the page color balanced?
  • Is there anything confusing or distracting on the page?
When someone comments on a site, the FIRST question to ask yourself is:
Is this a comment about TASTE or about the USER EXPERIENCE?
  • If its about TASTE, then ignore it. example: "I think this button should be Blue."
  • If its about the USER EXPERIENCE, then listen very carefully. example: "I don't think bubblegum pastels is the right color scheme for the National Rifle Association."


3 Keys for a New product to be successful. From “Trading Up”
For a new product to be successful, it needs these 3 benefits:
  1. Technical: It has to be better.
  2. Physical: It has to work better.
  3. Emotional: It makes you feel better.


Chart Junk
Remove all extra graphical items that distract the eye.

Catalog Capacity
Try to keep lists to a maximum of 6 or 7 items. This is the amount that the human brain can handle. That is why they made phone numbers 7 digits, because if they made them longer, would have many more wrong numbers.

Understand the Color wheel, and about using color Color Harmony 2: A Guide to Creative Color Combinations

Don't Make me Think

Site Copy
"Features tell, benefits sell."




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