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Adobe Contribute CS5 Tutorials
Website Tips / Design Tips pt. 2
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Contribute CS5 / Website Tips / Design Tips pt. 2)
OK, let's keep looking at these web design tips and the next thing you want to do is make sure that the site is well organized. Put some very deep thought into how you organize it with your menu's. You'll notice Amazon dot com put all their departments over here, and everything is organized by that, but of course they've made it very easy on people that if they want to look something up, they can just search for it. CNN has all of their elements right up here. Make sure it's very easy for people to understand these menu's and the terminology with them. If you're in the Health area, don't have something about the stock market. Make sure you have this organized well. MSN is very clean, they have just a few areas but you can see those drop down menu's give them additional information. In Wordpress they've got some basic elements up here, and then they've got their other little tabs right there. The best part of a website is if it's clean and organized. If people can understand how it's put together, then their going to stay and use your site, so that's where if you haven't built your site yet, take a lot of time to think about your organization. Get all your categories, draw things out, make a mock drawing of the site, and how everything's going to connect and what categories you're going to use for your menu's. That part of it is so very important and typically that's what stops people from getting a website done, is they have so much information they don't know how to get it started. So what I do to tell people to organize it, is get your home page and draw it out. What do you think its going to look like? If you have no clue, go out there and search online. Look at some other websites that have a similar topic as yours. Then once you've got that page done, I tell them to do the about page. Tell me about their company, keep it succinct, a few sentences here and then they could read more on another page. Give me your mission, give me your basic total area that you cover, and then the third page, do your contact page. Tell the people all the ways that they contact you, by phone, by physical address, can they send you a form? Make it very simple and easy. Those are you easy pages. Now that home page may change the look but at least you've got started, or if you're helping somebody do this, you've helped them get started. After that, then you can start adding all the actual meat to your site. Now when you're talking about organizing the site, the one thing you want to do incase the site is difficult for somebody, is add a help area. Make sure you've got someplace they can get help, they can search for help, they can read FAQs, they can contact somebody for help, maybe there's a live chat to get help. Especially if you're selling something, you're selling products or services, and you want to keep people, have a help option, and have a live chat option. Keep them there so they can easily contact you and get their questions answered. The next thing you want to do for a good web site is to minimize clicking. Don't make them click here, click here, click here, click here, to finally get the form to buy your product. There going to quit, make sure you make it simple. If I see the Toy Story DVD here, let me click that, and right there I can add it to my cart. I didn't have to go read 45 pages of information, then scroll down, and then add it to my cart. I opened up, got there, and I've got one click and I can add it to my cart, simple and easy. Same thing with policies and PDF files. If you've got a link on your site to your policies, make it open up when they click policies, don't make them go to a page that say's here's the policies page, click here to open up that PDF, make it a one click easy to use element. And one more thing about your pages. Limit the page length to no more than two screen fulls, so if I scroll down, make sure it isn't take me that long to read the information. If it's a long article, maybe you could do six or seven or ten screen fulls, that's OK because people have gone there because they've clicked to read more. Now personally, you know, two page length is the max for when somebody clicks. Personally I prefer one page, don't make me scroll down. I want to see what I need to see it and most important stuff right here in front of me. Then if I want to read more, or learn more, then I can click a read more button, or whatever it is I need to go to. If you have a lot of information, you can organize it on here, make it very succinct, try to get it in one page, you may not be able to, but if you can that is the best way to go. Don't make people scroll through the information. Alright let's stop there and let's keep moving to some more tips.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Contribute CS5 |
| Author: | Melanie Hedgespeth |
| SKU: | 34192 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-73-9 |
| Release Date: | 2011-01-18 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 133 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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