Boot Camp

Web Authoring Boot Camp
• Tiny print that smacks of legalese
• Too many choices
• Unclear choices
• Wrong choices
• Misleading choices
Keep in mind the core of the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm.
Intuitive Websites
There is a terrific book, called Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug, which offers excellent
and detailed information about designing intuitive websites. The title states it all:
when a visitor comes to a website, they need to easily intuit what to do to find information
and take action.
First, you need to recognize that how we think people use websites is different than how
they actually use them. While we may have loads of important content and images to illustrate,
the visitor isn’t going to read every single thing. They aren’t interested in perfect
text, being ushered from one important point to the next, or in reaching the conclusions
we hope they will reach from reading everything thoroughly. They won’t try every example,
or examine every image, and make choose to ignore nice charts, graphs, and other
important supplements to the content.
Axiom #2: The website experience is all about the visitor, not you or the client. It is the
visitor that the website exists to communicate with – see Axiom #1.
Think about how you are using this book, and how you use a basic search engine results
page, or Amazon.com, or your favorite news website. Visitors scan and get hooked by
the items that make them think they will get the info they came for. They usually ignore
much of the page, find whatever link looks like it will solve their problems, and click.
In addition, visitors can and do come into the website from every possible direction.
Your website contact info may be linked from someone else’s site, your sitemap may
be reached from a mention in a review, or your product page may be linked to by some
other website’s review section. You can’t control where visitors will land on your website,
and you need all elements of your overall design to account for this. Then they look
for whatever looks like the first reasonable option and go there. If they are not sure, they
will muddle through, and if they can’t get exactly where they want in 2-4 easy and clear
clicks, they will leave. Bye-bye!
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