Web Design Tips Page Flow
November 4, 2010
Web Design Tips for designing web pages consist of important factors to consider when designing web pages for your target audience. It is not easy to design a good web page or web site unless you know your target audience. Once you know and understand your target audience you can target specific designs you know your target audience will like and take advantage of. For example, if your target audience is age 50 or older you may consider the making the font on web pages larger. However, sometimes you have no idea who your target audience will be so you will have to fall back on basic patterns of good web design.
There are some basic design patterns that can be utilized that will significantly make your web site easy to understand and will not distract users. Let’s talk about the primary one first, “Page Flow”. All web pages should have a prescribed flow. The page flow can start at the top left and move across and then back and down. This is the pattern for most English based readers. It’s a natural way and very intuitive for English readers. If you know your target audience then tailoring a basic page flow can make your web site much more intuitive. The page flow emphasizes order of importance and usually suggests or conveys an action by the user or target audience at the end of the flow. Here is one example where information is needed to be entered by a user. In this case a Guestbook. Note the flow of the web page and the starting and ending points.
Start at the top left by entering your name followed by your input, followed by the Anti Bot letters and finally the action performed is Submit at the bottom right. The flow is as follows:
The above web page is very simple, has good flow, is very intuitive and does not need a lot of training or explaining. The user takes one look at this page and immediately understands what to do.
Web Design Tips, Page Flow Closing Remarks:
Poorly designed web pages often lead to frustration, longer learning times and in some cases the target audience may not be interested in returning to your web site. I have seen many web sites where there is so much going on it’s hard to focus what the content really is. In addition, some web sites have so many options and things to click making the site overly complicated.
Remember to position controls in their order of importance and in such a way they match the desired flow. They should be easily located and positioned correctly within the desired web page flow. In the example above the user enters the information and submits the entered data when completed. This is a perfect example of a web page that is easy to use thus very intuitive, very efficient and fast, and requires no training or explaining on how to enter the data.