Usability

Like the phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, effective web design is judged by website users and not the website owners. There are many factors that affect the usability of a website, and it is not just about how good it looks, but also how easy is it to use.

Planning

Good design starts with good planning. Creating a website, especially from scratch, takes a lot of effort and time. You don’t want to waste and money by figuring out the design of your site as you go. Think of your site as a project, a project that you have to plan out and start working on with the already made plans. Approaching your website this way will save you time and money

Websites that are not well designed tend to perform poorly, making it all the more important that you focus on aspects like navigation and grid-based layouts when creating a site.

Simplicity

Never underestimate the power of simplicity. In fact, simple design is good design. It is important to apply the idea of simplified design to your website. You want your site to be easy to navigate. Make navigating your site into a simple and pleasurable experience and your users will stay.

We live in a pretty cluttered word. There’s new information cluttering our minds and e-mail boxes every few minutes. The last you want is for your website to be cluttered.

Your website should be easy on the eyes and easy to navigate. This is why you should make sure that your site design makes good use of space.

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Best tactics

As new media professionals, we deal everyday with requests from prospects, clients, providers and other parties, and just by looking at their email address we can tell a lot. A prospect who is looking for website development or hosting with an aol.com address -in our experience- spells trouble. Being still attached to AOL as a business resource tells us that you are likely very reluctant to change,  even that you are technologically averse. Not very different from asking us “I want a website but I don’t do email”.

NOTE: I have nothing against AOL, I was their customer from 1996 to 1998 and it once was the dominating online provider, but it is a company that got complacent in its business model, trying to make it easy for the customer but refusing to adapt to an ever changing environment. Their services fulfill a role in personal communications, but we deem them very lacking in the business ecology.

Business Email recommendations

Let’s revise our recommendations for business email:

Use your own domain: Instead of using ForImage@hotmail.com set yourself up with info@ForImage.com (obviously an example only), here is why:

• Ownership – Your domain is yours: As long as you pay the domain registration (ForImage.com in this example) only you own the use of it. That works towards building your brand. It tells everybody you are serious and accountable about your business.
• Portability – Your domain is portable: You are not tied to a provider, you have the capability of moving your operation to another provider if you want/need. If your email address is ForImage@yahoo.com and you change providers you have to notify every party you do business. You will most probably lose business.
• Your can increase your productivity: By embracing a new technology, your email can become way more than your email. It can become your instant message platform, your scheduling system, your document collaboration platform, and a lot more.
• You have control over mail flow: you can set up info@ForImage.com to send copies of every email to Joe@ForImage.com and Kate@ForImage.com. You may even set rules of which emails to send or delegate someone in your organization to screen your email.
• Accesibility – You can have your email everywhere: Modern email implementations (notably using IMAP) will hold the email on the server so you can access it from your office PC, check it, search and reply from your tablet at the coffee shop, and check it again in your home PC, accessing all the time the same messages in all the devices.
• You can expand the use of your domain: Your domain allows you of course to have a website set up on ForImage.com and/or www.ForImage.com but you can also set up fb.ForImage.com to re-direct to your Facebook page and tw.ForImage.com to your Twitter feed.

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