What are the things to remember when one designs a website

Question

Hi,

We are planning to sell our own product in medical domain. Its a Patient management System. Before we start marketing we need to have website for the same.

We already have done some basic things like booking a domain name for the website, purchasing the hosting service.

Before we design the website, can somebody guide us what things need to be kept in mind when we initiate a website designing project.

Some of them are here. (not exactly in the order)

• Finalize the color theme for the website.
• Creating readable / user friendly urls
• Scrolling to be kept to minimum as people generally read the stuff which they see on the scrren. No one scrolls down unless they find it exciting.
• Validate the pages with online validators to avoid any errors.
• Use generic fonts else browser might shift to a default font if the user machine does not have that particular font.
• All images should have title tags and alt tags.
• Identifying the correct keywords and designing the content adhering/discussing taht particular keyword
• Have a demo page which will have the video of the product.

I may be wrong in some of the points but I would appreciate if someone can point the mistakes and also suggest the things in addition to the above point.

Any other suggestions on technologies/architectures/CMS freely available are welcome too. The hosting environment is Windows with MySQL/MSSQL (if that is necessary)

regards..

Kalpak (Obelisk Infosystems)

Answer 1

I think the most important thing to remember is that you need to hire a professional designer if you don't know what you're doing.

Answer 2

To be frank, your website design is going to give the impression of what your software is and what your company is about. I'd hire professional designers for the front end of your website in which they take HCI as their number one priority. For eg. There may be around 40 different shades of a light blue colour in which each one has a different effect on the user.

If your planning to undertake this by yourself, you'll probably go through 5 different revisions before you get it ok then around 10 more for it to be perfect with feedback and comments from users and web designers. You'll want to use sites like smashingmagazine.com where designers write articles on webdesign.

You could also go with a CMS such as .net Nuke in which they have many addons and templates you can buy to enhance the site.

Answer 3

I'm not sure if your website is just a companion to your product or a front end for it. If it's going to be a front end, you might want to de-couple the UI from the business logic in your architecture (following the M-V-C pattern should help).

You definitely ought to pay attention to the needs of the end user. After all, they're going to use the site. If you have a shiny website but the target user isn't able to figure out how to use it, or doesn't want to use it, you'll have wasted time and effort.

You might want to build some prototypes (paper prototypes, wireframes, etc) and test it out with target users before building the actual website.

Answer 4

Website design is very difficult to get right. Even Google isn't perfect from at least one designer's perspective.

Be careful of 'finalizing' the design. As your website grows and evolve you'll need someone who can add new features to the design, or adapt the design if you outgrow it. It helps to have a designer working closely with the development team. Or even better, become part of the development team.

Get some user tracking on your site and keep an eye on what users do. If you have time/money do some eye-tracking to see how users read your site.

Answer 5

Take a look at: What should a developer know before building a public web site? (It's not a duplicate)

Answer 6

The main focus is to understand your target audience.