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Don't Make Me Think
Simple Design for the Web
"Don’t Make Me Think" is a books about designing websites by Steve Krug.
I only read it very briefly but liked the essence of his book.
Inspired by this book and other sources here are a few ideas for designing sites.
1. First Impressions Count:
People’s attention span is very short, especially on the internet.
If something is too complicated or not interesting, they can easily click and leave.
2. Make it Obvious
People don’t surf the net to work things out and calculate, people generally take the path of least resistance.
When designing it is sometimes easy to pursue our own agenda, forgetting visitors have a very different mindset to ourselves.
3. Simplicity
Don’t overcomplicate pages. If you have something really good on your site, make sure this is linked in a prominent location, otherwise visitors are unlikely to find it. See Poems at Sri Chinmoy Poetry. Ideally on this page the tabs would be removed. But at least visitors don’t have to think where to go next.
4. Tables.
| Tables are very helpful in providing a clear format, appealing to the eye, |
Of course colours can be changed |
| See this good use of tables at Inspiration News |
5. Plain English
People don’t like long text. People like pictures and short captions
Also people will often click on images expecting a link.
6. Write in simple sentences.
Have you ever read “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” by Wittgenstein? Neither have I.
If you write like this your visitors won’t stay long:
- Book on Philosophy
- Winner of Bad English award.
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However don’t forget Search Engines give importance to text, not ease of navigation. It is important to have many pages of text but these are better as links within the site not as home pages or index_html pages. (Also Google don’t like too many pages that are very short)
- View: Advice for SEO
7. Commercial Inspiration
Successful commercial sites like Amazon and Google have invested a lot of money in making sure visitors are happy.
It is worth checking their sites for ideas. It is perhaps no conincendence the most successful home page (Google) is also the most simple.
8. Examples
The beautiful Art Work of Sri Chinmoy lend themselves to a clean, uncomplicated design.
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See Sri Chinmoy Art (again the tabs need taking away)
9. Tag Line
People scan for things they can easily pick up. It is good to have a catchy phrase, dare I say soundbite.
John Paul thought of a great phrase for Write Spirit
-"Sharing ancient wisdom and modern inspiration".
- it says nicely what the site is about.
10. Don't Have Too many things in navigation bar!
Specific to Plone Websites
1. Don’t rely on navigation bar. For this subsite I took the navigation bar away. Actually for this site navigation bar is quite useful but often it gets too long check out poetseers
- Note in Plone 2.5 it is hoped there will be a feature to limit the navigation bar.
2. If you wish to use tables for Plone. I strongly recommend FCKeditor (available for Plone 2.12) or html. Kupu strips out code making tables ineffective and loose their format.
3. I have found taking the navigation bar off front page improves visual design. But don’t forget some key folders you will want to have a link to from your home page.
4. A good feature of vsCore is that the tab colour can also change the colour of the title this makes it easy to know where you are.
Bibliography
(2) Picture by Unmesh Swanson Sri Chinmoy Centre Galleries
(3) Don't Make me think by Steve Krug