Here is an interesting article from Jacob Nielsen’s Useit.com website http://www.useit.com/alertbox/international-sites.html

It ponders the usability of user interfaces by users in a country other than the one that they were designed in. It could be argued that social norms and cultural differences can have a significant effect on the effectiveness of international usability. A particular difference might be the meanings of connotations that pertain to certain aspects of a user interface’s navigation.

The following are five best practices to help your website become a powerful marketing tool for your business:

1) Try to avoid splash pages

Splash pages are graphically rich and aesthetically pleasing but very annoying stumbling blocks to a good user experience. I personally can’t stand reaching a website and have to “click to enter” a website. It drives me mad! Splash pages are a dying breed and thankfully, not too many web designers create them for clients anymore. It is much better to just present your website’s visitors with the information straight away without making them click through what I would call a wall to the real navigation of the website.

2) Go easy on the advertisements

Although the argument about whether you should monetise your business website using paid advertisements or not is outside of the scope of this blog post, I would certainly argue that if you have made the decision to add adverts to your site then do so wisely. Usability research has shown that video adverts can be distracting so if you are going to add these then be very careful about where you place them.

3) Think about your navigation and page structure

Remember Jacob Nielsen’s rules of thumb about good navigation – reduce memory load, etc by making navigation simple, always have a clear way of reversing errors and help users to keep their sense of where they are on their website. If you’ve studied any Psychology then you might have heard about an individual’s need to maintain their internal locus of control. This applies to website’s too. Don’t let your website’s visitors got all hot under the collar or they won’t enjoy the user experience. They might not end up completing the tasks that they visited your website to do and might click away never to return.

One common excuse is that “my website has lots of information so it is going to be difficult to navigate”. This is a poor argument and even complicated websites that be improved by having good, well structured navigation and page layouts and links. Look at Amazon for instance.

4) Don’t let your visitors get lost in your website

Don’t break the Back button, allow easy reversal of actions that have gone wrong (e.g. adding that extra product that you didn’t want), breadcrumbs, etc. All of these things help to reduce cognitive memory load, relax the visitor, help them to complete tasks on your website and improve the user experience.

5) Auto play video and audio is a big no no

I know that this is the year 2011 and most web designers have wised up to allowing the visitors to click the play button on audio and video if they wish to. But lately I’ve seen these autoplay green screen video sales person popping up on websites that I detest! I refuse to offer this service to my clients because I think that it’s just a flash in the pan concept that will fall by the wayside. Online video is great don’t get me wrong but the autoplayers just won’t stand the test of time in my opinion.

Now many companies argue that conversion rates improve because their website’s visitors can just sit back and learn all about the Who, What, Where, How and Why of the company with having to read any text. But call me an old fashioned kind of guy but I like to scan text and find the pertinent information about the website for myself. Maybe these increases in conversions can be attributed to these videos and split A/B testing will help to identify this but I don’t like them, I don’t believe in them and, therefore, I won’t use them. If a client really wants one though then the customer is always right.

Effective means to achieve the desired effect so the phrase effective web development must mean to fit the purpose for which the website was created for. In other words, to meet requirements. A requirement, one would think, would be most effectively communicated by the individual who requires the website, in this case the business owner. The business owner, afterall, understand his and her business better than anyone else. But this decision maker doesn’t generally understand the field of web design and how the internet can help the business. Therefore, he or she requires guidance from the internet market, web designer of IT professional. In other words, the requirements must be extracted or the end solution may not accurately solve the original problem. This is because we may not really understand the original problem because we did not examine the business and its web design requirements thoroughly enough.

Please note this is an extract for a recent article that we had published on Ezinearticles, click on the link below to view the complete article:

Effective Web Designs