Key Features of Great website designs

Although each project needs to be considered with its own unique challenges the following principals should always be followed to ensure a great website design.

• Using web sites should be easy and pleasant, just like a great experience in a shop, hotel, or library.
• Designing for the web means designing sympathetically with the way people actually use the web, not how we think they should.
• People approach web sites in very different ways to how we design them
  • They skim pages for clues, instead of reading
  • They make snap decisions, instead of evaluating and judging carefully
  • They might not even be looking at the complete picture
  • They are driven by their goals, not ours
  • We must gain the best possible insight into our users' goals, so that we can help achieve them.
  • We must get clear on our design's purpose, and have the mental discipline to stick to it
  • We must pursue simplicity ruthlessly - if an element adds complexity but not value, it must be changed
• Understanding goals is the single most critical factor in the success of any design project, and fundamental to the Web Design from Scratch approach.
• Core visual graphic design for web pages that are easy to understand and easy to use.
• Information architecture.
  1. Split our stuff up, and
  2. Provide ways for people to find their way through it to get what they want.
  • You've got a lot of stuff you want to put on the web, and that you think people might want to look at.But if there's a lot of information, it will take too long to load and people won't be able to find what they want easily.
  • So we need to:

That's information architecture.