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The three critical aspects of a website. – Killersites Web Design Magazine

The three critical aspects of a website.


What are the three most important aspects of a web site? Let’s start with the bullet points:

  1. Content
  2. Ease of use
  3. Design aesthetics

It’s important to recognize and understand these elements (and their order) because how you build an effective web site is largely affected by the above.

It’s all on video!

In the following video, I get into the details and show examples that back up my reasoning.

… I should point out that this video is not just for web designers and nerds, the discussion is relevant to managers and small business owners as well who are trying to figure out how to effectively use a website to support their business.

Video Notes

The following is a summary of some of the points I make in the video:

  • Content sets the stage for the web site – it determines the structure and technology used to build out a web site.
  • You can make websites easier to use (from a users perspective) by sticking to web conventions: have a top and side navigation, offer a search feature, provides links to the same information in several places.
  • Content and ease of use trump slick design – Google and Craigslist are great examples.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

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7 responses to “The three critical aspects of a website.”

  1. I thought quite a while if I can find a fourth one but I could not find any. This is it: Content, Easy of use and design aesthetics

  2. Good video, reminds us all of the meat and potatoes of good design. I’d like to add one comment though. Even though I agree with the order, i.e. design aesthetics is #3, it is possible for it to be #1 if your site is terrible. In other words, people don’t care if you have a really nice site, they want the information on it – but they do care if your web site sucks. A crappy looking site with aliased graphics, spinning gifs, fonts all over the place will send up a red flag in people’s minds about your business. A good clean well designed site with no graphics is far better. Having no website is better than having a bad one.

  3. “A crappy looking site with aliased graphics, spinning gifs, fonts all over the place will send up a red flag in people’s minds about your business.”

    I can agree to that.

    Stefan

  4. Thank you, Stefan, for posting that video. It’s really easy for designers to lose sight of that order of importance. So, it’s good to be reminded every once in a while. And while I agree with Nova Scotia, I’ve seen countless web sites that look amazing but are almost completely useless because the functionality is lost in the form. The balancing of the three critical aspects is the challenge.

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