Welcome to Our Website!
- Web Messages Group
- May 6, 2019
- 6 min read
Hi, welcome to our website! This short post gives an in-depth how-to for every aspect of our website, if you have any questions or concerns this page should have it all! Not to mention if there is something we failed to address we have a 24 Hour live chat ready for you whenever you need it! Now let's begin...
Home Page, Layout — Short Tour:
Over the course of the semester a primary focus within the class has been web messages and specifically usability. Usability is critical for the success of any website and should never be overlooked. With that being said, through various techniques, constant debate, and a number of changes, we learned that the website should not only look good but also provide a seamless user experience for its visitors.
Okay, so to begin we will give you a short tour of our website and all the little details within it. A good website design comes down to making it effortless for visitors to find the information they need quickly and easily. There are many ways to improve the usability of your website as well as the content, so to start off we will identify aspects that we think have increased the positive usability of our website for this project. To begin I will discuss some obvious features, then dive into the more hidden but effective features.
Obvious Features:
To start off we will take a look at the homepage, right off the bat we can see we have provided:
Effective Navigation: As you can see menus tend to work best and appear consistent on all browsers and platforms like (home, blog, about, more, etc). Equally important the navigation is clutter-free, we used a drop-down menu or sub-navigation under some categories because it works better for our site in particular because its large with many sections and pages. Each blog includes a reading time and gives a short preview to what is within the post. For instance this image below, the red circle shows the read time, while the red box shows the text preview.
Additionally, we also have multiple ways to explore the content with a good search feature on every page, good internal linking, informative headers and footers, etc. When it comes to effective website design, as mentioned in class the simpler the better! Take a look below!
So, what we decided to do was limit the categories and places where content was available because by having too many options on your website can overwhelm visitors and drastically increase the amount of time it takes for them to make a decision on what they want to consume. For instance in terms of the user being our professor, you are coming to our website with a purpose, its not to necessarily to just admire the graphic design but the content. Fancy layouts can be visually appealing, we chose more simple aspects so we did not distract the user from finding what they came on the website for in the first place.
Additionally, we took a more simple approach to enable the idea that well formatted content is more easy to scan. The average Internet user skims through the content on a web page instead of reading each and every word from top to bottom. So we tried to take that into consideration by emphasizing key words and parts of the page to make it easy for the user to determine if that blog or source is relevant to their needs (Just like the sentence above, key concepts are noticeably underlined, italicized, and bolded). Within not only the main pages but the blogs themselves we took into consideration that the correct use of headings, sub-headings, paragraphs, bullets or lists help to break up text, making it easy for readers to scan and not have to fully read.
Aesthetics:
Now in terms of aesthetics, no matter how great the content on your site is, we wanted this website to be something also visually appealing. So what we did was used bright colours, specific typography, and created an effective balance. We used white and blue because some studies have shown that this colour pallet increases communication and promotes interaction (for instance sites like facebook and twitter use similar techniques on their applications). We also used this because it was a good way to not overwhelm our users. A good contrast between background and text for instance the black text on a white background makes our content legible and easy to read. By maintaining a consistent design of elements across our website like the same navigation, menu bars, and search bar across the top of each page of the site, keeping the same colour scheme and fonts across each page, and maintaining a consistent image style, we made the experience as easy and comfortable as possible for the user. Effective website design requires one consistent motif across the entire site, so ours was clean, crisp, and professional looking. Being simple but effective was the goal. With that being said, each page has slightly different layouts to keep our website visually interesting, but still matching.
Typography:
In terms of Typography, we used Arial and Sans Serif fonts to provide a more modern, streamlined feel. We bolded certain words, and changed the font sizes but overall we kept things consistent. With this in mind, the website thus embodied functional aspects while being easy to use, and provided relevant content in a modern way.
Pictures:
For the last part of the more obvious features, we can take a look at the imagery. Pictures convey a lot more information much quicker than large blocks of text. So we made sure that the images somewhat pertained to the content within the blog post, we made sure that the positioning of each image consistently down one side along with text content previews emphasizes our aesthetic while subtly guiding the user to where they wanted to go. These are two great examples of how visual cues on websites can guide users to primary conversion points. Below a video shows the curser hovering over the images I have just mentioned.
Hidden Features:
Now in terms of hidden features, having our website be optimized was pivotal to our success:
Optimized:
Our website can be used on different devices, browsers, using various data speeds, search engines, and by various users. It has mobile and browser compatibility, as well as titles and meta tags for all of our pages to increase accessibility. It can be used on smartphones, tablets, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc. Even a website that is strong in other areas but weak in optimization may be hard for users to find. SO, we made our website responsive so it changes its layout and options to fit the device and browser size of all users.
Information Architecture:
Now finally, the last point I have before getting into the content is our information architecture. A well planned Information Architecture, has to do with how information is organized and presented on your website. This is vital for good usability, however, it is often neglected. It has become even more important today as websites offer a wide range of information and resources to attract their target market. SO what we did was provided various website sections and categories that carefully present information in a way that it is easy for users to find the content we are looking for. WE always took into consideration the perspective of our users, so Maggie will explain the changes she made to make our website experience better for everyone.
Infographic:
Now, in terms of our visual element, when choosing images for any website quality plays a pivotal role. So what we did was provided an interesting transition into multiple infographics we created. So, what we did was we added in a little section here that tells you what an infographic is, why we made them, and where to find them.
- This shows precisely what I am talking about
The average user skims a website rather than reading it in full detail, so an infographic is the perfect way to simplify our findings in the most efficient way possible. In order to better understand what we have done over the course of the semester we have created four visuals for every kind of reader/learner…. The first one is a sum up of everything we have talked about with graphs, text, and creative content. Here we can take a look or you can go directly to the page here.
Conclusion:
Website usability, infographics, constant changes and analysis, all help in providing a seamless experience for visitors and improves chances of success. It is one of the factors that sets a professionally designed website apart from the rest. Not to mention infographics can thus be proven to be an important aspect to any website. By being easy to follow, increasing readership, being understandable, fun but professional, it all plays a pivotal role in various contexts whether for a business or a class project like this one. Given our tour and the characteristics we have identified we think we have done a good job in providing an easy and effective website. Please take a look at our overall site and see if you can identify many of the characteristics I've mentioned, Thank you!
By: Aajah Card-Mornan
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