Design Conventions: A Good Idea?

Even while searching for innovative ways to make their websites work, new designers should follow the established design conventions. These conventions have evolved along with the Internet, and users expect web pages to function in a certain way.

If there were only a few websites, designers could expect visitors to spend time learning how to navigate their sites. There are millions of pages on the web, however, and if visitors do not see what they have come to expect, they will find the site difficult to use and simply go somewhere else. Designers could lose significant amounts of traffic if they do not adhere to the design conventions that have already been imposed on websites. And no designer really wants to spend time on writing large help files or FAQs just to explain how to use a site. The web is a competitive place, and most of the time, visitors will simply leave a site rather than try to work through a bad design.

The design conventions for websites are simple, but they are effective. To follow these conventions, designers should ensure that their logos function as links to the home page; that clicking on a small image will display a larger version of that image; that all links lead to HTML documents unless they are clearly labeled as some other format (PDS, movie, etc.); that items are purchased by adding them to a virtual shopping cart and then taking them through a virtual checkout process. Website identity checks should always be accomplished through a system that relies on user names and passwords. These are just a few of the conventions. There are many others.

If a website does not follow these rules and conventions, visitors become annoyed, frustrated, and confused. People will leave a website in a heartbeat if it makes them work too hard to navigate it.

There are situations in which the common website design conventions may be ignored. One such situation is if a site is so unique that what it offers is worth the time to learn how to use it. When Google introduced its Gmail product, the first webmail service in the world that provided a gigabyte of storage space, an interface that utilizes Javascript to change whole pages without reloading them was included. This was a diversion from web conventions, but the site worked so well that it became popular in spite of its departure from conventional design. The site is now beginning to create new conventions of its own.

Designers should not start believing that they are more important than they actually are. The introduction of a new product or service does not mean designers can get away with adding streaming video to a page without annoying people, for example. Designers are advised to recognize the limits of their websites and work to make them as much like other websites as possible in terms of design and navigation.

Information and Articles: http://www.mastersmba.com

Providing Information on various topics, please browse our other Articles for more informative resources, we house information on every topic imaginable so regardless of your needs you can be assured to find the answer here. If you wish to reprint this on your own website, simply click the "Web Version" in the right menu, and you are presented with a pre-formatted document to use.

A lot of the information is written by the Master Article team, and published exclusively on the MastersMBA.com website, and we do our best to research all information to ensure it's as accurate as possible. However at times we also publish documents given to us by other sources, we do examine these documents to ensure they are as accurate and correct as possible however at times they discuss highly specialized fields making it hard to authenticate the validity of every fact in the document. These are written by specialists in their respective fields, and we do trust their integrity and judgment however it's always a good idea when doing any research to consult a number of sources and form your own conclusion based on a number of view points. Also if you are looking for Google Chrome Extensions you can check out that link.