Elements of Building a Better Website
This article kicks off a multi-author series on how to build a better website (or weblog). There are four key elements, VICA, that we’ll focus on, as shown in the diagram at right and the bullet list below. (All definitions are for this site, so they may vary slightly from other definitions.) The series will include tutorials and video screencasts, when appropriate.
- Visual Design.
Visual design includes elements such as page templates/ themes, logos, page banners, fonts, headings, leading (line spacing), color, icons. My favorite weblog that applies these elements well is Chris Pearson’s Pearsonified. There are also numerous “CSS gallery” sites that we’ll cover here in the future. - Infographics.
Infographics is part of data visualization and also part of overal visual design. However, it requires applying different techniques than the elements mentioned above in Visual Design. If you have data set, how can you represent it with some sort of diagram to make it more appealing and easier to absorb that a table or chart? Some great sites to check out are Infosthetics, David Armano’s Logic+Emotion, and Idagram. Make sure you go through all the pages on each of these sites. Another recent phenomenon is Edward Tufte’s Sparklines, which offer a convenient, easy to follow way to visualize numeric data. The diagram at right is a simple example of an infographic. - Content Formatting.
Content formatting is an extension of visual design, but does not necessarily require any illustration or CSS code tweaking, but may require a bit of HTML. For example, taking a long article and using a numbered bullet list makes the content easier to follow and absorb. So do using HTML headings. - Analysis & Promotion.
If you build it, will they come? That’s the question thousands of business owners ask about their websites. Unfortuately, the answer is probably “no”. So another aspect of improving your business website is to analyze what it offers readers, what they take away, and what you can do it improve their experience, including how to help them find you.
