Top 20 Must-have Website Design Factors

1. Ideally, your site's URL should contain your most important keyword.
2. Your website should run on a content management system. Free open-source content management systems like Joomla would do a fantastic job supporting 90% of all websites, including some very complex ones.
3. The style of your website should reflect the type of business you are in (check the leading companies/organizations in your field and model your site after them)
4. Your site should be compatible with all major browsers two generations back
5. Your site needs to be highly responsive, i.e. resize and rescale itself on all major mobile phones and tablet devices
6. Page load time should be under 2-4 seconds
7. All external links should open a 'New Window'; all internal links should be set for the 'This/Same Frame'
8. All hyperlinks should have 'Titles' defined.
9. All images should have 'alt' tags describing their content.
10. Your website needs to have pleasant images and an easy-to-read typography (font) style as well as spacious and not cluttered formatting. 
11. Your contact information needs to contain your full physical address, phone number and email, and it should be easily accessible
12. Your website's navigation should be hierarchical (a tree-like structure)
13. Your website's navigation should be arranged logically, starting with the broadest category and progressing down to more specific sub-categories.
14. Your website must have a Breadcrumb element and a Site Map element
15. Your website must contain a site-wide Search element (Google search is the best option)
16. Your website needs to have a Registration form or other means of gathering users' contacts.
17. Your website needs to incorporate Social Media buttons (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
18. Your website needs to have a Blog with user comments
19. Your website needs to have a custom 404 error page and 301 redirect setup
20. Above all, your website should offer free and useful information for your visitors, presented in an easy-to-read format (text arranged in short paragraphs, using headers, sub-headers, bulleted lists and other web page formatting principles).

There are standard web design practices that are the norm in modern web design. However, in real life organizations often rely on opinions of individual team members who often have limited experience and lack formal training. If you'd like to discuss your website design or redesign project, call Joomla Bliss at 613.231.6308

Selecting a Content Management System (CMS)

When selecting a Content Management System (CMS) for your website, consider the following:

1. Will your website have a significant affect on your business? For example, a restaurant business is not going to be severely affected by a poorly designed website. 
2. Do you have a very specific, highly custom and very large-scale plan for your website? For example, are you thinking of setting up a social networking community website similar to Facebook? Are you developing an Online auction?
3. Will you offer a significant amount of content? Will your website have more than 50 pages?
4. Will your website have a blog where people can post comments?
5. Will your website offer a newsletter subscription?
6. Will you be selling anything via your website? One item or multiple items? Locally or Internationally
7. Will you offer free downloads of PDF, Word, Excel files?
8. Will you have a lot of visual elements, such as product image galleries, photos, videos, etc?
9. Will there be restricted areas on your website that would require users to login?
10. Will you have a lot of social interaction on your site (posting comments, uploading photos, exchanging messages, etc.)?
11. Do you have plans to grow and enhance your website gradually, i.e. adding polls, surveys, quizzes, adding e-commerce, etc.?
12. Will you be changing the look and feel of your site frequently, i.e. once every 2 years? 

If you answer 'Yes' to 5 of any of these questions, your choice of a CMS should be Joomla. If your website is largely driven by a blog or simple text - it is safe to select WordPress. If you answer 'Yes' with an strong emphasis to question #2 - select Drupal or Magento.

One of the benefits of selecting Joomla for your website back-end administration is ability to chose from over 8000 third party Joomla off-the-shelf components and plugins. A Using quality extensions a Joomla developer can "assemble" a highly complex and sophisticated site in a matter of days. Customizing the flow and adding granularity to the features can be later enhanced and completed in phases, adjusting the requirements to real user behqaviour.

Whatever you do, make sure to test drive your CMS. Do not solely rely on sales presentations or word of advice. Consider the following CMS comparison article. And if you are still uncertain and would like to talk to us about a website CMS, call Joomla Bliss at 613.231.6308. 

Love it or hate it, but you can't deny that it's there. The single page web design is the most noticeable trend of 2022.  

When we ask our clients what website designs they like they send us samples of the sites that all have a few things in common:

1. Scrolling: One page (i.e. wall) design where the main menu tabs, if present, do not take you to new pages but jump you down on the same page. Scrolling can be quite extensive!
2. Flat navigation, i.e. no submenus visible
3. Excessive pagination, where one article is spread through multiple pages, making users click "next" multiple times
4. Sliding in and out of side navigational panels a la Windows 10
5. Zigzagging of on-page information by presenting a chunk of it aligned to the left and then the chunk that follows aligned to the right
6. On-page boxes instead of the traditional navigation with the main menu on the top or side bar
7. Use of imagery, icons and buttons of huge dimensions; use of huge font sizes; use of contrasting bright colors
8. Use of transparent background with overlayed images and buttons
9. Stacking links to key information points in the footer area, with no site map
10. Limited amount of information presented on a page

Take a look at some of the examples that illustrate this web design trend:

One-page desing with zigzagging of information

Huge overlayed images with transparency work

Large images, large buttons, centering small chunks of information

Oversized images, fonts, buttons, and boxes

As with everything, there are pluses and minuses of this web design trend.

Season's Greetings from Joomla Bliss in Ottawa!

The Joomla Development Team has just released Joomla version 3.4.8! Unlike the last few patches which are more urgent, this is mainly a bug-fix patch, so the team agreed that this can wait until after the holidays :) We do recommmended every one to update to 3.4.8 as soon as they can though, just to stay up-to-date.

You can update your site in your Joomla! admin panel or download the packages on the Joomla! site.

If you need any assistances with Joomla design upgrades or need to restore a hacked Joomla website, we at Joomla Bliss are happy to help. Just give us a call!

Whether you are planning on having your website run on Joomla, Drupal, WordPress or any other content management system, if your website is expected to have some user activity - you need to create a set of main use cases before the design process can commence. 

Not Writing Use Cases Costs You

In practice what often happens is that when marketing managers source a web design agency they usually provide some basic description of what they would like the website to do and expect the design agency to recommend the best "flow". Later, after the flow has been completed by the design agency, clients often request "changes" because the recommended flow does not reflect their vision adequately, and then those changes can sometimes be very significant, which often leads to additional charges. In other words, clients first pay for the recommended flow and then for its adjustment to their vision.

There is a simple way to reduce this two-stage - unpleasant to the client - process to one: develop a set of uses cases before starting the design process. 

What is a Use Case

In web design a use case is a detailed description of how users will perform a particular task on your website. For example, download a whitepaper, post a resume, search for a job, complete a payment, register for an event. etc.

Each use case should begin with defining a goal of a particular task and then establishing a starting point for it. Each use case should end with the "last step" in the process - and not only from the user's perspective but also from the perspective of a website administrator who will be gathering and analyzing the website activity information on a regular basis.

In other words, for each use case you need to determine the following: what you want your users to do on your website and what they might want to do on your website (which is not the same thing!)

• Your goals or what you want users to do (e.g. download white paper and then call you to order your products)
• Specific sequence of steps you expected them to perform
• Users' goals for performing these tasks (e.g. read useful informaiton free of charge and not necessarily order anything)
• Users' expectations of what type of information they should be offered

When you determe both perspectives, you will be able to find "overlaps". And this will help you determine how the website should be structured and how it should respond to a user action.

How to Write a Use Case

The easiest way to write a use case is by writing text - with detailed description of what happens or should happen at what point. Your narrative would be exceptionally useful if you also find an example website that has the exact (or very similar) flow that you would like to have. 

But before you do that, you need to establish the main purpose/goal of your website. Is it to educate? to sell something? to promote something? Write down all your goals specifically and then proceed with defining those use cases that would affect your goals the most.

Here is a short list of how to write an effective use case:

• Identify the type of users you expect to use your website (accounters, students. board members of your company, event participants, etc)
• Create use cases for each type of users. Start with the most important one. TIP: To define the most important users, focus on the $$ or authority. Does a user type affect your revenue? Does it affect your company? Start with those users who affect these two things the most.
• Define what that user is expected to do on the site (download, register, buy, etc). Each one of those expectations will be a separate "goal" and it will have its own use case.
• For each use case, decide on the normal course of actions. For example, a user comes to a website via an email invitation by clicking on a link from that email. The user "lands" on a specific page where you present them with an option to register in order to receive something. The user registers (clicks the call-to-action button). What happens then?
• The user receives a thank-you email? What would that email contain? Will the website send one thank-you email or will it also send a follow-up auto-reminder of some kind?
• It is assumed that all user registration information will stored on your website, otherwise, why would you need a website? What kind of registration quesitons would you need to ask in order to generate more $$. 
• Would you allow sales people to call users who registered on your website to follow up? If yes, then you need to ask for the user's permission during the registration process.
• Can the user do more than one action?
• Can they create an account and view their activity history on your website? 
• Can this user come back and repeat the same action? 

All this information needs to be captured in a use case. That is why it is called "developing a use case", because it takes a few rounds to editting to establish the right amount of information. 

After you've developed a written text-based use case for each important (business-affecting) task and user type, it is best to provide an example website that utilizes something very similar to your goals.

After your web designers analyze your use cases, they might still have questions for you! And after they've clarified all the details, the will be able to create a use-case flow diagram.

Use Case Flow Diagram

Creating a flow diagram is a very important step and yet very few design agencies do that. A master diagram showing interconnections between various user types prevents a lot of miscommunications. It also simplifies Quality Assurance and Project Management. 

One of the easiest way to create a use case flow digram is to set it up in a series of PPT slides. Once you "glue" them together, you will be able to see where your "holes" or "missing steps" might be. 

If your site is simple, then a verbal text-base use case description might suffice. But if your site has several inter-connected user activities - a diagram in addition to the textual description is a must.

If your web design agency did not volunteer to create a master use case flow diagram, request that they do. Depending on your contract, there maybe a portion of the budget allocated for the "discovery stage". If it is the case, then the use case flow diagram should be provided to you. If there is no discovery phase covered by the budget, still request it from your designers. And if they refuse (unlikely!), then you need to create such a diagram yourself. 

What happens if you don't? Well, nothing terrible, the skies won't fall down on you. You will end up spending additional time writing emails, clarifying and explaining, calling and asking for revisions - and also paying for all additional changes. That's all.

One of the articles on web design published by Smashing Magazine provides some useful insights on recent changes in the web design field affected by mobile devices.

The article makes many valid points, such as mouse click versus taps, etc. Those details are important to keep in mind when designing a website.The presentation is good and so is the conclusion. But there is one point concerning the main design principle that caught our attention. Here is what the author is saying:

"The way we designed our websites until recently was by putting a header with the logo and navigation at the top, putting the subnavigation on the left, putting some widgets on the right, and putting the footer at the bottom. When all of that was done, we’d cram the content into the little space that was left in the middle. All of the things we created first — the navigation, the widgets, the footer — they all helped the visitor to leave the page. But the visitor probably wanted to be there! That was weird. It was as if we were not so confident in our own content and tried our best to come up with something else that our guests might like.

But rather than pollute the page with all kinds of links to get people out of there, we should really focus on that thing in the middle. Make sure it works. Make sure it looks good. Make sure it’s readable. Make sure people will understand it and find it useful. Perhaps even delight them with it!

Once you’re done with the content, you can start to ask yourself whether this content needs a header. Or a logo. Or subnavigation. Does it need navigation at all? And does it really need all of those widgets? The answer to that last question is “No.” I’ve never understood what those widgets are for. I have never seen a useful widget. I have never seen a widget that’s better than white space."

Well, it's just like saying, why do you need a roof and a wall and an entrance, focus on the living room. That's all that matters, your guests will be there after all.

An interesting moment we found is how everything has to be linked to "confidence" these days.

Companies are trying to display a summary of their website's content on their home page for a reason, to make sure users don't miss something important, not because they have no confidence in what's in the center of the page. Granted, it often creates a cluttered look, hence a granular top navigation can be useful to mitigate this.

But in any case, it is not a power game. Confidence in one's content has nothing to do with sidebar widgets and additional navigation links. Without navigation, your users will be confused.

If you run a focused website, a blog on a particular and rather narrow topic - one living room solution might work.

But if your website has a repository of documents, tools, etc .- your users will be utterly confused. Recently, I was talking to someone who was trying to locate a particular item on the shopify.ca website. This site has the above-mentioned living room design, it does not have a traditional navigation, so clicking back and forth and scrolling down endlessly is the only - annoying! - way.

The use of white space is, indeed, a good thing. No arguments here. But "never seen a widget better than a white space"? Huh? How about calendar of events? Weather storm monitoring? Traffic congestion report?

So please, confident web author of smashing magazine, for those of us who is used to structure and logic, let us keep some navigation, at least one level somewhere! Not all concent can - or should - be reduced to a flat one-level menu.

We noticed that a lot of websites found a way out of this trendy pickle by finding a heavy use of the left-site navigation. Not sure what's the difference. If you are going to use a hierarchical navigation, you might as well provide one common point of reference and use a drop-down top menu like we did before.