Better by design
- Article 9 of 26
- M-iD, October 2004
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From a standing start in September and a budget of £50,000, by December the Council had a web site ready for testing.
One of the key challenges faced along the way was ensuring that the content met the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) accessibility standards. That was especially challenging when migrating content from the old system. Many minor but time-consuming changes had to be made.
Another problem for Holland has been coping with the turnover of web site administrators, because most are students on placement from university. In order to cope, Holland has drawn up a number of policies to ensure that the established best practices are followed.
These include locking down the templates on the site so that no one can alter them without permission; giving new users at the Council comprehensive training on how they should use the system; and distributing a style sheet on best practice, warning users not to change colours or font sizes.
Now, Holland believes Worthing Borough Council has not only escaped from its mid-1990s time warp, but is also set to meet all its e-government targets - early.
Keep the structure simple
Planning the site structure is usually the first area where design falls apart. Many will try to design a site based on the structure of their organisation rather than on logical areas from an end user's point of view. This can result in too many top levels in the navigation, which will reduce scalability.
"Any good web designer knows there should be no more than a dozen top-level sections," says Andrew Craig, creative director of web site designer Realise. Six to eight top-level sections are normally enough and these sections should be sufficiently broad to cope with any future development.
Make it usable
Once the site structure is determined, initial designs can be developed, but there are external considerations other than just aesthetics to consider.
There are many pieces of legislation, for instance, that can affect how a web site should look, says Paul Dawson, head of user experience at Conchango, a business technology consultancy. Many of the principles behind usability apply to both web sites and their bricks and mortar counterparts.
"There's the Sale of Goods Act - whether something's fit for sale and how people can return it; local trading standards; property mis-description for estate agents. But the biggest issue that affects most e-commerce sites' bottom line is returned goods," says Dawson. Since shoppers cannot touch the products they buy from a web site until they are delivered, returns are usually much higher for e-commerce sites than for bricks and mortar outlets. Good design principles can, therefore, help to minimise the number of returns.
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